Digital marketing automation is constantly evolving. Today’s marketers can automate a greater number of areas of their work than ever before, but just how far can this automation go? Will digital marketing be automated fully one day? Let’s explore the current climate of online marketing automation and see what technology is pushing boundaries to investigate where it could go in the future.
What is digital marketing automation?
Automation is seen throughout modern businesses, and its role in marketing is similar to other areas. Essentially, it streamlines processes to analyse data, run campaigns and more. At its core, it takes advantage of software intelligence to carry out tasks that humans could do, but don’t actually need to. This usually means simple, repetitive tasks like data entry, which would otherwise take a lot of time to do.
This way, marketers are free to put their time and energy into projects that require more of their expertise. The combination improves the overall success of automated marketing work, generating more leads than would be possible without the automation tools.
What is digital marketing automation made up of?
Marketing can utilise automation to handle things like workflows and data analysis. Here are some examples of what marketers use automation for:
Audience segmentation
The collection and analysis of customer data is the foundation of digital marketing. Automation can handle much of this, analysing vast swathes of data to segment customers appropriately. This enables marketers to create highly targeted, data-driven campaigns.
Automated workflows
Workflows are important for various aspects of digital marketing, like lead nurturing and customer retention. With well-prepared workflows, automation can be applied to handle minute tasks like data entry, scheduling and follow-ups. This saves a lot of time and eliminates the risk of human error.
Delivering campaigns
When leads are being nurtured, it’s important to ensure messages are tailored to contain only the most relevant information at a given time. Automation can select the right recipients and construct the ideal email, and it can analyse the performance of those communications. That analysis can facilitate positive adjustments to increase conversion rates.
Social media management
Automation can help you schedule social media posts ahead of time. With social media automation, you also get an analysis of the performance of every post, providing more data by pulling statistics from different social media platforms. These insights can give marketers a greater understanding of their audience in order to optimise future posts and campaigns.
What are the limitations of automation in marketing?
The areas where automation cannot be implemented are usually areas where you wouldn’t want it to be. Things like design, creative writing, art and the formulation of marketing strategy are all still left in the hands of humans. They require creative processes and critical thinking that AI cannot do.
In the past, these tasks often fell to the backburner because more repetitive, tedious tasks were getting in the way. Automation helps by removing this problem so marketers can focus on the more important stuff.
How might digital marketing automation evolve in the future?
The future of automation is always fast approaching and aims to replace more processes with even more sophisticated technology. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are at the cutting edge of automation and can provide further assistance in data analysis to optimise campaigns. In the future, AI may be able to forecast certain trends and help create campaigns based on informed predictions, but it may be a while before this is perfected.
Automation is also becoming more prominent in customer service. Automated phone trees have been around for a while to process thousands of calls a day, and marketing automation can apply this to website in the form of chatbots that greet customers and direct them where they need to go.
Companies should be investing in automated marketing technology if they want to avoid being left behind.
The bottom line
Automation in digital marketing has grown into a crucial element of modern marketing in the digital world. It streamlines processes and helps leverage gathered data for more informed decision-making on strategy and campaigns.
Automation is unlikely to fully take over digital marketing in the foreseeable future, but everyone should be taking advantage of its tools as they arrive. Without them, you are missing out on a powerful resource for lead generation that your competitors are already using.
From automation to good old fashioned digital marketing, we can offer a wide range of digital marketing services from SEO, PPC, social media management and much more. So why not let us do the hard work for you! Get in touch with us and see how we can help you and your business.