Top 5 Marketing Automation Trends of 2022

What Is Marketing Automation? 

As the tools used in marketing become increasingly sophisticated, the bar gets raised with expectations for ROI (return on investment) and the user experience. 

It's no longer good enough to throw out a mailing list to people who've signed up through your website. These days, everybody recognizes automated emails, even if they mention the individual's name. 

There are several cases where marketing automation can be used, but one of the ones that is getting more relevant over time is semantic automation.

Relevance is taking on an ever-increasing significance in the marketing arena. That's where marketing automation comes in. It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to collate user behavior information. By harnessing data on each user's interaction with your website, marketing automation can help to distribute relevant content at the best possible time. 

However, it can do even more than that. Keep reading to learn about the latest trends in marketing automation. 

Top 5 Marketing Automation Trends of 2022 

1. Behavioral Data for Customers 

How many demographic groups sit within your target audience? When does each individual habitually use your website? What was each person's interaction? What was their last interaction with your site? 

Unless you happen to know the answers to these questions, you need marketing automation. That's the only way you will create a personalized experience for each person who interacts with your website at scale. 

This is sometimes known as hyper-personalization. Instead of using your potential client's name, location, or company name to interact with them in a standard way, you make your product or service offering more personally relevant. As a result, it's easier to move them down the sales funnel. Automation can create a personalized interaction at any given stage of the process. 

Automation also enables you to create marketing strategies that are way more agile. Acting quicker on the user insights you've gained is guaranteed to give your marketing campaigns a significant boost. You can focus on your creativity while letting the technology do the heavy analytical stuff. 

2. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence 

Before we delve deeper into machine learning and artificial intelligence, it's essential to understand the difference between the two. The terms are often used interchangeably, yet they're different but complementary technologies. 

Machine learning (ML) is the tool that gathers data, analyzes it, and identifies patterns to create automated processes. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be seen as the "front end" of ML. The most obvious example of AI is the way in which a chatbot (more on those later) responds to a customers' questions. AI pulls the relevant information from the data gathered by machine learning and expresses it to the customer naturally. 

There's currently a healthy trade in buying and selling customer databases, but by leveraging the power of ML and AI, you can automatically create your laser-focused customer profiles. As well as saving you lots of money, your data will always be current. 

The combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence enables you to deliver large-scale content to potential customers automatically. OrbitalAds has a range of solutions to get your marketing automation set up to leverage this technology. 

If you choose not to use this incredibly powerful and accessible technology, you may as well wave a white flag to your competitors. 

3. Omnichannel Marketing 

We're willing to bet that, from time to time, a marketing jingle or slogan gets stuck in your head. A catchy one will stay with you for ages; it may even seem like it's following you around.  

The internet has taken this concept to a whole new level. Marketing channels are no longer restricted to TV and radio. Users usually move through various media and channels, so marketing to them is far more sophisticated. People will often use a mixture of various websites and apps in their day-to-day activities. This provides far more opportunities to present them with your product or service. This is known as omnichannel marketing. 

By automating your omnichannel marketing—once a potential client has visited your site—you can have your publicity follow them across other web pages they visit, even through the immensely powerful channel of social media. This is commonly known as remarketing. The point of it is that if they didn't respond to a call to action (CTA) during their first visit to your site, remarketing could bring them back for another bite at the cherry through two methods. 

• Your ads stay front and center as they travel across websites (think back to that radio jingle) 
• It's easy for them to return to your site by clicking on the ad

The beauty of the internet is that everything is (or can be) connected. From a marketing perspective, that's incredibly powerful with the right strategy. YouTube has become one of the leading marketing channels because of its reach. As a result, it offers countless opportunities to sponsor videos or make agreements with popular influencers. 

4. Funnel-optimized Content 

Most people involved in marketing have heard the expression "sales funnel," but did you know that there's also a marketing funnel? 

The marketing funnel is a precursor to the sales funnel. It covers the entire customer journey, from initial awareness to post-sale activity. While the sales funnel also needs to be extremely efficient, you won't be off to the best start if you don't get your marketing funnel right. 

The first step in creating funnel-optimized content is to understand where the gaps are in the funnel. Look at visitors who have left your site without engaging and find patterns to plug that gap. Then, review your content to understand how successful it is in terms of customer interaction.  

It's also worth considering the media you use on your site. We're increasingly living in a video-driven marketing environment. Users generally have very short attention spans. They're more likely to engage by watching a short, impactful video about your product than read a paragraph of text.  

An old expression says you only get one chance to make a first impression. That couldn't be truer concerning online shoppers. You want to give yourself the best possible chance of getting them to engage on their first visit. You don't need to hit them with a "hard sell" from the start, but you need to send the message that your product or service will add value and that it represents a solution for them. 

There's no getting away from it. Content creation is labor-intensive, so you don't want to be going at it alone. That's where machine learning once again comes to the fore. Let it do the heavy lifting by collecting and analyzing the data on your website's usage and use it to help you identify what kind of content does and doesn't work. 

5. Conversational Marketing and Chatbot 

Users complete many online transactions without any human interaction whatsoever. However, sometimes you need some advice before going any further on your buying journey. For companies, it's not cost-efficient to have call center staff sitting waiting for the phone to ring or for a message to ping. That's what gave rise to the chatbot. 

When a customer is reaching out with a question, they want to feel that they've been understood and that they've been given accurate information. In the early days of chatbots, interacting with them often led to frustration on the customer's part. However, with the growth of machine learning and artificial intelligence, those interactions feel far more natural. A key part of that feeling is the fact that they're conversational interactions, driven by the combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence. 

These days, personalized chatbot conversations have led to improved customer service and engagement. If you haven't yet implemented a conversational marketing approach, it's not too late because you can be sure that your competitors will have done so already.

Conclusions

It's no wonder that marketing automation market is growing so fast. With the increase of data points that can be taken advantage of in an online marketing strategy the need of marketing automation also increases. 

In OrbitalAds, we specialize in keyword automation for search campaigns providing our users a way to target the highest buying intent keywords existing in their markets in a fast and easy way. Check out our product advantages.