Freya Oxton-Grant
Marketing automation can be amazingly helpful and valuable for small to medium-sized businesses. Take a look at these statistics:
- Its reported that your sales productivity can increase by 15% using automation,
- Actual conversions and sales can rocket to up to 50%, and
- Your qualified leads pipeline can be boosted by as much as 451%
But what is the future of the technology? How will it be improving as marketing practices develop, and how will this assist construction businesses like yours?
Predictive Analytics
Artificial Intelligence is all the rage at the minute and has been for the past couple of years. It’s the sort of technology everyone thinks is amazing yet is so hard to implement and integrate into current products and services.
For marketing technology, AI proposes a future of machine learning and business tech that is sophisticated and self-regulating.
Anticipated product offerings for the future of marketing automation centre on the ideas of predictive analytics. This moves the analysing and iterating from the end of your marketing process to the beginning, improving the customer journey through predicting how customers will behave before they ever even click a button.
Using data mining, the tools would be able to understand your customer better then they even know themselves, incorporating psychology and behavioural economics into the marketing communications they are served.
With the huge amount of data available from digital marketing, the future of marketing automation will be one that measures the information in real time and optimises itself. Marketing automation will soon merge into an almost automated self-improvement marketing platform.
Chatbots
Chatbots are already a common element to many marketing automation platforms and they allow you to have a customer service rep on call 24/7 for your business. You can read more about how marketing automation can help you with your construction businesses’ customer service here.
Chatbots are really just another form of AI; the tool uses language processing algorithms to process and understand your customer’s queries.
The future of marketing automation will include more and more of this tool being integrated into businesses’ websites due to the massive ROI they provide. They can be customised to your business needs from a Q&A messaging service to a product recommender or data sheet provider.
They provide the content your customer needs just when they want it and improve the overall customer journey through their ability to be available any time and any device.
Customer Lifecycle Marketing
The concept of customer lifecycle marketing is that engaging with your customers shouldn’t stop at the sale. Marketing activities should continue throughout the lifecycle of the customer relationship with an aim to delight, and if possible, convert them into brand advocates.
This process will work towards a sales funnel which is constantly replenishing with referred customers from your business’s loyal base.
Marketing automation already has many tools that can help in this endeavour. Automating messaging over set time frames that will support and engage your customers is available through automation sequences and workflows.
In the future, marketing automation platforms are theorised to be able to anticipate what customers will want and need from their interactions with a business and be able to deliver before ever being asked.
Conclusion: Broader Adoption of Marketing Automation
With the advancement of marketing automation platforms and software, in the future we will see a much higher general use of this incredible technology.
At the minute, there is a major trend of interest in technology that enhances the work people do in marketing. It is already known that around 75% of marketing leaders have implemented some sort of marketing automation into their company.
Going further, the future seems to hold a growth in usage of AI and machine learning as well as more highly targeted marketing technology. The best platforms providing these tools will be the ones that integrate them into an easy to understand and implement tool.
For example, an integration with sales automation is one of the most important steps happening now. One of the biggest challenges companies are currently facing is actually being able to follow up of all the leads generated through marketing automation and lead gen strategies.
According to HubSpot’s report, less than half of marketers with well planned out lead management processes have sales teams capable of following up on at least 75% of leads.
Joining together the many mismatched tech stacks that businesses use is increasingly harder. That’s why businesses who invest in software providers that combine all these key automation tools as well as innovate and incorporate trends for the future, are the companies that will see growth.
Companies who fail to implement marketing automation will unquestionably struggle keeping up with the competition. Automation handles what no one else has time for, it's like getting an extra employee without needing an extra desk!
Want to learn more about marketing automation for your building products or construction business? Read our BEGINNER'S GUIDE to Marketing Automation for Construction Companies.
About Insynth
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing agency based in Shifnal in the West Midlands.
They use the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to support building product companies to grow their business by proactively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.