From analytics and CRM to emails and social media, automation has seeped into virtually every step of the marketing process.

Despite how far it’s come, automated marketing will continue to scale, with global spending on marketing automation software slated to grow to reach $25 billion, a sevenfold jump from where it stands now at $3.6 billion.

To produce tangible results in the increasingly automated landscape, marketers must learn to embrace automation by cashing in on the latest trends.

Before taking a deep dive into some of the top-of-mind trends that are gearing to dominate the industry this year, let’s quickly brush over how automation became the hub of modern-day marketing teams.

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Why Marketing Automation Matters

The numbers pretty much speak for themselves.

Sixty-three percent of companies that have adopted marketing automation report higher ROI than their competitors, and nearly nine out of ten industry leaders leverage programmatic advertising strategies to scale campaigns and tap into new audiences.

What is it about automation that lets brands take their marketing efforts to new heights?

In short, automating workflows frees up time for marketers to work on high-impact initiatives that move the needle instead of wasting their time and energy on repetitive manual tasks. With the complexity of managing channels and touchpoints growing by the day, automation yields the much-needed bandwidth for marketing teams to transition from cost to profit centers.

Rising Trends in 2022

Automation has the capacity to elevate marketing teams to rockstar status. But simply throwing automation into the mix isn’t enough. To realize its full potential, marketers must stay ahead of the following trends driving the future.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Not too long ago, AI was smiled away as a far-fetched novelty. Never in their wildest dreams had marketers imagined the application of AI would stretch beyond chatbots and push notifications to power more sophisticated forms of marketing such as copywriting, PPC ads, and website development.

As its scope continues to expand across different domains, AI will play a critical part in the planning, execution, and success of future campaigns.

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• All-in-One Platforms

A marketer’s toolbox is often cluttered with different software that doesn’t speak the same language. Bringing these disparate systems together, however, is no cakewalk.

Designed specifically to get around the confines of interoperability, an all-in-one platform can eliminate the need for multiple tools by serving as an open-standard solution to help streamline each link in the marketing chain.

• Conditional Logic

Humans make choices based on information and intuition. The same, however, cannot be said about automation. It has to be grounded in conditional logic to function with what can be called informed intuition.

Here’s an example. You’re emailing cold prospects to have them book a demo. Some might oblige on the first go, but many won’t. In a perfect world, automation would chime in and send out targeted follow-ups to engage unresponsive prospects. With conditional logic in place, automated systems will do precisely that.

• Data Aggregation

Collecting and sifting through mountains of complex data by hand is uncalled for when the technology to automate such tasks is readily available. Besides, there’s no viable excuse to let error-prone, time-consuming manual processes dictate the terms of how you aggregate and manage data.

So, do your campaigns a favor and start leveraging a single source of truth that pulls together and unifies metrics across channels under a common format.

• Multichannel Marketing

Having the right message delivered to the right person on the right channel at the right time has long been the holy grail of marketing success. But the ever-growing number of touchpoints is complicating the task of harnessing a consistent, personalized customer experience.

That’s precisely why investing in multichannel automation has become a must. Without the 360-degree view of cross-channel metrics automation tools provide, marketers are doomed to be left in the dust under a stack of dataflows and siloed systems.

Set these trends in motion

There are no limits to the wonders of marketing automation. And at this point in our collective technology landscape, every brand should be able to enjoy the fruits automation provides. It’ll be up to how well you act on the latest trends to improve your campaign performance and bottom lines.