9 Marketing Automation Trends for 2022 to Increase Your ROI
Marketing automation is a crucial component to saving your company time and money. When you can automate simple processes, you give your team time to spend on more critical tasks.
But are you maximizing your efforts with marketing automation?
If you want to get the most out of automating your marketing campaigns, you must stay on top of marketing automation trends.
On this page, we’ll share nine marketing automation trends for 2022 that you can use to take your campaigns to the next level. If you want to stay on top of the latest marketing automation trends and tips, subscribe to Revenue Weekly!
1. User quality data
Quality is a critical component of 2022 marketing.
You want to know if your digital marketing strategy worked for your target audience vs. all users. Without that data, you can’t make informed decisions about your site’s design, calls-to-action (CTAs), and copy.
That’s why a rising marketing automation trend is upgrading user data with quality scores.
For example, what if your business could score leads automatically and even score potential leads automatically? That information would have a tremendous impact on your sales team and your marketing team.
You’d both focus your efforts and analysis on your qualified leads.
Plus, you’d make data-backed decisions when it came to your marketing efforts. Your site’s design, CTAs, and copy would get tailored to what resonated with qualified leads the most. The results? Higher conversion rates, which would translate to more leads and sales for your business.
How can you bring this marketing automation trend to your business, though? MarketingCloudFX.
With MarketingCloudFX, you can:
- Attribute marketing channels and their results to your bottom line
- Sync marketing data with sales teams
- Determine the buyer journeys of qualified leads
- Bring unified customer relationship management (CRM) to your business
- And more
If you’d like to see MarketingCloudFX in-action for your business, contact us online to give it a go!
2. Funnel-optimized content
Marketing automation combines the best of both worlds: Personalization and automation. With the power of marketing automation, your business can create personalized experiences that speak to a reader directly by referencing their unique challenges, industry, and goals.
If you want to maximize the value of this marketing funnel benefit, though, you’ll need to create funnel-optimized content. This content focuses on different stages of the buying funnel and the questions and concerns buyers have during this stage.
So, go ahead, and start embracing this marketing automation trend. You can begin by:
- Speaking with your sales team about common questions from leads
- Chatting with your customer support team about common questions from clients
- Compiling a list of content topics for the bottom-, middle-, and top-of-the-funnel
- Researching which content types competitors use to engage users, like blog posts or videos
- Working through the steps of producing content, from writing to editing to publishing
Keep in mind that content creation is a time-intensive process, whether you’re looking to write a blog post or film a video. If you don’t have the time to publish content regularly, think about investing in content marketing services to get ahead!
3. Machine learning and artificial intelligence
Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are two crucial tactics in the future of marketing automation. If you want to be at the top of your game, you need to invest in machine learning to develop better marketing campaigns.
With machine learning and AI, you can collect information about your audience that helps you develop better campaigns for them in the future. Machine learning allows you to gain data on users and their online behaviors and automation lets you sort that data.
You can use this information to develop future campaigns that engage and delight your audience. It allows you to create personalized content that appeals to your audience.
If you want to have success with your marketing automation in 2022, you need to use machine learning and AI in conjunction with your automation software to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns.
4. Personalized content
One of the essential marketing automation trends of 2022 is customized content. It’s not enough to add someone’s name to an email to personalize their experience. Users want more, and the future of marketing automation centers on personalized content.
Personalized content allows you to focus on your audience’s specific behaviors and product preferences. With machine learning and AI, you can get to know your audience and compile helpful information. With that information, you can create automated customer profiles.
These profiles contain information you gather from social listening, on-site behaviors, and more. You can compile that information to discover your audience’s preferences and buying habits. Then, you can deliver personalized content that fits user interests.
This marketing automation trend allows you to deliver content based on users’ interests. You’ll provide content to them at the right time to help nudge them towards conversion.
If you want to stay on top of the future of marketing automation, you need to produce personalized content that resonates with your audiences’ interests.
5. Chatbots
If you haven’t started using chatbots, you’re missing out on one of the top marketing trends for 2022. Chatbots play a critical role in enhancing customer service and engagement. With chatbots, you can have interactions with your customers and answer their questions without lifting a finger.
Chatbots are an essential part of marketing automation in 2022 because they help save your business time. Instead of having to find time to answer every question you get on your website or social media profiles, you can use bots to answer simple questions.
Take a moment to think of questions that you get multiple times a day. Now, imagine having someone who can handle these questions for you, freeing up your time to answer more complicated and complex problems. With chatbots, you make that situation a reality.
In 2022, chatbots will play an integral role in helping your business boost engagement. You’ll be able to help your customers better and build better relationships with them.
6. Automated social media marketing
Automated social media marketing is one of the best marketing automation trends of 2022 for businesses looking to capitalize on social media’s benefits.
Social media usage continues to grow each year. Last year, there were 3.4 billion people on social media, which is a 9% increase from the previous year. This number will only increase as more people gain access to social media networks.
With more people joining social media, these platforms become a central place for you to engage leads and get them more familiar with your brand. If you want to keep your company top of mind, you need to post content often.
With automated social media marketing, you can stay on top of posting content.
Automated social media marketing allows you to create posts weeks in advance and schedule them to publish at a specific date and time. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer make it easy for you to schedule content for the month and see the full scope of your campaign.
When you automate your social media marketing process, you save your company time and can focus your energy on other important projects.
If you want to follow the top marketing trends for 2022, start by automating your social media marketing campaign.
7. Personalized email automation
As you look at marketing automation trends for 2022, you’ll notice that personalization is a crucial component of many of these trends. If you want to see success with your marketing automation in 2022, you need to personalize your email marketing campaigns.
Email personalization plays a vital role in helping you deliver a tailored experience for your audience.
Automation will help you in two ways.
First, automation will help you create customer profiles for people interested in your business. You can gather valuable information about them to deliver custom emails to them.
Second, you can use automation to send emails, too. An all-in-one software, like MarketingCloudFX, allows you to gather customer data, organize it, and use it to deliver automated emails at the right time.
You can send emails like:
- Abandoned cart reminders
- Coupons or product discounts
- Information about related or similar products
- And more
You can personalize each of these emails to help customers get the information that’s most valuable to them.
The future of marketing automation will rely on creating personalized emails that resonate with your audience’s interests.
8. Conversational marketing
Conversational marketing is an essential marketing automation trend for 2022.
With automation, it’s easy for your communications to sound robotic and less human-like. If you want to succeed with marketing automation in 2022, you need to take a conversational approach with your content.
Pay close attention to how you communicate with customers. Do your automated messages sound cold and stiff or warm and inviting?
You don’t want your messages to come off as impersonal or emotionless, as it can push leads away. People want to feel like they’re interacting with a human, even when they’re not.
With conversational marketing, you can make your messages sound more authentic. Natural language processing (NLP) will help you create more conversational responses in automation. NLP focuses on technology that understands the way humans speak to help deliver the best content or experience.
You can improve automation by using NLP to deliver more conversational communications to your audience.
9. Mobile marketing automation
One of the most valuable marketing automation trends for 2022 is mobile marketing automation. If you aren’t using mobile marketing automation, you’re missing a valuable opportunity to engage leads where they spend their time.
Did you know that 70% of Internet time gets spent on mobile? Or that more than 50% of Internet traffic comes from mobile?
As mobile usage continues to grow, you need a plan to help you reach and engage these mobile users.
Mobile marketing automation allows you to gather information about your mobile users.
You can learn information like:
- Location
- Browsing habits
- Type of device
- And more
After gathering information about your mobile audience, you can start sending automated content to them.
Some automation options include:
- SMS updates
- Push notifications from your app
- In-app messages/coupons
- SMS surveys
- And more
These options allow you to engage your audience on their mobile devices and keep your brand top of mind.
If you want to stay on top of the future of marketing automation, create a strategy that allows you to reach mobile users.
Put these marketing automation trends for 2022 to work!
If you’re looking to take your marketing automation to the next level, you need to take advantage of these marketing automation trends for 2022. By utilizing these trends, you’ll see the best results with your campaigns this year.
Feeling overwhelmed by all these trends? WebFX has your back. With our software, MarketingCloudFX, and as a leading marketing automation consultant, we’ll help you automate your campaigns and take advantage of these trends to grow your company’s leads, sales, and revenue.
Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our marketing automation software!