5 Marketing Automation Trends You Need to Follow in 2021

In the past couple of years, marketing automation trends have shown that they’re here to stay. With a wide range of clear benefits, businesses are more and more relying on automation, constantly making the field more competitive.

Marketing is an integral part of any business’s growth strategy. Covering all your bases in the digital marketing world is becoming an ever-growing challenge.

So, how do you simplify it?

Keep reading to learn about the marketing automation trends you need to follow in 2021 that simplifies the ordeal of this evolving digital world.

1. Social media marketing remains on autopilot

People are spending more time on social media every year. According to a report, Americans spent over 1,300 hours on social media in 2020. Even though millions have gotten used to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are extremely popular among millennials and Gen Z.

On the other hand, the use of professional social media is also on the rise. LinkedIn is now counting over 770 million active users.

What does all this say? Social media is capturing massive attention. It’s the place where businesses are looking to advertise. However, the challenge remains — you have to establish a presence on multiple platforms simultaneously.

That’s where social media marketing automation helps. It has allowed businesses to move forward with deploying unique automation marketing strategies. Some of the tools include:

• Hootsuite — Use the tool to schedule your social media posts. The app is perfect because it supports various platforms. It’s the one place where you can control several social media accounts.
• Sendible — Much like Hootsuite, you’ll be able to manage all your social media accounts with one tool swiftly. Plus, you can easily engage with your audience.
• Crowdfire — Are you building up your Twitter following? Use Crowdfire to remove all the inactive followers. It’ll help you build a Twitter account with high engagement.
• Automate.io — Use the tool to automate capturing your Facebook leads with Facebook Ads. On top of that, use it to automate other workflows in your business. The tool supports integration with over 200 different tools and platforms.

There are many more solutions in the market. You’ll find businesses automating processes such as LinkedIn prospecting which is a great way to automate your outreach campaigns.

Given how social media is still on its growth path, these tools will continue to be essential for digital marketing automation.

2. More personalization in automation

With AI in big data still showing signs of growth, it’s evident that it’ll greatly benefit personalization in marketing automation trends. There are multiple ways how personalization will help improve marketing automation services.

• Effective PPC campaigns — Click-through rate and user behavior data will show which kind of ads convert better. It’ll lead to more effective advertising campaigns.
• Better social media marketing — Data from automated posting will show which kinds of posts perform better and during which parts of the day. Businesses will have better results with social media marketing automation.
• Higher upselling conversion rates — The better the upselling suggestion, the higher the chance of making a sale. Big data will help eCommerce platforms better recognize upselling opportunities and automation techniques for ecommerce businesses that convert well.
• More content engagement — All those analytics will show the types of content people interact with the most. That way, businesses can improve their content engagement on blogs and social media.

Here’s the catch, though:

Deployment of these technologies is only available to big players such as Netflix and Amazon. They utilize AI to increase their profits. The AI is collecting data and using it to predict future user behavior.

It’s insane how precise personalization has become. People are receiving suggestions from these platforms on what to watch next or buy next. And it’s working!

There’s more room for better personalization in automation but the expansion will be slow, as the technology is yet to become available to small businesses.

When that happens, all the companies that rely on AI in their marketing automation will achieve higher conversion rates.

3. Chatbots are still relevant

The power of AI is helping with chatbot designs. Automation of customer service is one of the best ways to grow customer satisfaction. The whole industry is yet to develop, with market figures getting close to $10 billion in only a couple of years.

A report states that there are over 300,000 chatbots active on Facebook while millions of people also use them on their websites.

However, the most crucial part is that they’re an effective tool for providing customer service to business clients.

Even though they’re currently far from perfect, some businesses are using chatbots to improve their services.

For example, publications such as TechCrunch use their chatbots to deliver the content their visitors want to their inbox. That’s a great way to provide quality service to millions of readers.

BigCommerce uses its chatbot to welcome its visitors and prompt them to join their newsletter.

Others are using chatbots to guide their customers through the buyer’s journey while some use chatbots to offer customer support. 

A chatbot can personalize messages and deliver links to knowledge base pages to solve a problem. It can achieve that by recognizing pre-set keywords in the chat.

For the time being, setting up chatbots requires a lot of effort. However, automating a specific process in your company can save plenty of money in the long run. Chatbots are the perfect option to achieve that.

Using them will remain a trend for the years to come. Chatbots will help shape the future of marketing in multiple ways. Just sit tight, and watch it happen.

4. Automation with a focus on mobile devices

There are almost 15 billion active mobile devices around the globe. Nowadays, the majority of people browsing the net are using mobile devices. 

Why is that important? 

Well, automation needs to address the needs of the market. As more people are looking at the small screen, advertising approaches are changing. The same applies to automation.

That’s why platforms such as WebEngage specialize in creating a seamless advertising experience on mobile platforms. With similar marketing automation tools, businesses can expect to achieve high conversion rates.

These types of tools provide detailed analytics for different advertising channels. Some of those are:

• In-app
• Push notifications
• SMS
• Web push
• Messaging apps
• Email

Using the channels will allow businesses to create marketing automation strategies that convert more and drive revenue. Each of these channels will perform differently across industries. But companies will quickly decide which are the most effective ones.

As the number of devices is yet to grow in the future, mobile marketing automation trends are yet to change and adapt to the upcoming market.

Last but not least, the following marketing automation trend will continue growing.

5. Businesses rely on more automation tools

According to this report by ITPro, approximately 68% of businesses are using some sort of automation in their marketing efforts. However, there’s always room for growth.

The primary reason is the range of benefits that automation brings to the table. Businesses can hope to achieve:

• Lower costs — Companies that opt for using a marketing automation SaaS tool drive down their expenses immediately. There’s no need for gigantic marketing teams to collaborate, create strategies and deploy them. All this is doable by a handful of skillful people.
• Higher efficiency — Achieve more with less. A single employee with a broad range of automation tools can achieve great results. On the other hand, with all the data at hand, all the marketing campaigns will become more efficient due to better performance.
• Personalization — AI-powered tools are a great way to create personalized experiences for your customers. It’ll make the communication sound more natural.
• More productivity — Once you’ve put your marketing on autopilot, your marketing team can focus on other essential things. There’s no more need to waste time on creating posts and publishing them manually.

All these benefits indicate that automation tools are here to stay. They’ll improve over time and become a standard part of any business’s strategy to maximize their efficiency.

Finishing thoughts

Keeping up with the current trends is essential for any business. If you’re not already using marketing automation tools, it’s time to start.

They are one of the best ways to continue offering excellent services without putting more pressure on your staff.

All it takes is creating a strategy and organizing the whole process. After taking care of those initial steps, it’s smooth sailing for your marketing team. Collect the data from campaigns and use it to improve your future ones.