Your marketing department works hard, but are they working too hard on systems and processes that could be automated? Marketing automation can help save your business time and money by eliminating manual tasks to free up your employees' time for critical marketing initiatives. Automating aspects of your marketing campaign can improve results while reducing costs, allowing your business to thrive in a competitive marketplace. Marketing automation isn't new, but it evolves year after year. Check out these trends you can use right now to enhance your marketing campaigns:

Omnichannel Marketing

Do you know how customers interact with your brand across channels? With social media, websites, mobile apps, digital ads, and more, you have a lot of campaigns to plan and track. Yet, throughout every touchpoint with your brand, consumers expect the same experience.

There are several types of marketing, but only one type enables you to provide the same experience across different channels. Omnichannel marketing allows you to create a seamless user experience across channels, and automation is a crucial component. Automation technologies, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, can help you track customer interactions with your brand regardless of touchpoint. Instead of tracking different channels separately, you can create a single campaign across all channels and monitor each campaign's success using automation.

Personalized Content & Offerings

Your customers want a personalized experience when communicating with your brand. Gone are the days when you could add their name to an email and expect it to be enough to delight them. Now, they want you to talk to them like you're old pals. You can learn about your customers with marketing automation technologies that collect their data, such as purchase history, location, age, and location, to make their experience more personalized. For example, you can send them product recommendations based on past purchases and specific preferences.

Social Media Monitoring

To create an effective social media campaign, you must monitor the current trends and try to insert your business or brand into the narrative. The only way to do this is through social listening and monitoring, which allows you to find brand mentions and trending topics in your industry to attract more customers. Unfortunately, monitoring social media can be time-consuming because it means sifting through massive amounts of posts. However, robotic process automation (RPA) can take care of these tasks and alert you when there's a brand mention, allowing you to take quick action to engage your customers.

Social Media Marketing

Automate your social media Marketing Strategy to save time developing your monthly content calendar. Of course, you shouldn't automate every social media effort because it can sound robotic. However, your customers want to know they're talking to a real person when using social media, so you should set up automation to reply to comments or direct messages. Instead, you can set up automation for content curation and posting to ensure you regularly post content. Then, your social media manager can reply to customer comments, questions, and messages to ensure there's always a real person behind the account.

Chatbots

Chatbots are a popular customer service tool because they allow bots to handle basic tasks like providing shipping information, troubleshooting, and handling exchanges. Chatbots aren't new, but they're getting smarter and will soon be able to accomplish much more. Unfortunately, while chatbots can help you reduce costs spent on customer service agents, they can't do everything. For example, one thing your chatbots should never do is handle serious customer complaints. Chatbots don't have the same human touch as professional customer service agents; they have no idea how to diffuse a situation, don't understand sarcasm, and will rarely be able to help an angry customer. Instead, they can cause further anger because they struggle to understand nuances in human language and lack empathy.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing enables you to reach customers wherever they are. Most people never leave home without their smartphones, allowing you the unique opportunity to communicate with them at any point throughout the day. Mobile marketing, which consists of SMS, in-app notifications, and push notifications, can ensure your customers are up to date on all the latest news and offerings your business has to share, and the only way you can send them these communications is through automation.

Automating mobile campaigns across channels can help you reach your customers at the right time and scale. However, it's important to remember that your subscribers have unique expectations regarding mobile marketing; they've given you their phone numbers, so don't take advantage of that by constantly trying to communicate with them. Choose how frequently you send texts or push notifications carefully, or leave the option up to your customers by allowing them to edit their preferences on your website or Mobile App.

AI and Machine Learning

AI and machine learning are two important components of automation and can help you create better marketing campaigns. As AI becomes more sophisticated, it can learn from the data you collect on customers and campaigns to provide you with real-time recommendations and insights to improve your existing campaigns. An example of AI in marketing is Google Ads recommendations that appear on your Ads dashboard. These recommendations can help you improve your existing campaigns, and they're based on data Google has collected from its users.

Audience Segmentation

You've done your research and know everything about your customers, including the fact that your business has several different types of customers. For example, if you sell rock climbing gear, you might have products designed for novice and expert climbers. Marketing automation makes it easy to segment your customers into groups based on location, gender, experience level, recent purchases, interests, and values. Once your audience is segmented, you can create more personalized campaigns. For example, the rock climbing gear Company we mentioned earlier can create email content designed just for novice or veteran climbers to appeal to their experience level.

Segmentation leads to personalization and can help you communicate more effectively with your audience. The right content can go a long way toward increasing your retention rates and building Customer Loyalty.

The Future of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is continuously evolving, allowing us to accomplish more and create better marketing campaigns. However, knowing when a specific aspect of your marketing strategy requires a human touch is essential. You can't automate everything, especially important interactions with your customers. However, automation can help you maintain constant contact with customers and ensure they have a personalized experience based on the data you've collected from them. This technology can reduce workloads and streamline campaigns to help you evolve your marketing strategy.

Ashley Nielsen

Ashley Nielsen earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration Marketing at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is a freelance writer who loves to share knowledge about general business, marketing, lifestyle, wellness, and financial tips. During her free time, she enjoys being outside, staying active, reading a book, or diving deep into her favorite Music.

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