Top 10 Marketing Automation Strategies for 2024

Digital marketing can be complicated. It's an ever-evolving industry that requires professionals to be dynamic and adaptive. Here’s why.

As digitalization caught up to consumers, their interactions with brands also changed. Consumers are more careful, selective, and aware. Their needs, preferences, habits, and lifestyles are constantly changing.  growth strategies for business

Keeping up with all of that, while utilizing all the marketing mediums, and staying ahead of your competitors isn’t a walk in the park.

While it can be overwhelming, with the right growth strategies in marketing you can get the desired results and even surpass your marketing goals. That’s what we are here to discuss today.
This article will share the top ten growth strategies for business in 2024. So, let’s get started.

What’s different about marketing automation strategies in 2024?

Each year, the best and brightest of the industry share their expert predictions with the rest of the world about what’s around the corner. Like clockwork, every January, there’s a new list of must-haves and must-dos for marketers and business owners, and this January is nothing different.

However, when you look deep into it, it makes more sense. Small, incremental changes take place every day and eventually become a trend. As marketers, we must stay updated with the growth strategies for business and do our best to keep up with the changes.

But don’t worry, change isn’t always a bad thing.

So, what’s new about 2024? Well, the good news is, that most of the trends from 2023 remain in store for 2024. What really changes this year is the technological landscape of the market. As automation takes the front seat, let’s talk about some of the major growth strategies in marketing.

"Marketing automation assets are lucrative tools in the digital space that can automate your workflow."

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Top 10 marketing automation strategies for 2024

There is a special term for technology that focuses on streamlining and enhancing marketing strategies: martech. Martech is a rapidly growing sector and at the forefront of it is marketing automation.

So, what is marketing automation strategies? Marketing automation is the kind of technology that handles certain repetitive and routine marketing tasks for businesses. These tools are valuable assets to businesses. A recent survey shows that up to 76% of companies use marketing automation strategies.

But it is important to understand that just having the right tools won’t cut it. The way you use those tools must change with the needs of the market, and that’s what we are about to discuss. Let’s discuss the top ten trends to watch out for this year.

Data Transfers

What is Data Transfer?

Data transfer is the process of secure exchange of large files between two or more systems within or outside an organization.

Within an organization, data transfer is used to evaluate customer base and campaign success so you can continue to optimize your marketing strategies. Data transfer is also used to exchange data securely among business partners, suppliers, agencies, etc.

To use this data effectively, a marketer has to transfer it between tools different tools. This consumes valuable time and effort and increases the chances of human error when done manually. Thus, it's becoming increasingly popular to automate data transfer processes.

What are the benefits of Data Transfer?

• Operational Efficiency: Automated data transfer significantly reduces the effort and labor required in manual data entry. This frees up your marketing team to focus on strategy and creativity. It enhances the pace at which insights are generated, processed, and leveraged in marketing processes.

• Real-time Insights: Automating data transfer enables real-time data analysis providing marketers, and decision-makers with real-time insights essential for agile responses to market trends and consumer behaviors, capitalizing on opportunities, and risk mitigation.

• Improved Data Governance: Data transfer automation establishes a framework for consistent data processing, handling, compliance with data regulations, and enhancing data security.

• Enhanced Customer Experiences: Customer experience is at the top of every growth strategy. The idea is to serve them with the best in terms of quality, service, and experience. With advanced data transfer, you can automate the segmentation and analysis of customer data, enabling personalized inbound marketing solutions.

Challenges Of Data Transfer

• Skill gap and expertise: Implementing and managing data automation may require additional skills that your present team may lack.

• Cost implications: Implementing automation tools for data transfer may be expensive for small businesses.

• Data privacy concerns: Automated data transfer and processing often raise concerns about data privacy and misuse.

Full-funnel Omnichannel Marketing

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

As of 2023, there are 2.64 billion online buyers in the world. Which means 33% of the global population, shop online.

Now, here is the funny thing. When I say online, it can mean a wide range of platforms. It can be a search engine, an online ad, your social media handle, and more. 67% of all customers start shopping on one device and finish on another.

On the one hand, this diversification creates endless opportunities for marketers. However, on the other hand, it is an incredible challenge to provide your consumers with a unified experience.  

That’s why full-funnel omnichannel marketing automation is one of the top trends even in 2024. With omnichannel marketing, you can create a seamless experience for all your customers throughout all marketing channels.

Top 3 Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

• Cross-channel Insights: Data is a marketer's best friend, especially when it's centralized in one location. With omnichannel marketing data from all your marketing channels is considered which helps keep your marketing initiatives unified.  

• Enhanced Customer Retention: When you assist your customers throughout their buyer journey, and address their needs effectively, they develop a sense of reliability and trust, increasing their chances of becoming returning customers.

• Customer Self-service: Customer self-service is a major part of omnichannel marketing. A large section of consumers prefers using self-service instead of speaking to a company representative. A digital assistant or chatbot can keep communication open with the customer and allow for a chance to receive feedback.

Challenges of Omnichannel Marketing

• Delivering Personalization: no matter how hard you try, and how adapt automation tools become, it is not as intuitive as the human brain. Omnichannel marketing may border on generic content if not monitored and updated on time.

• Data Privacy Concerns: Marketing automation strategies requires consistent data tracking and storing. It can be challenging to ensure complete data privacy and segmentation.

"Businesses need to build trust among their customers, and selling quality products is not enough."

CONTENT MARKETING

Automated Social Media Marketing

What is Automated Social Media Marketing?

Another trend from 2023 that is going strong even in 2024 is automated social media marketing. With the constant increase in the number of social media users, this trend is only expected to last. 
Social media platforms are one of the major marketing channels where you can engage your leads and nurture them into customers. However, successful social media marketing takes a lot more than intent, it needs consistency.

HubSpot social marketing tools can help you post content regularly, create a buffer, and automate sharing. Create posts in advance and schedule them so you don’t miss out on daily engagement and updates.

Benefits Of Automated Social Media Marketing

• Limited Dependency on Teams: Social media marketing dwells a lot on the availability of your marketing team, or social media managers if you are not using automation tools. With automation tools you no longer need them to post content every day. Your content will be published on time even when your team is unavailable.

• Save a lot of Time: Posting on different social media channels including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, etc. is time-consuming when done manually. But with social media marketing automation, all it takes is proper scheduling.

• Manage Marketing Campaigns Easily: Social media marketing automation strategies is extremely effective if you run multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously. It is easier to track the progress of each campaign and update them accordingly.

• Maintain an Online Presence: In today’s marketing scenario, online presence is critical and mandatory for a brand’s success. With HubSpot social marketing tools solve the challenge of scheduling posts across all social media platforms for specific times and make it easier to carry out this task more efficiently.

Major Challenges Of Automated Social Media Marketing

• Lack of Flexibility: Automation makes it difficult to modify and implement flexible market strategies.

• Non-immediate ROI: Automation costs can only be justified once you see the results. Nearly 31% of marketers fail to attribute ROI to automation.

Generative AI

What is Generative AI?

It must not be a surprise that generative AI has made its way to the top ten growth strategies in marketing. It is one of the most popular martech trends of 2024.

Generative AI stands for artificial intelligence technology that is capable of generating text, images, videos, or other data using generative models. They usually respond to prompts and learn from the patterns and structure of their input training data.

You must be familiar with tools like ChatGPT, and DALL-E. Although marketers and content creators were skeptical about their usability, more, and more people are starting to find it beneficial.

You can create blog wireframes, content calendars, email subject lines, and more. It can also generate images for ads and banners.

Benefits Of Automated Social Media Marketing

• Personalization: The best thing about generative AI is that it can learn from user actions. They can read through their searches and evaluate their past interactions to provide personalized data. This can be weaponized to improve your inbound marketing solutions.

• Time and Cost-saving: Generative AI can automate several marketing activities that are usually time-consuming. It can free up your team to do more strategic work and let them focus on business growth and ROI.

• Customizations: Companies and businesses train AI models on their proprietary data. It enables your team to receive customized solutions based on your needs, preferences, industry, etc.

Challenges Of Automated Social Media Marketing

• Data Privacy and Security: Generative AI models consume and store a large amount of data to create accurate results, but handling sensitive data can often create privacy and security concerns among users.

• Contextual Understanding: It is common feedback from marketers, and users globally that GenAI systems struggle to understand context, more so when the topics are complex or nuanced.

• Legal and Regulatory Issues: If you are working in an industry with strict data privacy guidelines, you must protect intellectual property and ensure responsible AI use.

Personalized Content

What is Personalized Content?

We have already established that personalization is at the core of growth strategies for business. But you might ask how it falls under automation trends. Here’s how.

Customers want personalization, and it takes more than adding their names to email heads. They want more- targeted content that speaks to their specific needs, and preferences. By leveraging B2B and B2C marketing automation tools like, machine learning, and AI, you can get more information about your audience and use it to create automated customer profiles.

These profiles consist of data you gather from on-site behaviors, social listening, and more. Your marketing team can compile and leverage this data to create targeted content and deliver it strategically.

Top 3 Benefits Of Automated Social Media Marketing

• Improved Customer Experience: When you think about your customers, they think about you. By tailoring your marketing materials and services to their specific needs, you can engage them better and build loyalty over time.

• Higher Conversion Rates: Personalized interaction with a customer significantly increases their chances of conversion. When you serve your customers with offers and promotions that are relevant to them, they are more likely to take action.

• Stronger Customer Retention: Acquiring a new customer can be 5 to 7 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. By improving your customer experience through personalized content, you can increase customer retention and save more money.

Challenges of Automated Social Media Marketing

• Data Privacy Concerns: Collecting and using customer data can raise concerns about data privacy and security. Businesses must collect and use customer data ethically and responsibly.

• Technology and Infrastructure: You need proper technology and infrastructure to implement a personalized marketing strategy. It requires users to adopt new tools, and software to collect and process customer data.

"From automating recurring tasks and providing assistance to streamlining your customer service process and sales forecasting, HubSpot’s AI features are a class apart."

HUBSPOT AI TO AUTOMATICALLY FILL PROPERTIES

Chatbots

What are Chatbots?

Chatbots are one of the top B2C marketing automation trends of 2024. Chatbots are computer programs that simulate and process human conversation whether text or audio. It allows humans to interact with digital devices as if they were communicating with another human being.

But how can they improve your marketing strategy? Well, chatbots play a crucial role in enhancing customer experience and as a result your brand reputation. When done manually, answering questions and providing solutions takes a lot of manpower and time.

With chatbots, you can take care of the simpler queries and have interactions with your leads, and customers without even lifting a finger.

Benefits

• Saves Time and Effort: With chatbots, you can solve two problems at the same time. On the one hand, you can resolve your customers’ queries in minutes, and on the other hand, you don’t have to answer individual questions through emails, social media messaging, or through a website.

• Boosts Engagement: Since your potential customers don’t have to go around your website looking for the answers, their overall experience will improve leading them to take action. Having a chatbot also supports self-service which is another rising trend among retail customers.

• Round-the-clock Customer Service: Businesses have traveled beyond borders and time zones, thanks to digitalization. This means, your potential customers and leads can be looking for solutions when you and your team are asleep. With a chatbot at work, you can provide customer service 24/7.

Challenges

• Lack of Human Touch: Marketers often overlook the limitations of Chatbots. It's important to understand that it may not have the answers to all the questions or may sometimes fail to comprehend the query.

• Implementation Time: While this is not a challenge per se, it is better to remember that like any other improvement, Chatbot implementation is time-consuming. Deployment, configuration, and training take time. You may have to wait a while before it's 100% operational.

• Need for Maintenance: Chatbots are just like AI, they need updated training data and timely maintenance. This might take time and effort.

Predictive AI

What is Predictive AI?

So, we have already discussed generative AI, which helps you create content including text and images. However, there are other AI models that are available in the market. When talking about growth strategies for business, predictive AI plays a big role and is one of the biggest automated trends of 2024.

Now, what is predictive AI? Predictive AI is a machine-learning technique that allows these models to analyze historical and present data to predict future trends, behaviors, etc. These models process your marketing data to identify patterns in customer interactions to make precise predictions.

Predictive AI can pick up on things that you might not. You can leverage it to optimize your marketing strategy months ahead.

Benefits

• Predict Campaign Responses: With the help of predictive AI, you can optimize your marketing campaigns by making the most of AI-driven predictions on the latest trends and anticipating campaign responses.

• Optimize Marketing Budget: You can effectively leverage predictive AI to reallocate your budget, and resources based on the forecasts. Additionally, you can integrate data from multiple sources to create a streamlined view of customer interactions across channels.

• Informed Decision Making: Predictive AI can predict potential outcomes whether it is of a certain campaign, a variation of content, or the last interaction of a lead on your website. Thus, you can always use the information to make informed decisions. It also provides you with a competitive advantage.

• Risk Mitigation: You can leverage predictive AI to conduct thorough risk assessments. It will provide you with real-time alerts that enable you to take quick risk-adjusted actions.

Challenges

• Privacy and security: Predictive AI depends on personal data which may raise concerns among end users regarding data sensitivity and potential misuse of information.

• Deployment and integration: Integrating predictive AI into your existing workflows and systems can be challenging. It’s better to hire professional HubSpot services for a seamless deployment.

Email Drip Campaigns

What are Email Drip Campaigns?

Email marketing has been one of the best marketing strategies for a long time now. The number of email users globally is about 4.5 billion as of 2024, and it is only expected to increase. But we are not talking about sending emails here, we are talking about automating the whole process.

So, what do automated email drip campaigns mean? An automated email drip campaign refers to a series of pre-written emails, sent to subscribers or leads automatically based on a trigger or at a particular time.

With HubSpot’s Marketing Hub onboarding, you can automate your email drip campaign and reach out to your potential customers, leads, and existing customers based on triggers. All you have to do is set up specific emails that go out to users when they take a specific action, or at a particular time.

Benefits

• Time-saving: There is no doubt that automation saves time. This is applicable to email drip campaigns as well. Instead of sending an email whenever someone subscribes to your newsletter or fills out a form, you can expect your CRM to take care of it.

• Increased Engagement: With automated emails, you can keep your audience engaged at every step of their customer journey. You can set triggers based on your preferences and marketing strategy and the right message will find its way to your leads, consumers, and followers respectively.

• Improved Lead Nurturing: Sending personalized emails at various touch points in their journey is a clever and tested way to move leads ahead along the flywheel. Most audiences open and read emails sent to them by brands that they have searched, and explored.

Challenges

• Deliverability: Automated emails often find themselves in spam folders.

• Engagement Rates: Holding customer interest can be difficult. You have to make your content catchy and relatable.

Review Management

What is Review Management?

Review management is the process of getting customer feedback on your product or services. While this practice has been around for some time, in 2024 we are looking at automatic reminders that are sent to customers encouraging them to leave feedback.

Think of it like this, your customer is in the awareness phase of the marketing funnel. You need them to move further down the marketing and sales funnel to reach the consideration phase, once they are there, it's all about their trust. Hearing good words about your company from other customers makes it easier for them to trust your brand.

Potential buyers or consumers always look at customer reviews to determine how well your business has served others. Thus, it is crucial to gather as many positive reviews for your company as possible.

Benefits

• Increased Volume and Consistency: Automated tools can send review requests at scheduled times, increasing the chances of getting a response. These tools also ensure that every customer in the contact list receives a reminder and reduce the number of missing reviews.

• Time and Resource Efficiency: Collecting your reviews manually can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. With automation, you can send out several emails simultaneously in the blink of an eye.

Challenges

• Customer Perception: Customers can perceive automated emails as spam or intrusive, especially if not timed right or sent too frequently.

• Quality of Reviews: Automated systems may prompt customers to leave generic or less thoughtful reviews.

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Data Reporting

What is CRM Data Reporting?

Again, you might say that using CRM for reporting is not a new trend. However, it is one of the best practices in marketing automation strategies. With HubSpot’s marketing hub onboarding, you can leverage the real power of CRM and get enhanced reporting.

You can then use these reports to gain audience insights and refine your targeting. CRM data reporting also contributes to HubSpot social marketing. It can generate reports based on audience activity on different social platforms which helps the marketing team to optimize the content strategy accordingly.

Benefits of CRM Data Reporting

• Improved Decision-making: With CRM data reporting, you can get comprehensive insights into customer behavior and common trends, enabling you to make informed decisions. You can access up-to-date information and respond promptly to enhance your marketing strategy or do a little damage control.

• Enhanced Customer Understanding: A CRM consolidates data from various touchpoints, giving you a 360-degree view of your audience, their interaction with your brand, and their perception of it.

• Optimized Marketing Efforts: It simplifies the tracking of your marketing efforts. Measure the success of marketing campaigns to adjust and improve it for better ROI. It also contributes to targeted marketing by identifying the most responsive customer segments and channels.

Challenges of CRM Data Reporting

• Data Integrity: Ensuring the data entered into the CRM is accurate, complete, and up-to-date can be challenging. Inadequate data quality can lead to incorrect insights and decisions.

• Duplicate Records: Duplicate data entries can skew reports and lead to misleading results.
  

Conclusion

To sum up, if you want to utilize your marketing automation in 2024, you must take advantage of the above-mentioned trends. By using these trends, you will see the best outcomes of your inbound marketing solutions. Are you feeling overwhelmed with marketing automation strategies? MarkeStac has your back. Contact us for best-in-the-class HubSpot services.