Digital marketing automation is constantly changing, and marketers can automate more areas of their job than ever before. But how far can automation go? Will digital marketing ever be fully automated?
Let’s look at the state of online marketing automation, the technology that’s pushing the boundaries, and where it could go in the future.
What Is Digital Marketing Automation?
Automation in marketing plays a similar role as automation in the other parts of your business: streamlining and optimizing your processes to analyze data, run campaigns, and more.
Essentially, automation is enlisting the help of software robots to handle tasks that could be done by humans but don’t need to be.
These are typically simple, repeatable tasks that commonly involve data entry or other similar jobs.
This saves a lot of time and effort and frees marketers up to focus on projects that require a more critical eye. It also improves the overall success of your automated marketing efforts, some marketers even saw an 80% increase in leads generated after implementing automation software.
Components of Digital Marketing Automation
In marketing, automation can be utilized in many ways from workflows to data analysis. Here are a few examples of how companies are using online marketing automation today:
Segmentation
Digital marketing is all about obtaining, organizing, and analyzing customer data. Much of this work can be done via automation. With automation technology, marketers can use MarTech solutions to analyze data and segment customers and prospects into their proper groups. This then helps marketers create targeted, data-driven campaigns.
Campaign Delivery
Speaking of campaigns, digital marketing automation can help with them, too. When nurturing leads with marketing campaigns, it’s important that you tailor your messages so that they contain valuable, relevant information at the right time.
Automation helps you choose the right recipients, build the right email, and analyze how those emails are performing. Statistics like open rates, click-through rates, and deliverability show you which emails are doing well and can guide you toward positive adjustments.
Workflow Automation
Building workflows is another crucial part of automated marketing. Workflows help in many different aspects of your digital marketing, from lead nurturing to customer retention. With well-written workflows, minute tasks like scheduling, follow-ups, and data entry can be automated to be done without human guidance. This saves a lot of time and reduces human error within the process.
Social Media Management
One of the most obvious benefits of using digital marketing automation is the ability to help you schedule social media posts in advance. Social media automation software also analyzes your post’s performance, giving you access to more data than ever before by pulling stats from social media platforms. This new insight can help marketers understand their audience and improve future posts and campaigns.
What Can’t Be Automated in Marketing?
The things that cannot be automated in marketing are typically the things you probably wouldn’t want to be automated anyway. Creative writing, art, designing, and marketing strategy are all things better left in human hands because they require creativity and critical thinking that cannot be automated. These are typically the tasks that get pushed back or placed on the back burner because smaller, more repetitive tasks are getting in the way. Automation removes this problem.
What’s the Cutting Edge of Automation in Marketing?
The cutting edge of online marketing automation is always changing as more advanced technology becomes available.
Today, marketers are just beginning to use machine learning and AI in analytics to assist in developing strategies and campaigns.
Related: 5 Ways to Generate Leads for Your Business Online
Though we are still a long way away from marketing being fully automated, the latest technology is automating more things than ever before.
This is extremely prevalent within the data collection space, where automation is giving marketers an abundance of detailed behavioral information on every aspect of a potential customer’s journey through their website.
Small data like how users choose to close a pop-up or how they’re interacting with graphics is now collected and organized to help marketers discern and act upon patterns that would previously go unseen or undocumented.
What Does the Future of Digital Marketing Automation Look Like?
The future of automated marketing is approaching quickly as new forms of automation look to replace even more processes and use even more advanced technology.
Things like machine learning and AI are beginning to become integral and assist further in the data analysis role to help marketers develop better campaigns.
In the future, this AI could work to predict actions to forecast trends and create campaigns based on informed predictions from data, though this is still some way off from fruition.
Customer service roles are also becoming automated. Everyone knows about automated phone trees that you’ve probably called into before that help companies move through thousands of phone calls a day. Marketing automation takes this and applies it to your website in the form of tools like website chatbots that greet your customers and help them find what they’re looking for automatically.
While the future of online marketing automation technology is always evolving and advancing, many businesses are still playing catch-up to the current standards by continuing to search for additional software to add to their tech stack. Only 51% of companies currently use some form of marketing automation and even less are fully automated and using this technology as effectively as possible.
It’s crucial that companies who have not yet invested in automated marketing technology do so soon, as companies who do use automation are typically outpacing their competitors.
Bottom Line
Digital marketing automation is quickly becoming a crucial part of digital marketing that streamlines processes and makes better use of gathered data to help make informed decisions on strategies and campaigns.
If your business isn’t using automation in your marketing, you’re missing out on a major potential boon to lead generation that your competitors are already taking advantage of.
For marketers, keeping up with constantly changing technology can be difficult. But it’s worthwhile to understand how this technology can help you become more effective and make your job easier along the way. Learn more about some exciting marketing innovations like using marketing as a recruiting and retainment tool or how you can improve the way you do market research.
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