According to Emailmonday, more than 51% of companies are using marketing automation already
The curtains have drawn on what was a transformational year. The world was in recovery mode, even though there were miles to be covered. The past two years have tested and impacted global brands and their perspective on marketing automation in general. A bit closer to home, we also saw the marketing automation industry grow considerably amid increasing demand from businesses, all over the globe, to automate their marketing workflows and be able to better engage and retain their users. We bring to you nine marketing automation trends for 2022.
Going into 2022, the marketing automation software market is expected to continue growing at 8.55%, unlocking a market capitalization of $ 6.4 billion by 2024. According to Emailmonday, more than 51% of companies are using marketing automation already. Over 58% of companies are planning to adopt it.
2022 will be all about creating unique, engaging experiences that add value to the evolved, to make user engagement feel super-connected, always-online consumer, and marketing automation will act as a catalyst in making it all happen.
Let us look at the top trends that will influence and dominate the Marketing Automation industry this year.
1) Marketing Automation will continue to grow going into 2022
The stats discussed above clearly emphasise the growth of Marketing Automation in 2022. And it could be down to a very simple reason – an increasing number of marketers are beginning to realise the value and potential of Marketing Automation, which is apparently increasing their investment in MarTech.
Here are some stats in that regard
Opportunity
● The number of Marketing Automation vendors grew 27% in 2018, a clear indicator of the burgeoning market demand.
● According to Email Monday, spending on Marketing Automation tools will grow rapidly, reaching $25.1 billion annually by 2023.
● The report also stated that 75% of marketing professionals are already using at least one type of Marketing Automation tool in their strategy. Other businesses can try to emulate tactics deployed by market leaders to achieve similar levels of success.
● Marketing Automation has come to be recognised as an essential tool for improving bottom-line growth, with over 70% of Indian marketers using it primarily for improving their lead conversion rate.
What’s The Catch?
Securing a sizeable budget, and creating a sound strategy for Marketing Automation will continue to be dodgy as some decision-makers might still be split on the idea. Some marketers continue to associate Marketing Automation Platforms as high-maintenance, complex systems that are formidable to master.
2) Personalised content will reign supreme
The need for personalised content is not surprising at all today. But in all the communications you receive from brands, you’d still find a lack of personalisation in most of them. And when you look at the numbers in support of it (here’re some from Instapage), you’d be hard-pressed to understand why?
In 2022, context will increasingly be the driving force behind business growth. Consumers are demanding relevant experiences from the brands they interact with. They expect brands to know their likes and preferences, and come up with intelligent product recommendations that are worth their while.
Opportunity
● By combining social listening, user attributes, on-site behavioural attributes, and past purchase data, marketers have a fantastic opportunity to formulate a highly accurate customer profile.
● Understanding user preferences and buying habits will help brands move beyond segmentation and personalization, and enter the realm of hyper-personalization and predictive recommendations.
● Personalised content will be the key ingredient in a brand’s Marketing Automation marketing efforts. It can help brands rack up their customer loyalty index, ensuring that business doesn’t get lost to competition.
What’s The Catch?
Creating and executing hyper-personalised campaigns at scale for a really massive user base will be the real challenge. Marketing Automation platforms that integrate seamlessly with online businesses and collect user data at various points will be instrumental here by letting businesses personalise large-scale campaigns easily.
3) Smarter Marketing Automation: Machine Learning + AI-assisted platforms
Predictive Personalisation will be the pot of gold at the end of the Marketing Automation rainbow in 2022. Netflix and Starbucks are already up and running with recommendation engines that use AI + Machine Learning to create hyper-personalised experiences for customers. Their growth is proof enough that predictive personalization is the way ahead.
Opportunity
● In 2022, marketers will start to use machine learning in content creation. Machine Learning and data will work together to boost engagement efficiency.
● Once a user clicks an ad, the underlying user, and behavioural data will be consumed by Machine Learning systems and used in future campaigns and touch-points as the user progresses in their life-cycle.
● Similarly, AI-assisted platforms will proliferate and technologies like Natural Language Processing & Deep Learning will be leveraged to automate the study of user behaviour, online activity, understanding speech and language patterns to create hyper- personalized user personas.
What’s The Catch?
A commercially viable AI + Machine Learning end-all, be-all solution is still in the works. Larger brands have the manpower and financial resources to create their own system, but other businesses will have to wait before they find a simplified plug-and-play system. If you know of any such software that is already making waves in the industry, please drop a word in the comments below.
4) Chatbots will continue making waves
In the coming years, Chatbots will be playing a crucial role in customer service and customer engagement. Chatbots will become smarter and will be capable of behavioural recommendations in the future along with deep integration with third-party software.
Opportunity
● Over 54% of respondents in this study preferred engaging with a brand via a chatbot, and not an app. The potential for user engagement is absolutely massive, provided the chatbots are intelligent enough to hold up a meaningful conversation with multiple users.
● Messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger have had huge success with Chatbots since opening up the integration for brands. According to research, over 60 per cent of users who received a chatbot ping on Messenger engaged with the message.
● WhatsApp will soon allow brands to integrate chatbots with their API, opening up a whole new avenue for brand-user engagement. With 1.3 billion active MAU’s, this is a tremendous opportunity for businesses big and small.
● With 3.2 billion messaging app users expected in 2022, the market potential for chatbots is huge. It is too big a number for marketers to ignore, and chatbots are a great tool for tapping into it.
● From Oracle’s survey of 800 top decision-makers around the world, over 80% are already using, or are planning to start using chatbots for their business by 2022. Chatbots are largely coming out as a plausible engagement solution for marketers.
What’s The Catch?
Chatbots are essentially human-trained computer programs taught to understand and mimic human conversation. Chatbots still struggle to understand the human contextual conversation at times because every individual has a unique style of communicating. Chatbots lack the seamless exchange of information, something that humans can do so effortlessly.
5) Automated Social Media Marketing
Time spent on social media has increased from 135 minutes in 2017 to 143 minutes in 2019. Brands are eyeing an even bigger sizeable piece of your social screen time in 2022. The smart automation of social media marketing will be on the agenda, as brands try to reach out to the right audiences with their messaging at the right time in a user’s life to maintain high contextual relevance.
Opportunity
● Organic visibility will continue to fall on Facebook. To counter this, brands try to improve their ROI by increasing their social media marketing budget. Social media ad targeting will become highly targeted by mirroring Google’s Adwords platform.
● The generation Z population is growing, and so is their purchasing power. With time, they will rival millennials’ spending potential. Brands need to prepare a targeted social strategy specifically for them because they spend the maximum time online.
● 2021 witnessed a substantial increase in the social media budget of brands, which will increase even further in 2022.
● Video content will dominate social media. Social video advertising increased by 130%, which will urge several brands to look towards video as an effective social engagement tool.
What’s The Catch?
It will be interesting to see how effective social media campaigns are in the coming years for advertisers. Facebook’s new rules are going to throttle impression shares for publishers and advertisers, as the world’s largest social media platform seeks to go back to its roots and promote content from immediate friends and family.
6) Lifecycle Marketing using Predictive CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)
According to Forbes, brands that can provide the most pleasant and engaging experience throughout a customer’s lifetime will have higher conversion and Marketing Automation statistics. If the customer experience isn’t up to the mark at any particular stage, users will refrain from making repeat purchases.
Opportunity
● Brands will look to migrate from a static to a more dynamic, behavioural approach in creating customer segments to accommodate a user’s changing needs and preferences in real-time.
● More and more brands will try to study and assess their user’s online behaviour and understand how they are transacting, operating online, and their motives behind search and purchase.
● Predictive CLV is going to be the way ahead, as brands will seek to optimize their advertising spending according to the expected revenue from their customers in real-time.
● With advanced segmentation, brands will be able to identify high, medium, and low CLV users and create highly personalised marketing campaigns with a justifiable marketing cost that doesn’t exceed the perceived value of each user subset.
● Marketing Automation Softwares will let brands create highly accurate user profiles easily by analyzing user attributes, behavioural and past purchase history, and creating an accurate CLV assessment.
Where’s The Catch?
The biggest issue here will be getting the right type of data consistently, especially for larger businesses dabbling in multiple product and service categories across markets. Also, forecasting metrics like revenues and costs are always tricky which can skew the outcome negatively in case there are errors in the calculations.
7) User Marketing Automation is going to be critical for business growth
Maybe 2022 will be the year, we will all witness a deeper and increased emphasis on Marketing Automation than acquisition. The reason is, in 2022, customer experience campaigns will evolve to become a cross-function of marketing and dictate future campaigns based on user engagement and response.
Brands will push hard to understand the journey of anonymous users who haven’t transacted on their site. Tracking their journey from becoming an unknown to a known user will deliver real value in terms of growth. According to Bain & Company’s report, a 5% increase in customer Marketing Automation can positively affect profitability by over 75%.
Opportunity
● Acquiring customers remains 5X more expensive than retaining existing ones, and the CLV of old customers compared to newly acquired customers is a lot higher. This is why most businesses will have to be laser-focused on Marketing Automation in 2022 to max out their bottom line.
● Forrester says that Brands that offer better customer experience will have 5 times higher revenue growth than other brands. This will be the next big battleground as brands scramble to woo their users with a highly personalized experience to secure their commitment and increase their loyalty count.
● Happy users will act as brand evangelists to their immediate circle of friends and family. Consumers today trust reviews and recommendations from their peers a LOT more than advertisements. This will be reason enough for brands to keep their customers happy and retain them.
Where’s The Catch?
Brands will have to work fast and align their interests towards the ‘Experience Economy’. A personalised customer experience will be the major differentiator in the market and it will be hard for brands to constantly innovate, execute and deliver maximum value to their users at scale.
8) Mobile-first approach
Mobile marketing will be a major growth driving factor for businesses as it fast becomes the user’s primary device for communication with the online world. Marketers will aim to create an elaborate mobile engagement strategy for brands, leveraging tools like push and web notifications, SMS, mobile wallet, and in-app notifications effectively. Marketing Automation will be the tool that weaves an elaborate web around these campaigns and ensures that they work cohesively at scale.
Opportunity
● Mobile ad spending overtook desktop in 2018 for the first time, and this will continue in 2022 with spending expected to increase by 8.5 % YoY. Expect a lot more mobile-based ads and campaigns in the coming year.
● Google’s mobile-first index released in 2020 will force the hand of many brands to optimize their website for mobile. Mobile will become the go-to channel for marketers in 2022 for engagement and Marketing Automation.
● Brands will definitely be looking to focus on creating mobile-specific content and exclusive mobile engagement strategies to capitalize on the medium’s popularity.
● With the growth spurt in mobile usage, brands will be scurrying to collect and analyze the data of their mobile users and how they engage with their brand. This behavioural and transactional data will be crucial for understanding the user’s intent and buying behaviour, which will lead the way for personalised campaigns in the future.
What’s The Catch?
It will be difficult for marketers to create personalised, contextual, and highly engaging campaigns on mobile consistently. The margin for error is very low considering the personal nature of mobile as a medium, and an ill-timed campaign or a wrongly worded message can lead to user churn or dissonance immediately.
This is where tools like WebEngage come into play. WebEngage can empower your brand to send timely and personalized campaigns on various mobile-specific channels like Push notifications, In-app messages, SMS, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
9) Integrated Cross-Channel Marketing will dominate
Going ahead in 2020, Marketers will be more likely to succeed with a multi-channel marketing strategy as compared to working in individual silos.
Opportunity
● According to research, employing two or more communication channels increases engagement levels by over 166% compared to single-channel outreach models. Marketers will be keen to exploit this factor to keep their customers engaged at multiple touchpoints.
● More than 53% of UK consumers spend their online browsing time on multiple devices. This has given rise to the phenomenon of Webrooming, where the user conducts considerable research online before carrying out the purchase. Marketers will exploit this multi-screen approach to ensure engagement across all touch-points where the user is active.
What’s The Catch?
It will be interesting to see how marketers analyze data and choose the best possible mediums for their marketing campaigns. A multi-channel campaign will have several layers of user engagement and action, and this will require data intelligence to identify key insights that positively affect conversion and engagement. All of these factors will have to be seamlessly sewn into these multi-channel campaigns to ensure that the brand message remains fresh and adds value to the end-user.
Your user is no longer willing to wait and will make the jump to a better-suited competitor without a second thought. This is why Marketing Automation will play a key role in business as brands will scamper to create a more engaging, targeted, and personalised experience for their users going ahead in 2022.
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