The Future of Marketing Automation: Insights and Predictions

Once upon a time, B2B marketers and salespeople used to gauge potential clients directly by singing them their sales pitch and making sales. However, this doesn’t work anymore.

Nowadays, it’s the customers that are leading the way and marketers are trying to catch up. How?

As customer behavior has changed, smart marketers have learned themselves towards marketing automation software to know more about their customers. Without knowing your customers, there’s no chance you could generate successful leads for your business.

According to researchers, incorporating marketing automation into their lead generation strategy resulted in:

• 58% increase in revenue
• 54% improvement in traffic and engagement
• 59% boost in the sales
• 52% increase in their lead generation

Let’s move further to understand what exactly is marketing automation?

Most B2B marketers are familiar with marketing automation, in fact, most of them are already using it. However, to recap, marketing automation is a combination of the latest marketing automation tools and technologies to easily find and reach your customers on different platforms, automate repetitive and boring tasks, and collect important data to understand their needs.

It enables businesses to improve their lead generation, streamline nurturing, customer lifecycle marketing, customer retention, and business ROI measurement. Basically, it intends to make your life much easier and your efforts much more effective.

The future of Marketing Automation

To put it into simple words: the future of marketing automation is customers centric.

From data collection to lead generation, marketing automation will stay B2B marketers’ favorite in the future.  Based on the current analytics, let’s have a look at how automation is driving lead generation today as well as what’s to come.

1. It’s going to be all about customers

Gone are the days when sales reps could generate leads just by singing the same sales pitch to hundreds of customers. Customers, nowadays, are well-informed and that’s why all marketing efforts ate now customer-centric. This is because the future is customer-centric!

In the future, only those marketers will be successful who analyze customer behavior and interaction more closely in order to get insights into how to get maximize outreach, engagements, and conversions.

To be one step ahead of your competitors, make advanced marketing automation an integral part of your engagement marketing strategy to build strong, personalized, and long-lasting relationships with your customers.

Today, digitalization has altered the way marketers are interacting with customers and it will continue to do so. The more relevant and personalized your marketing efforts are, the better the results.

2. Personalization will become even more important

The digital marketing landscape will continue to change, and marketers need to keep up with the changing demands of the customers.

A personalized experience is really important if you want to build healthy relationships with your customers that last long. To do this, you need to integrate the right tools and technologies like marketing automation software and tools and cross-channel marketing strategies into the process.

3. More Jobs and Activities Will Require Marketing Automation

As marketing automation has become part of a number of activities, more jobs and business processes will require marketing automation to perform the tasks more efficiently and quickly.

Today, SMBs and enterprises are more leaned toward the best marketing automation tools because these tools have become much more affordable and are within the reach of their business. A recent survey from CleverTouch marketing has shown that SMBs are investing more in tools with advanced marketing automation capabilities because they have helped them complete their complex tasks quickly and more efficiently.

• Marketing surveys have found that almost 48% of marketing companies hire qualified staff to meet their marketing automation goals.
• 13% of organizations keep their marketing automation processes completely in-house.
• The rest of the companies seek help from outside parties to fill their marketing automation
• Moreover, 40% of companies have acknowledged that a lack of knowledge and skills related to marketing automation is the biggest hindrance in achieving big goals.

All the above stats show that there is a notable uptick in the popularity of marketing automation. Businesses are now looking for people who have marketing automation know-how. Thus, if marketers really want to stay ahead of time, they need to understand and integrate advanced marketing automation tools and techniques to stay competitive.

4. Generic Content Will Become Almost Non-Existent

Currently, there are a number of marketing automation software available in the market that helps marketers to publish and share relevant content with customers to keep them engaged during each part of the purchasing cycle. In the future, marketing will become even more customer-centric and personalized and customers would expect brands to provide them with highly personalized content.

If you give them the same old, generic, and non-personalized content, they will get bored soon and look for other brands that are more in tune with the needs of their audiences. Fortunately, there are marketing automation software and tools that help marketers to publish personalized content so they don’t fall short to fulfill their customers’ needs.

5. Marketers Should Stay Current With Marketing Automation for Maximum ROI

Even though many marketers have realized that marketing automation is the future, many don’t have the skills and knowledge to use this transforming technology and boost their ROI.

Most companies don’t incorporate marketing automation into their business processes because they think it will be a burden on their budget.

However, they fail to see the bigger picture. Instead of investing in resources that give you slow and awful progress, investing in advanced marketing automation will prove to be transforming. Through automation, companies can easily reach and get links to the customers they want to reach.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is a dynamic field and it will continue to evolve and transform processes in the future. If you are in the marketing frontier and looking to transform your lead generation processes, don’t be afraid to give marketing automation a shot.

The data above shows that marketing automation is the future of B2B marketing. Companies that integrate new technology in their processes will be successful tomorrow but for the companies that don’t, there is no going back in time.