7 Marketing Automation Trends for 2022 and Beyond

In the past few years, there has been a massive change in the marketing landscape and the way brands engage with customers in general.

Brands are using intelligent technology solutions like marketing automation platforms (MAP) to automate simple marketing tasks and empower teams to focus on critical business functions.

But, the million-dollar question is, are you getting the most out of your marketing automation efforts?

With 2022 just around the corner, it’s that time of the year when marketers start researching the key marketing automation trends to ensure they get the most out of their marketing campaigns and boost their revenue.

So, if you’re looking for ‘what’s next in 2022?’, here are the top 7 marketing automation trends we think will play a big part in the marketing world.

1. Funnel Optimized Content Will Take a Front Row: 80% of the customers are more likely to buy from a brand that offers personalized experiences^[i]. With marketing automation, brands can create personalized experiences that engage users directly by referencing their individual challenges, industry, and goals.

However, if you want to maximize the value of your marketing efforts, you’ll need to create funnel-optimized content.

You can start by:

• Identifying the type of content that the competitors are creating to engage users. For instance, creating a mix of content types like videos, infographics, podcasts, or blog posts.
• Asking your sales team about the common challenges that your customers or prospects face. This will help you identify topics that map back to your prospects’ key challenges.
• Asking your customer support team about the questions customers frequently ask to create solid content for both pre and post-sales stages.
• Creating a list of content topics for the bottom, middle, and top levels of the funnel.
• Creating a content calendar to define the complete process of content creation, from writing to editing to publishing.

2. Chatbots Will Continue to Rule in 2022: According to a CNBC report of chatbot statistics, AI chatbots will help brands save more than $8 billion a year by 2022^[ii]. Chatbots will continue to be a crucial part of your marketing efforts in 2022 because they can route customers to the right place to find the information they need to make informed decisions, and smartly push customers along the conversion funnel. Brands can use chatbots to provide 24*7 customer support, quickly answer customers’ simple queries, and build a better relationship with them.

AI-powered chatbots will be one of the many marketing automation opportunities that brands will use to enhance customer experience by sending them instant replies to their queries and sending links to buy or transfer the customer to a live support associate if required.

3. Quality Data Will be Key to Get a Competitive Edge: Quality data will be a crucial component for making data-driven decisions in 2022. Without quality data in place, you cannot make the right decisions about your call-to-action, site designs, segmenting and nurturing leads, and personalized marketing campaigns.

For data to be beneficial, it should be of high quality. The better your data’s quality the more value you can get out of it. With high-quality data, you can craft more effective campaigns, increase sales, decrease ad waste, and make your marketing campaigns more effective.

You can determine the user data quality with this set of data quality dimensions categorized into six major categories:

• Timeliness: Is your data accessible when you need it?
• Accuracy: How well does a piece of information show reality?
• Completeness: Does it resonate with your expectations of what’s comprehensive?
• Validity: Is your information in a specific format or does it follow business rules?
• Uniqueness: Is this the only instance in which this information is present in the database?
• Consistency: Does data stored in place match relevant data stored elsewhere in your database?

Use these dimensions to evaluate the quality of a specific dataset at any point in time.

4. Automation of Social Media Marketing Will be a Priority: Automation of social media marketing will play a key role in 2022 for brands that are looking to make use of their social media platforms.

With over 4.48 billion^[iii] social media users worldwide, social media platforms are becoming the central place for user engagement and getting them familiar with your brand.

Automation of social media will enable you to reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks (posting content), decrease response time, and give you the time and data you need to create more engaging content. Use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to design posts weeks in advance and schedule them to publish at a specific time and date to stay on top of your marketing game.

5. Personalized Email Automation Will be Relevant in 2022: If you want to gain traction with marketing automation in 2022, you need to personalize your email marketing campaigns.

Personalized automated emails will help improve open rates, reply rates, and click-through rates (CTRs). So, using a marketing automation platform can be your best bet to send personalized emails that appeal to your specific audience segment.

You can set up an email template based on your customer interests, region, and preferences. Once you’re done with this step, you can just sit back and let your marketing automation platform do the heavy lifting.

6. Mobile Marketing Automation Will Continue to Grow: Do you know, more than 54.8%^[iv] of internet traffic comes from mobile? As mobile usage continues to grow, we can be sure that in 2022 brands will increasingly use mobile marketing automation to engage leads and generate revenue.

With mobile marketing automation, you can gather information about your mobile users and start delivering personalized content to them.

Mobile marketing automation will help you to get:

• SMS updates
• Push notifications from your app
• In-app messages/coupons
• SMS surveys
• Real-time feedback

Leverage mobile marketing automation to optimize your campaign performance by:

• Segmenting users to perform A/B testing to know which messages are performing well.
• Efficiently segment users based on contextual information in a way that is timely and cost-effective.

If you want to optimize your marketing investment, design a strategy that allows you to reach more mobile users.

7. Conversational Marketing Will Still be Big: In 2022, if you want to connect with your customers in a way that is personal, convenient, and meaningful, you need to take a conversational approach to your content. You surely don’t want your messages to sound robotic and impersonal, which in turn, can push prospects away.

With conversational marketing, you can make your message sound more authentic and personal to your audience.

You can integrate your conversational marketing platform with your marketing automation platform to better understand your customers’ needs, deliver a seamless customer experience, and leverage declared data across your marketing funnel.

The Bottom Line

Each year brings new trends and strategies for marketers to implement in their marketing game. And with change being the only constant, the key to getting an edge each year is keeping yourself informed about what’s coming up next.

Want to know how you can keep up with these marketing automation trends? Talk to us!

Statistics References:

^[i] https://www.epsilon.com/us/about-us/pressroom/new-epsilon-research-indicates-80-of-consumers-are-more-likely-to-make-a-purchase-when-brands-offer-personalized-experiences

^[ii]https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/09/chatbots-expected-to-cut-business-costs-by-8-billion-by-2022.html

^[iii]https://backlinko.com/social-media-users

^[iv]https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-traffic-coming-from-mobile-devices/