Automation is the future of technology, and Marketing is no longer just a human skill. Clearly, Marketing Automation Software is slowly taking over this bastion as well, and the market for this product is expected to reach USD $5.5 Billion by 2019. Have you carved out your share of the pie yet?

A decade ago, the only automation that a marketing expert knew was email blasts- the internet was cutting edge technology. Today, the tasks have been taken over by applications that help increase efficiency and decrease time to market of range of products by intelligent apps that do repetitive, routine tasks.

But what does the market feel about this new addition? And what does the future look like?

According to a Markets and Markets forecast, the global market for marketing automation has grown by 8.55% YoY since 2014, with the North American region taking the biggest market share. The report goes on to give some thought provoking statistics. According to SiriusDecisions “B-to-B Marketing Automation Study” (2014), there is an almost 11 times increase in the number of B2B organisations using marketing automation over the last 5 years. Among  the successful adopters over the last two years, two thirds are planning on increasing this investment over the next few years, since they see business benefits in it. The clear business benefits are customer acquisition (over 69%) and customer retention (more than half)!

The biggest advantage of marketing automation is that it eliminates repetitive tasks, and frees up expensive manpower to focus on more strategic activities. It also allows the flexibility to target the most relevant customer, provide them with personalised service and hence improve the overall customer experience. Using automated solutions also ensures better lead management (a 77% increase according to this survey) and multichannel marketing.

But there is a reason why it is just fitting so well with the enterprise IT strategy today. An automated marketing system allows integration with the most critical process in strategic decision making today- analytics and reporting. Says Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Trends Survey” (2016), more than half of the enterprise that deploy marketing automation tools look for their ability to provide market data analytics, crunching for best leads, managing focused campaigns and nurturing specific leads. This is not only about focused marketing with a higher success rate but also cost saving.

The other advantage it brings to the market strategy is the ability to integrate with CRM tools- so you not only know who you are targeting, but also their feedback and the collaboration that follows – on a single platform.

While there is no doubt to the superiority of marketing automation solutions over manual marketing activities, there are a few challenges that need to be met before adequate adoption happens.  The biggest hurdle is, ironically, the fear of complexity in integrations, which inhibits the efficiency of the whole sales and marketing funnel. Secondly, most enterprises seem satisfied by their limited marketing activities, and budgets for a new automation are also hard to come by, as well as hard to justify.

And the biggest reason is- in order for automation to work perfectly, the enterprise needs mature marketing practices- processes and completely clear roadmaps. That is lacking in most organisations, and this particular business activity is more of a knee jerk reaction than a concerted, planned activity.   This is a challenge enterprises need to meet, in order that best benefits can be derived from these tools.

Solutions of choice

Inevitably, over the next few years, platforms that are scalable, agile, analytical and highly responsive will dominate the marketing automation scene.  Technologies that work today are actually coming together to provide a solution that meets these demands. So what will the marketing automation platforms of 2019 look like?

They will be:

• Predictive and intuitive

Slimmer, faster and highly integration friendly, tomorrow’s platforms will be able to work with almost any business process. Manual effort on  marketing activities are actually on the decline and software that grows with your business, understands its markets and based on learning capabilities, knows how to position your brand- is the future of marketing automation.

Practical machine learning is fast developing to be able to decipher signals and deliver relevant recommendations, helping create validated strategies. The software is evolving rapidly, and today there are products from brands like Lytics and Infer, that are capable of offering effective predictive channels to meet marketing challenges like higher lead nurturing and sharper campaigns with better response numbers.

• Highly responsive

The ability to respond to customer and market feedback depends entirely on the integrated nature of an organisation.  Teams that work in silos rarely have the ability to be agile or responsive to market requirements. Lacking a completely visible sales cycle, they end up with a sorry state of CRM and toothless marketing campaigns. The marketing automations of tomorrow will remedy this situation. Already brands like KnowledgeTree are creating solutions that offer complete visibility across all sales and marketing channels. With intelligence that utilises this visibility, the new age solutions will have the ability to provide full recommendations – across both sales and marketing – and linking the two to best market performance. Marketing activities on a platform optimised in this manner will have the ability to assist strategic decisions to create, nurture and drive entire marketing campaigns with more intuition than a human team!

• Open

Open platforms are, across the board, fast being adopted. For marketing automation, the advantage of open platforms will be about the ability to build intelligent and insightful strategies and tools that are focused on the market. It will delve deep into the untapped areas of, for instance, your marketing database, unearth ignored areas and offer recommendations for re- nurturing them, simply because they are on an Open platform where intelligent thinking is not limited by proprietary boundaries. Autopilot is one of the best names in this business.

Today, SaaS and other CRM tools have given us marketing technology solutions, but there do not seem to be many automation names that can claim great success in the market.  That may be because the API tools available are still not matured sufficiently, but that is set to change soon. This transformation needs to be fast, because otherwise we are missing out on the advantage of Open platforms- that are privy to customer information on a much more basic level- and this data could be priceless.

So, we can safely hope that the marketing automation software over the next two years or so will be smarter, more relevant and will make human intervention all but redundant. In many cases, the increasingly powerful predictive insights that these platforms will allow will change the entire strategy on marketing. With the happy collaboration between marketing and CRM, the circle of efficient and effective marketing practices will be complete!

Some of the names in the solutions the market offers currently are Oracle (Eloqua), IBM (Unica), Adobe’s (Campaign) and Marketo.

Needless to say, they can be integrated to the CRM tools, so most of them are effective and efficient. But there are spots they fail on. At least two of these are not very encouraging in terms of market response or the support they provide to the marketing teams – IBM (Unica), Adobe’s (Campaign) are out. Marketo and Eloqua seem to be the market leaders in the corner. They each have their flaws, shortcomings and strengths. On the surface, Marketo has a cleaner UI, more features that provide better planning tools, and is also more affordable than Eloqua. But at the end of the day, the acceptability is really a subjective issue.

Whatever the brand or the tool, the fact that marketing is going to be largely automated over the next two years, gives a clear view of the strategies that will be in place- market responsive, clear, CRM collaborated and of course- result oriented. And of course,  far more efficient than human responsive will ever be.