Digital Marketing Automation Trends In 2022
Digitization is evolving at a heightened pace, particularly after the devastating 2019 pandemic. Traditional businesses still thinking about going online are now focusing their resources to be digital and transforming their business from physical premise to a comprehensive online presence and offering easy and user-friendly e-commerce platforms.
The ‘New Normal’ is driving even the smaller firms to get an online front and tap into the global markets; however, automation in digital marketing is becoming necessary due to low budgets and restricted finances.
Digital marketers worldwide are now keeping a keen eye on the upcoming digital marketing automation trends. They are making better technology investment decisions to get ahead of their competition in various industries.
It is evident now that the highest number of companies are leaping towards digitization compared with companies going digital before the pandemic. 2022 is a year that is characterized not only by an increase in demand for automation systems but also by the need for fresh and original online marketing strategies. These allow us to become part of the lifestyle of our potential customers and have a constant and positive presence in their purchasing decisions.
How to Utilize Digital Marketing Automation in Your Business
According to various global economic predictions that consider the widespread recession caused by Covid 19, the traditional marketing sector will experience a significant reduction in 2022, with more and more companies cutting their expenses. However, investment in the specific sector of marketing automation continues to increase.
It is because marketing automation is a tool that boosts sales and can also increase the efficiency of other business areas and lay the foundations for flexible scalability capable of adapting to virtually any scenario.
The digital marketing industry evolves exponentially year after year, which causes a transformation in the generation, segmentation, and speed with which the most competitive markets persuade their audiences through digital campaigns.
For this reason, the variation in trends has become the basis for the optimization and automation of processes, making them more akin to changes in user behavior and consumption.
In this sense, digital marketing automation becomes a tool that will help your business focus on one of its main objectives, such as generating leads from its databases. Apart from automation, the concept of inbound marketing is also gaining ground and often works with automated digital marketing practices.
Inbound marketing is a method focused on reaffirming and strengthening a brand’s relationship with its ecosystem of consumers and potential customers through four main phases: attraction, interaction, education, and loyalty. In general terms, this is the description of each of the stages:
Attract: This phase focuses on capturing people’s attention through content that complements their research on topics of interest.
Interact: At this phase, as the user’s attention is on the brand, they should be given the possibility of downloading content such as eBooks, webinars, videos, among other options.
Educate: After a business knows the users and has their records, it must focus its objectives on marketing automation through two phases that are measuring the quality of the leads based on their intentions, secondly, creating an automated mailing strategy that will address the intent of the potential customers. Once this is defined, mailing them through testing and retargeting strategy will allow you to optimize the settings on the content sent to obtain better reactions and perhaps a profitable sale.
Build loyalty: In this last phase, the objective will be to satisfy customers by providing relevant and valuable information.
What are the Benefits of Digital Marketing Automation?
The benefits of automation in digital marketing practices include consistency in the execution of a digital campaign.
Automation can also aid digital marketers to engage the audience by their cumulative behavioral triggers, search trends, sociodemographic data, etc. All these factors are easily manageable once an automated digital marketing practice is enabled.
Automation tools in digital marketing offer better controls and processes that turn big data into useful information, allowing better business opportunities after accumulating the user’s insights.
Automation in digital marketing is a strategy that provides feedback on the efforts made from inbound marketing, focusing on one of the key objectives: generating leads or identifying qualified consumers. Under this scenario, companies have adopted more dynamic processes through technology like content management systems.
It allows managing the timeframes of digital campaigns, contacting customers in a personalized manner, monitoring their actions and interests, reducing the use of resources, and even managing with more efficiency. Automating data and resources needs a proper organization that is strategically useful so that the communication of your digital campaign is more assertive and responsive.
Digital Marketing automation trends in 2022
By now, it is probably clear that the significance of automation in digital marketing practices has become an essential ingredient to stay ahead in the digital world. The perception of a business is pivotal in the physical world in terms of its success or failure; likewise, digital perception and wellbeing of a brand is also crucial in the digital world.
Since users now have several platforms like social media to express their feelings about a particular product or service, good or bad.
The need for a comprehensive communications strategy and a sound content marketing approach will not be possible unless digital marketers get equipped with automation in their operational capacities. Some of the areas where digital marketers can implement automation tools are as follows.
Data Personalization
In the past, a common denominator of companies doing digital marketing was that they missed the potential of automation technology by restricting it only to the area of marketing. However, 2022 presents economic challenges that force companies to gain maximum output from all business tools, including automation. The integration of all systems for automation and 360 degrees digitization has become a priority if not a necessity, as it allows heightened efficiency and scaling of all processes without the need to hire more staff or spend on new software.
One of the key points to achieving this synergy and facilitating omnichannel marketing and decision-making with real-time information is integrating all the data in a content management system.
We, as digital marketers, face the need to create increasingly personalized experiences for our favorite audiences. On the other hand, we are dealing with the growing distrust of people who feel that ads and recommendations make them feel exposed and that their privacy is at risk of breach.
Moreover, essential data and privacy settings changes are coming in 2022, especially with the expected slow disappearance of third-party cookies.
Therefore, to the same extent that we seek to provide the client with what they need at the right time, we must worry about collecting first-party data from all channels and maintain explicit, voluntary, and evident authorization and the usefulness of the information that we are sharing.
Aligning Marketing and Sales Goals
Automation allows marketers to use ‘word of mouth’ as they integrate this tool into an automated strategy, especially (but not limited to) e-commerce and digital marketplaces. Suppose any user shows particular interest in a product but does not buy it. In that case, you can send him the positive review of the next customer who acquires it plus a small discount for a limited time to promote conversion from trust and a sense of urgency.
Omnichannel marketing becomes valuable because it refers to sales across multiple channels, including social media, the web, podcasts, newsletters, etc. It provides a seamless shopping experience for users. Companies that adopt omnichannel strategies achieve a significantly higher customer retention rate than those that do not.
Automation is not about the ease in conducting and executing campaigns only; businesses worldwide have used automation to raise the synergy between different departments or sub-departments within an organization. In these lines, the marketing department’s effectiveness in automation will connect with the sales department to better gauge the sales targets and volumes.
The concept of automation in digital marketing cannot be restricted to a single team only; the benefits of the centralized strategy are beyond departmental efficiency. Once the sales team receives good marketing campaigns and effective communication strategies, they can perform better in the open markets to convert traffic into potential customers.
Focus On Voice Assistant Devices
Modern specialized speakers and voice assistants are becoming more and more common. By 2025 it is predicted that most Internet users will already have a device of this nature. Beyond this, they will have a much closer, emotional, and trusting relationship with their AI devices or digital companions like Siri or Alexa.
So, an automation strategy designed on the user’s smart speaker can make timely recommendations about a product that is essential for companies that want to take advantage of the boom in voice search.
Voice search is comparatively a new concept; this means that there is still room for its improvement. Tapping into this phenomenon will enhance the overall digital marketing impact and provide additional access to the users.
Voice assistant devices are becoming very common among youngsters, so a digital marketing strategy based on these devices will target a particular niche, making the process more target oriented. Enabling voice search by any business also aids in the search engine optimization practices, as the number of users opts for voice commands rather than typing.
Video Marketing
Videos are far more interactive than any other form of content, and video-based content continues to play a crucial role in shaping customer experience and decisions. It also doesn’t lose its B2B marketing power.
Effectively created video content creates an engaging story through images and has a lasting impact on B2B customers based on information retention and attention of the viewers. Animations in videos further increase the effectiveness of the message transmission since animations can show over the top communications that enjoy a higher chance to gain virality.
AI Use on The Rise
Automated chatbots are already a familiar concept; the challenge now is to humanize them and make them sophisticated enough to sustain meaningful communication in various settings. It is essential to standardize a customer experience driven by data, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and machine learning. In this way, we save staff and customer service efforts and ensure the potential for large-scale engagement in all our interactive touchpoints.
Artificial Intelligence has more to offer than just automated responses, automated voice commands and intelligent vehicles.
AI is now part of our lives, and we subconsciously use AI throughout the day. Cybersecurity, for example, is essential now that businesses are opting for digitization around the world. So, it is natural that investing in AI-powered tools will deliver service excellence to digital marketers working in different industries.
Choosing The Tools for Automating Your Marketing Strategies
Digital marketers now have various automation tools that can enable them to go for better results and give a tough time to their competitors. Investing in AI-powered tools is highly beneficial since it’s the single most effective automation tool that can benefit the strategic marketing practices of any business hailing from any part of the world. Innovative e-commerce platforms and inventory systems get enabled with AI-powered tools.
It means that users are already expecting to experience AI functionality on digital platforms. If they are not applied, it can be a turn off for your potential customers.
Conclusion
Digital marketing automation trends in 2022 are quickly identifiable by digital marketing professionals who want to have a long-lasting relationship with their customers.
Following the intent of the users and offering value-based content that drives sales, companies that enable digitization through automated digital marketing tools can easily capture a significant market share in comparatively a short time.
Strategically, the concept of comprehensive marketing practices is all about customer satisfaction. If there is a gap in the customer experience, chances are the customer will look for a better option. To conclude, the above information clarifies that the AI-based tools, coupled with rich interactive content marketing strategies, will raise the sales volume for any business respectively.
