Marketing in the digital age encompasses making use of a number of trends, tools, and technologies in order to reach the varied audience spread across equally varied and multiple platforms all over the world wide web. The marketer in the digital age knows that getting through to that audience is a matter of cutting through all the communication and digital noise, to create ripples that can be heard and remembered with the short attention span of the existing customer in the digital age. This is where tools like marketing automation step into the picture.
In order to seamlessly make use of the opportunities online with a well-structured sales pipeline that does not eat into your bandwidth – especially if you are a small and growing business – there is a need to adopt practices like CRM and marketing automation. Before we go ahead and talk to you about the evolutionary landscape of the same, let us first understand what a marketing automation software or system really is. Marketing automation is all about automatic all the tasks in the sales pipeline that are geared towards reach and lead nurturing once those leads have been painstakingly generated. With a proper small business marketing automation process in place, you will be able to employ a much smaller team that will also be able to focus on core tasks like conversions rather than the mundane tasks that can take away focus and replace creativity with monotony.
With such an evolution of marketing methods, there has been a change in the way businesses do business online and how buyers react to them as well. In order to keep up with the changing pace of things, it would be important to know what the upcoming trends are, in the arena of marketing automation. This will help businesses and marketers keep track of the changes and adopt the same so that they can always efficiently reach their core consumers and close their conversions as well. Here are the top trends that point to the future of marketing automation:
True Presence Building: One of the core features of any good marketing automation software remains its efficiency in taking the core message of the brand or the business to multiple channels. Now, with an omnichannel approach, more and more such softwares are geared towards creating campaigns that fit each audience on each of these channels. Earlier, what we saw was that most of these systems would stick to landing pages and emails to do the job of integrating CRM with marketing. Yet, now, true marketing automation is going to be all about creating ripples on all platforms including blogs, websites, social media and all those channels that are frequented by the audience of the brand.
More Customization: Increased personalization in marketing automation is the need of the hour and one that many softwares and platforms like Engage Bay, are working on. There is a slow yet steady movement towards creating personalized campaigns that actually speak the language of the audience in terms of the varied needs and problems encountered by the specific people within that target audience. In doing so, there is a greater focus on getting those needs and solutions matched and articulated with the help of proper content that is now gaining importance in all these campaigns.
New Age Content Delivery: With the constant evolution of social media and the way the world communicates and sells or even buys, there is a shift towards adopting new forms of communication and content delivery. Marketing automation is geared towards making the most of these new channels and methods of content delivery. This includes knowing the channels, their challenges, the hashtags keywords and the very format of the content that the audience would expect to see. By catering to the exact format followed by each channel, the brands and businesses will be able to capture the attention of the audience across all these channels which would make their marketing efforts that much more efficient and relevant.
Better Choice of Metrics and Filters: And when we talk of content and its delivery, how can we forget the core technologies that drive this very content and its delivery across various channels? When we speak of content, there is always a backdrop of SEO and other such metrics along which we have to fashion the said content so as to deliver it in an efficient manner that will actually drive engagement. In order to do this, marketing automation is fully geared to take on the reins and create better metrics and filters that will help in matching each task in the sales pipeline with the requirements of content delivery like SEO and other such parameters that drive the engagement of the content on social media and other channels as well. These filters will help in narrowing down the leads so that marketers and sales teams are completely sure of what they are to chase and which opportunities will definitely give them conversions.
More Experimentation: The right marketing automation software of the future will now enable you to test, track and basically experiment a whole lot more before you send out your content on the various channels. This will help in testing what is working and what is not so that the campaigns can be individually designed in order to reach the right place at the right time and in the right way. In doing so, small business marketing automation actually makes sure that these methods and tools will ensure that the messages are seen by the right leads so that a conversion is a sure shot thing at the end of the day. Further, the element of integration with CRM will also extend to these channels instead of remaining confined to landing pages and emails alone. This will also ensure that the marketing efforts in the automation sphere will reflect through proper calls for action embedded into the content and the messages that are communicated across all these channels, unanimously for the buyers and prospects alike.
