- Jul 14, 2020
- Category: Automation Marketing
Marketing Automation has caught the attention of marketers across the world. Along with providing better customer engagement and experience, it is helping organizations to cut costs at various levels. The other highlight of the technology is that it saves time, which is a major advantage for the time-crunched companies.
Marketing Automation, along with other latest technologies, is driving businesses to reap enormous profits and excellent business results. The rise of marketing automation has also given hope to marketers that they would be able to connect with customers more efficiently.
Some automation trends that were popular in 2019 and would also witness increased popularity in the 2020 as well are:
- Chat bots: As organizations look to provide better customer service and support, chat bots have become crucial in providing the same. The requirement to provide 24/7 customer support is challenging for any human service agent, chat bots fill this gap by providing the necessary help whenever a customer needs it.
Many companies have already integrated chat bots for providing an ultimate customer experience. For example, companies, like Kasisto, based out of New York, United States, offers digital experience in the banking and financial industry. It has the KAI financial chat bot, which provides services in consumer banking, investment management, and business banking.
Then there is Babylon healthcare chat bot that helps to generate diagnoses based on the response of the user. It’s surprising that these chat bots offer 24/7 healthcare service, which a healthcare professional also cannot provide!!! - Personalized Engagement: Personalization is a crucial component of marketing. Every marketer has understood that to connect with any customer, one needs to have personalized communication with them. Now here is the catch-22 scenario, personalized content does not mean that you just have to greet the customer by their name, or send birthday greetings, etc. In the current marketing scenario, you have to go much deeper and send content by analyzing the behavior of each of the customers.
The 4th generation technologies AI and machine learning would help to drive automation and in the personal engagement process. With the help of these technologies, a marketer can understand the preference of a customer, and design the content aligned with those requirements. So, as per observation, you need to develop the content that connects with the interest of the recipient. - Email Marketing Automation: Email marketing is favorite among the majority of the marketers, while in the current scenario, automation of the email marketing has taken over and into the strategy of marketers. Many established organizations are using automation in all the stages of the customer life cycle. The marketing automation technology is helping to gain insights into the behavior of the customer, thus giving detailed information about how a customer should be targeted. With the help of the relevant data, one can create the timely, and personalized emails for sending to customers.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) for conversational marketing: A right conversation holds the key to convert a prospect into a customer. Conversational marketing is the recent marketing approach bound to get popular in 2020, where the prospects are moved through the sales and marketing funnel with the automated conversational responses.
Many buyers want to converse with a human customer service agent as they feel automated chatbots decimate their interest level with its robotic answers. Conversational marketing gives the vibes of a real and authentic communication process, and natural language processing is the facilitator in this process. - Marketing automation accentuated by VR and AR: Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are some of the buzz words being discussed in the marketing industry. As customers are exposed to a wide range of products and services, they are now looking to have a real-time experience of the product or service before purchasing it. This is giving rise to experiential marketing assisted by the technologies such as VR and AR.
The below video shows how marketing is evolving with the augmented technologies:
As you can see the shopping approach of customers are changing, and with that, marketers are also adapting to the next generation of marketing trends. With marketing automation and AR, marketers can develop an immersive and virtual shopping experience for the customer. They can curate it as per the individual behavior and their shopping pattern.
For example, a customer can feel like an athlete by wearing a shoe, and this can happen, only if the marketer knows that the customer is interested in sports or is an athlete himself.
- Social Media Marketing via automation: Social media marketing would revamp the complete structure of the marketing approach. As an increasing number of customers sign up on different social media platforms, marketers need to follow a different strategy to attract these group of customers. Regular social media posting would keep your brand at the forefront and in the priority list of your potential customers.All this could be achieved by automating your social media marketing campaign. You must know, social media is an excellent platform for giving your brand the right exposure, but along with that, you have to amplify your presence the right way; otherwise, you might be overlooked. You need to post regularly to feed your customers with a steady flow of information. This would help in earning the trust of your followers and potential customers. Check out this example:
As you can see the brand smartly executed the promotional activities, and received a good number of likes and views. The marketing automation can perform the posting activities with little human intervention. The posts need to be planned in advance so that at a specific date and time, it could be published. The agile process makes the task easier for employees and also increases the productivity resulting in good business results.As a brand, in today’s world, the more successful you are in the social media, the more you reach out to a good number of potential customers. It keeps your brand on top of their mind so that when they would be willing to purchase any service or product that you sell, you would be their first choice.So, look out for the automated social media marketing, that would soon become popular in 2020.
Conclusion:
Marketing Automation would change the approach and strategy companies follow to promote their service, maintain the relationship with a customer, and even motivate them for repeated purchases. In the ever-evolving business world, organizations need to adopt the latest marketing trend to sustain in the market, and marketing automation being one of the latest ones would be the focus of many marketers in the industry.