Top Marketing Automation Trends in 2023

Intro

Marketing is witnessing new tides of change. And these tides are certain to bring in new opportunities. Today, CMOs can no longer survive with a marketing campaign that helps their content rank better on Google. They need ways to target customers across all touchpoints in their buying journey. And that’s where technology comes in.

With marketing automation, CMOs can align, adopt, and adapt their marketing strategies to the latest trends and technologies. But even marketing automation is quite volatile. Driven by technology like AI, ML, data, and more, marketing automation keeps evolving to incorporate the latest advancements.

In this article, we have compiled the latest trends that businesses, marketers, and CMOs can follow to gain a competitive edge in 2023 and yield a better ROI through marketing initiatives.

But first, let’s understand what marketing automation is.

Understanding Marketing Automation

In simple terms, marketing automation is the process of automating different tasks that make up the marketing department. These include various repetitive tasks, redundant tasks, and more to eliminate bottlenecks, free up resources, and speed up the entire process. Larger organizations, marketing departments, and even startups can become more efficient in marketing to their target audiences across all the different channels.

Using marketing automation, one can automate a number of tasks, including blog publishing, emails, setting up workflows for triggered actions, social media scheduling, and more. By installing marketing automation tools in place, businesses can enhance their customer experiences, smoothen and simplifies the customer journey, enable cross-channel marketing through digital experience platforms, tailor experiences for personalization, boost sales, and much more.

However, in order to achieve these benefits, businesses need to implement marketing automation more efficiently. This includes following the best practices and trends followed by industry leaders. That said, here are the top marketing automation trends in 2023 that you can follow.

Top Marketing Automation Trends

When it comes to marketing automation or automation in general, the industry is still evolving and booming. There’s a long way to go before the industry matures and reaches its final potential. And that is what creates a lot of volatility.

The evolving technology, the birth of new marketing practices, advancements in customer expectations, and the rolling out of new features by industry players keep businesses at the edge. All of these factors give rise to new trends in the marketing automation ecosystem. And that is exactly what we have highlighted below:

AI Takes Center Stage In Marketing Automation

Artificial Intelligence has certainly enabled businesses to create algorithms that can offer solutions to various problems. Moreover, AI has the potential to transform how businesses engage and interact with their customers.

Businesses can leverage AI to considerably reduce the disengagement that can be caused by the constant pestering of outbound marketing practices. Using AI, one can now analyze the purchase probability of the customers before reaching out to them and even enhance ad relevancy. Further, AI can be used to create customer profiles using the available data and forecast the demands to improve the customer experience.

In a nutshell: Marketing tools can collect data from customers while AI algorithms can enable them to assess this data better- create customer profiles, note patterns, personalize emails, assist through chatbots, and more. It will also enable businesses to offer personalization, campaign recommendations, decision-making, scheduling, and more.

RPA to Enter Marketing Automation

Robotic Process Automation has been enabling businesses to automate several of their business processes. And now, it is all set to transform the way they undertake its marketing automation initiatives.

In 2023, as RPA initiatives rise, businesses will be utilizing bots to automate many of their repetitive tasks. Some of these use cases of RPA in marketing automation would be:

• In PPC campaigns to make bids in Google Ads with a higher ROI
• To sort and analyze data from performance reports to yield better insights
• To automate technical reporting and auditing of different digital marketing campaigns (SEO) like link-building
• To automate several tasks in the lead nurturing process like lead qualification, lead scoring, lead retention, and more

Using these bots, businesses can streamline several repetitive and time-consuming tasks and automate them efficiently. Moreover, it would eliminate the chances of errors and enhance the speed at which the tasks are completed.

Digital Experience Platforms For Omnichannel Experience

The next trend that we will be witnessing in the marketing automation sector will be the surge in the shift to digital experience platforms for omnichannel marketing. Today’s customers desire a seamless experience, no matter the channel they use to interact with the brand. Whether they are engaging on social media, on your website, through live chat, chatbots, your mobile app, or any other touchpoint, they want a consistent experience. A digital experience platform allows just that.

It collects data from all touchpoints and enables automation to deliver a seamless user experience. Whether it is data collection, data unification, or strategizing campaigns, DXPs allow businesses to let the data flow seamlessly through sales and marketing teams so that they can engage with them more effectively.

DXPs also enables businesses to create workflows and sequences that automate actions based on certain triggers. They can use CMS like Drupal or Hubspot to create stellar digital experiences. Such platforms allow businesses to collect data from all touchpoints and make them available on a single platform. In fact, this traditional CMS (Drupal) has now reinvented itself into a digital experience platform and offers a plethora of advantages to businesses striving for an omnichannel experience. Businesses can be seen migrating to Drupal 10 to offer a seamless experience across all touchpoints.

Going The Extra Mile With Hyper-personalization

To say that personalization is the crux of effective marketing would be an understatement. Much has been said and studied on the need for personalized content and experience in marketing. However, 2023 would be about making the extra effort by delivering hyper-personalization.

Today’s customers are digitally conscious beings and have realized the value they hold for every business. And they’ve also realized that businesses are willing to go the extra mile to keep them satisfied, which has led to an increase in their expectations from brands.

As businesses straddle towards hyperautomation, offering hyper-personalization in their marketing endeavors wouldn’t be a tough nut to crack. They can use the same elements like AI, RPA, and other technologies to deliver a more personalized experience. They can monitor the user activity in real-time and deliver a personalized experience without much challenge. They can use marketing automation tools to gather user data, analyze their behavior and tailor the response in real time.

Machine Learning For Predictive Lead Scoring

Every marketing initiative is directed toward generating more leads and converting them into active buyers. And lead scoring is crucial as it helps you identify how much potential the lead has to convert into a buyer. Till now, leads were passed onto sales and marketing teams who would then assess their behavior, stage in the journey, and the interactions they’ve had with the brand so far.

Although many organizations have started using the automated lead scoring model to give numerical values to each lead within their marketing automation process, now it’s time for Machine Learning to change the game.

ML has been impacting SEO and in 2023 Machine Learning would enable businesses to gain predictive lead scoring using an algorithm to predict the probability of the customer making a purchase. ML algorithms would learn customer behavior patterns and identify hidden buying signals to predict the same.

In 2023, businesses will take the predictive lead scoring model by installing ML algorithms with their marketing automation efforts.

These were some of the top marketing automation trends that businesses will be leaning on in 2023. There will be several other trends that will be driving the marketing automation industry in the near future, especially in 2023. Some of these include:

• Using data to personalize the marketing automation initiatives and make more informed decisions.
• Integration data from marketing automation tools into customer relationship management software to pass on the leads down the sales funnel.
• Marketers are expected to use their marketing automation tools to focus their efforts on mobile marketing, like push notifications, in-app ads, etc.
• A number of tasks around social media management are also expected to become automated, like scheduling, analytics, AI content generation, and more.
• Chatbot automation with conversational AI is also a trend that we can see booming in 2023.

Final Thoughts

Taking a closer look at these trends, it is clear that there are two driving forces shaping them- customer expectations and the evolution of technology. And both of these pillars are crucial for any business to target digitally conscious customers and gain a competitive edge in the digital ecosystem.

Just implementing marketing automation initiatives or tools like Pardot, Hubspot, Marketo, Pipedrive, etc., won’t be enough. They would need to stay updated and offer the best experience to their customers with the help of technology. And not just that. Utilizing these trends, businesses can also speed up and streamline their entire marketing efforts to enhance sales and increase revenue at the same time.