We’re all looking for ways to scale our digital marketing. Marketing automation makes simple or repetitive marketing processes more efficient, even effortless. Using software to automate your marketing tasks saves your team’s time and resources and allows you to focus on higher priority tasks. You may use software to automate tasks like social media posting, email newsletters, customer service chats, and more.
The marketing automation market is expected to grow from $3.3 billion in 2019 to $6.4 billion by 2024, according to a report by Markets and Markets. Are you using marketing automation to its full potential for your brand? This post explores some rising marketing automation trends to keep an eye on for 2021.
When you review and quantify the benefits of marketing automation, you can quickly justify its use.
One of the most clear benefits of marketing automation is efficiency. When you set up an automated process for creating and publishing social media posts, for example, you spend less time brainstorming, crafting, publishing, and monitoring posts. Social media automation still requires audience research and content planning to ensure your posts perform well, but automating steps in the process frees up time and resources to spend elsewhere.
Your brand must have a consistent, engaging online presence in order to succeed. If you have poor brand visibility, an unfocused marketing strategy that isn’t tailored to your target audience, or inconsistent content, you’re missing the chance to connect with potential customers. Marketing automation makes growing and maintaining your digital presence easier, not to mention less costly and time-consuming.
Every marketing process comes with some risk of human error. Whether it’s researching metrics for a report, writing email newsletters, or responding to customers in chat, there’s always a chance that someone on your team can miss a detail or say the wrong thing. Automating certain processes lets you plan your brand’s content and responses ahead of time, to double and triple-check accuracy, appropriate tone, and on-brand language.
The value and demand for marketing automation is rising fast. To harness that potential, brands can test the following marketing automation tools in 2021.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence, or AI, can help your brand learn more about your target audience and develop better marketing campaigns. When you collect data on your brand users and audience, AI software sorts it, analyzes it, and predicts the right steps to help you reach your marketing goals — in less time than a person could.
This trend isn’t meant to replace or take over human jobs; it helps your marketing team work smarter and more efficiently. To make the most out of machine learning and AI, determine what you want marketing automation to achieve. Do you want more robust insights into your users’ behaviors? More relevant marketing campaigns? Faster growth?
One use for AI is to personalize content for individual customers, which we’ll talk about next.
Customized content goes beyond using a customer’s first name in an email newsletter. A truly customized brand experience relies on a detailed customer profile based on site behavior, survey results, past purchase history, and web analytics.
Customized content may engage your audience based on details such as:
For example, if someone on your furniture website searches for a leather recliner and leaves after ten minutes without buying anything, your AI software may look into this user’s search and purchase history, device use, and what day and time they usually make purchases. Based on the user’s data, a customized marketing campaign would then send an email on an early Sunday afternoon suggesting multiple options for leather recliners.
Automated messaging, or chatbots, are an important customer service tool. Rather than waste time having a customer service representative answer common questions, a chatbot can be set up to answer them instead. You can write these responses ahead of time and make sure they’re correct and on-brand.
Automated messaging can be set up on your social media profiles, like Facebook Instant Reply or Instagram Quick Reply. It can also be set up on your website or through email. You might set up customer responses to frequently asked questions like promotion or sale information, product inquiries, or an out of stock item.
If mobile is your target audience’s preferred device for communication, browsing, and shopping, take advantage of automated mobile marketing tools, such as:
Before diving into new mobile marketing tools, research mobile user information first as you would for customized content. Device type, location, browsing habits, and mobile behavior all matter. You can even include mobile data as a separate area when evaluating brand performance in a digital audit.
An all-in-one turnkey solution that lets your brand post localized, customized content can save your team time and money. That’s what ThumbStopper’s Brand Manager™ does: distributes your brand’s high-quality content automatically by partnering with your retailers in local markets.
With Brand ManagerTM, you no longer have to waste time monitoring content deployment. You can focus on building engaging marketing campaigns, understanding your audience, and creating customized content. Learn more about ThumbStopper’s solutions for brands today.