Marketing automation, just like any other technology, is rapidly evolving, primarily thanks to AI and related technologies. Earlier this year, Adobe published an extensive study on what marketing automation is like in 2024 and what we can expect in the near future. In this post, we want to show you some of this report’s crucial findings and share our perspective. So, let’s see what’s coming for marketing automation!
According to Adobe’s report but also our experience and observations, there are five trends we can expect to grow in the near future when it comes to marketing automation:
- Increased use of artificial intelligence
- Focus on the new buying groups
- More content-generation features
- More interactivity (built-in chats and webinars)
- Better analytics and attribution
Let’s have a closer look at each of these trends, as they will undoubtedly shape the future of marketing automation.
Increased use of artificial intelligence
There’s no avoiding it; AI is almost everywhere. And with the right approach to this fascinating technology, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. AI can streamline tons of repetitive tasks, speed up your work, and optimize the results that you’re getting with your marketing campaigns.
iPresso is AI-powered, too! We use AI and machine learning in order to detect market and customer trends, prepare personalized recommendations, analyze user data, and even monitor content on the internet. We believe AI is not a replacement for a human marketing team, but it can be a very useful tool.
Adobe respondents seem to think the same. Almost 50% of them said they trust AI to optimize their marketing activities with some human oversight (interestingly, almost 25% are willing to do so with NO human oversight!)
Source: Adobe State of Marketing Automation in 2024
In the near future, we can expect more and more marketing automation features and solutions to be AI-powered, primarily because the vast majority of them is based on data, and that’s where AI and ML thrive.
Take personalized product recommendations as an example. This feature is extremely useful but to work at full speed it needs access to your customer data so that it can tailor recommendations to each visitor’s/customer’s interests and needs. This is where AI steps in; this technology can analyze customer behavior at scale and provide them with recommendations that should resonate with different groups of customers.
Focus on new buying groups
Marketing automation will gradually move from individual leads to buying groups. These groups consist of groups of individuals who are responsible for purchasing decisions in large companies.
Source: Adobe State of Marketing Automation in 2024
In the near future, marketing automation will help you identify and engage with those buying groups that can vary based on the type of product or service you want to sell. Here at iPresso, we’re getting ready for this transition as well. Even though individual leads will remain important for many more years, the truth is that more and more large companies make buying decisions collectively, and single individuals are no longer capable of making such decisions on their own.
Therefore, marketing automation will soon help you reach different people within one buying group and resonate with them from different perspectives and using different arguments (this is where personalization comes in handy as well).
More content-generation features
Almost everything you do marketing-wise is, in one way or another, based on content. Newsletters, blog posts, ads, and push notifications are all based on content. With marketing automation features, we can expect to see dynamically generated, personalized content in the near future.
Again, this is something we’re getting ready for here at iPresso. Our content automation feature can be supplemented with other solutions soon allowing our clients to generate dynamic and personalized content at scale. It is likely that in the near future other MA features will have more generative AI functions allowing you, e.g., to send thousands of personalized push notifications or text messages to your target audiences.
Over 25% of marketing leaders say that AI has been operationalized into their day-to-day marketing activities (for comparison, only 13% of laggards do the same thing):
Source: Adobe State of Marketing Automation in 2024
More interactivity – built-in chats and webinars
“Many of today’s marketing leaders are evaluating the benefits of transitioning from separate third-party chat and webinar tools to capabilities built right into their MAP [marketing automation platform]” – says Adobe.
Perhaps soon, marketing automation will help you be more interactive and support even more communication channels, such as chats and webinars. And while automated AI-driven webinars are not yet a thing, who knows what will happen in a few years or so? Marketing leaders are already assessing the available options, saying that built-in chat and webinar features are critical to their development (over 75% of answers):
Source: Adobe State of Marketing Automation in 2024
Better analytics and attribution
The last trend we want to mention is obvious to any marketing manager. It is 100% understandable that marketers need precise web analytics and marketing attribution to improve their campaigns. Adobe respondents say the same thing, naming better analytics and attribution critical to their business:
Source: Adobe State of Marketing Automation in 2024
We can expect that in the near future, MAPs (marketing automation platforms) will be integrated with even more data sources and will allow you to measure more touchpoints and other relevant datapoints regarding your marketing and sales activities.
Here at iPresso, we do the same thing: We are continually incorporating new data sources and improving our analytics capacity. For example, we recently implemented integration with Google Ads so that you can get more data regarding your PPC activities.
Wrapping up
More data, more integrations, more interactivity, and more AI – that’s how we can summarize the upcoming future of marketing automation. This technology will surely keep evolving and giving marketers access to more features and solutions streamlining their work. Because that’s what it was introduced for in the first place.
If you want to improve your marketing and sales operations, marketing automation is probably the best thing you can do. We invite you to start using iPresso for 30 days for free. We hope this trial access will enable you to see how MA can improve your work and the results you’re getting.
Leave a Reply