Marketing is a landscape that’s constantly changing.
Owing to the development of new automation platforms, new software, and constantly evolving consumer behaviour, marketing also forces teams to look into innovations and improvements to give companies the competitive edge and build their brand.
Over the past few years, marketing automation has kept businesses afloat amidst these changing standards—an all-in-one solution that empowers businesses to adapt to the changing market and leverage new changes in the best way possible, with the goal of increasing ROI.
Today, automation has become one of the core necessities of modern businesses with 9 out of 10 marketers claiming they use more than one form of marketing automation software regularly.
To keep up with the changing landscape of B2B automation, it’s important to keep an eye out for the changes that are expected in this sphere.
As another year rolls on, let’s explore some of the biggest changes that are expected to dominate B2B marketing automation in 2022.
The growth of hyper-personalisation
Sending personalised messages to your audience keeps them engaged with your business. To reach your target audience and retain their interest, however, personalisation has to go beyond emails that start with a ‘Hey ’.
Enter, hyper-personalisation; the next stage of B2B marketing automation evolution.
In a hyper-personalised messaging strategy, companies move beyond using just the names, company names, or locations to cater to their buyers. Instead, companies rely on the behavioural data of their clients that are retrieved using the real-time interactions they have with your brand.
For example, when a user visits your services pages but leaves without any transaction, the real-time analytics provide insights into their recent activity enabling you to send a behaviour-based message or email that starts a conversation about your services.
Buyers constantly expect offers that are tailored to their specific needs. This is why hyper-personalised messages have the potential to make your messages relevant and timely, enhance the buyer experience and increase your Net Promoter Scores.
Growth of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)
While personalisation is one of the easiest ways to tap into your target audience, only 17% of marketing teams are known to use AI and machine learning to assist in the process.
This is why machine learning and artificial intelligence are named as two of the biggest B2B marketing automation tools that can give you a competitive edge in the market.
In fact, the power of machine learning and marketing automation are predicted to become more sophisticated with time, empowering marketers to tap into the right audience, at the right time, and with the right content.
AI and machine learning can optimise marketing automation in B2B marketing processes by ensuring the following:
- Predicting customer behaviour
- Improving your lead nurturing process
- Forecasting the outcomes of marketing campaigns
- Providing information about the performance of products and services
By leveraging these insights, you can determine factors such as the best time and manner to communicate with your buyers, the optimal time for sending them a message, or the strategies that can guarantee the best results.
Business owners who harness AI and machine learning for their campaigns can increase customer satisfaction and retention rates, shorten the sales lifecycle, improve conversion rates and generate a higher ROI.
Increase of conversational marketing and chatbots
With AI becoming a major investment for companies in the coming years, the wide-spread adoption of chatbots is another trend in marketing automation within B2B that’s expected in 2022.
The easiest way to maintain communication with your clients is by encouraging conversion with them. This is why, in 2022, conversational marketing is getting more credibility in B2B marketing automation.
As Forbes put it, conversational communication that shows the buyers that we care about their needs and preferences is the future of direct marketing.
Natural Language Processing technologies that are rapidly featured in chatbot development, in particular, are an excellent trend to look forward to. The growing capacity of chatbots to understand human speech patterns let you maintain an engaging conversation with your clients and improve your overall customer care.
As a result, you can automate responses to queries that repeat like frequently asked questions while simultaneously humanising the brand to your audience.
Prioritising mobile-first automation
The rising usage of mobile devices makes mobile-friendly marketing still a relevant trick when communicating with your buyers.
Take a look at the following figures.
- Today, over 80% of people use mobile devices to surf the web and up to 70% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.
- 95.1% of active Facebook traffic and 57% of LinkedIn traffic come from mobile devices.
- 80% of Alexa’s top-ranked websites are mobile-friendly.
- By the end of 2021, 68% of companies had already included mobile-first strategies in their marketing plans.
If these numbers are anything to go by, it’s no surprise that the mobile-first strategy will be increasingly popular in 2022 when users of mobile devices will make up the majority of your website visitors.
What this means for marketers is that they need to adapt their efforts with a mobile user emphasis—with features like in-app ads, push notifications, and SMS targeting—to increase consumer engagement, retention, and experience.
In addition, a website with a responsive layout that is appealing on all screen sizes and resolutions enable you to keep in touch with your on-the-go clients and improve the accessibility of your services.
The convergence of content marketing and automation
The automation of optimised content is becoming a strategy adopted by many brands.
Adopting AI technology will refine how businesses forecast and predict consumer behaviour, enabling them to produce more accurate content that ensures engagement and interaction.
Marketing automation and content marketing together is a powerful combination that can help you increase the efficacy of your content, collect more leads, boost conversion rates, and increase your ROI.
Automation provides you with the tools you need to learn more about your clients.
By tapping into the specific insights about your buyers or segmented groups, you can identify information such as where they access content about your products and services or the types of search queries they’re creating.
Today, this joint effort has opened more opportunities for marketers. Particularly for content creators, these insights give opportunities to choose messaging angles, find subjects that are more appealing to the buyers and the kind of queries that need to be answered.
As we move forward in 2022, these marketing automation tools are expected to strengthen content strategies and add more value.
B2B marketing automation is only becoming more sophisticated and customer-centred in 2022
We live in the age of customer empowerment. This means businesses are constantly working to deliver the best customer experience and ensure that their buyers have an enhanced shopping experience with them.
This is why marketing automation in B2B is also evolving towards enhancing convenience, comfort and quality of their customer experience, in order to build their audience.
If you’re interested in learning more about marketing automation in B2B, feel free to schedule a free consultation with us today!