A Glimpse into the Future of Marketing Automation: 5 Trends to Pay Attention to

Marketing automation is becoming a must-have due to how it allows marketing teams to widen the scope and scale of their projects and how they can get more done with less resources. It saves on costs and time as well improves lead management and lead scoring to allow for a higher quality of lead to target. This plays a role in better targeting and adding as much personalization as possible to a multichannel campaign. All of this adds up to success, and you cannot stay competitive in digital marketing without keeping up with technologies that help better reach, connect, and engage with prospects and customers.

But if this is the present, what does the future hold for marketing automation and how it will continue to reshape how marketers go about their campaigns? Of course, no one can ever completely predict the future, but there are trends that might provide a glimpse of it. Look at these five trends in particular that will impact the future of marketing automation (and marketing in general):

Customer-centricity will continue. Regardless of what martech tools you use or how advanced marketing automation becomes, the customer will always remain at the center of everything a marketer does. Customer data will inform your lead management and scoring, their preferences will tell you what channel they prefer, and what solutions and marketing messages they might be interested in.
Personalization and customization will become more and more integral. A marketer’s mission is to send the right message at the right time on the right channel to customers. However, customers will set the terms of engagement. They want you to meet you on the platforms and mediums that they prefer and when they wish to be contacted. You won’t be able to waste even an iota of their time, since there’s always another marketing message from somewhere to take up their attention. So, you need to be relevant. You need to personalize and customize as much as you can to grab, keep their attention, and win them over.
An omnichannel approach will be necessary. With customers dictating the terms of engagement, you’ll need a holistic marketing strategy that encompasses not just a few channels but all of them: email, web, mobile, search, display, social, and so on. You have to create a strategy that ties them all together into a seamless experience, since some customers will want to jump from channel to channel, platform to platform, and device to device without having to miss a beat.
Social will only grow in importance. Almost everyone has an account on some social media platform, and businesses are going to keep expanding their presence on social channels as well. People use social media to interact with each other, catch up, make friends, get news, find information, entertain themselves, and more. Brands need to be on the channels where people are living their lives. To help keep up with that ever-increasing workload, you might even see more and more of social media marketing being automated.
Other martech tools will come into play. Along with automated social media tools, you may also see chatbots becoming more prevalent in marketing automation as well. More and more brands are interacting with more and more people online—more than any single team can keep up with across multiple channels. Therefore, they will need more and more automated tools to help provide a seamless experience and meet customers on the platform and channel of their choice.