Most of us got into marketing automation because it makes our lives as marketers a lot easier.
Except sometimes it doesn’t. In fact, before it makes your life easier, marketing automation tends to make your life temporarily harder.
Before your lead generation efforts are automated, you need to set them up. It requires strategy, knowledge of your customers and great content to make this work.
And then when you’ve got it setup, there’s constant optimization, analysis and decision making to be done.
My vision on 2020 marketing automation is that needs to become easier. There’s a couple of sides to that:
- More automatic automation. I want my marketing automation to do more stuff automatically (isn’t that ironic?). I’m talking about stuff like sending the next piece of content (without me having to tell my MAP which one is best suited right now). Or figure out for me where my best leads are coming from. Obviously, machine learning has made an entry in marketing automation and will (hopefully) make this happen. But right now, in 2018, I’ve now seen it applied anywhere in a way that was close to what I just described.
- Less thinking. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll need critical, human thinking in marketing for the foreseeable future. But as my marketing automation platform gets smarter, I’d like it to tell me what’s working, where I should do next. I want to to sort through my data and help me make decisions.
- A lot more multi-channel. Yes, all the MAPs integrate with a ton of channels. But the core is still email. That’s because email still works (yes, it does). I continue to look forward to more easily integrating new ways of communication (again, with as little thinking as possible).
I’m a lazy, lazy marketer. Which is why I love marketing automation. 🙂
