Market automation, especially when it comes to marketing, is a booming business with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. The IT industry should grow by leaps and bounds along with this move toward automation since most of that will be done by the IT world.
In just four years the market automation growth — run by the IT industry — has gone from a $500 million business to a $5.5 billion industry. Marketing automation technology is the key for IT industry growth and will be the driving force in this new way of doing business.
Marketing products over the Internet have created a new world. The downside of that is there are a lot of mundane tasks that must be performed that take valuable time that could be used better elsewhere. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can take care of some of these tasks. With this technology, marketers can find the right customers more easily, and more easily market to them.
More automation means there are fewer physical things to do, and some might fear jobs could be lost. While some tasks may no longer be needed, the benefit here is that people will have more time to be creative. The data produced will need analysis, and there will be a need for people to be able to manage that data. This could help marketers spend more time developing market strategies as they learn more about their potential customers.
Business Development
A third way this surge in marketing automation growth will change the way business is done is that it will free up people to dedicate more time to being creative. Marketers will be able to spend more time involved in creative business thought. There will be mountains of data, and with marketing automation technology, sifting through it and making sense of it will become easy. Marketers will be able to use that data better to reach the right customers, making their campaigns more effective.
Marketing automation can also cause a change in the philosophy of sales. For years there was a one size fits all mentality. You try to convince the consumer to buy your product. That is the essence of sales and marketing. With IT industry growth, there could be a change to a personalized system or a trigger system. If a customer clicks on a certain product or downloads an e-book, the system would automatically send out a specific email as an example. The goal would be to align the sales or marketing to each customer on an individual basis. With automation, marketers could approach 100 customers in 100 different ways by using technology.
Customer Experience
The marketing automation will allow marketers to get aligned with the customer’s experience. Customers are also smarter and use technology in many ways. Their expectations have increased, and this type of marketing will allow those expectations to be met. Customers now expect brands or companies to know them, and to know what their needs really are. Instead of trying to convince the customer they need a product, the smart marketer will be able to find out what the customer needs and offer to meet that need.
Much of the customer experience is already handled by automation. Some have estimated that by the end of 2020, almost 90 percent of computer sales will be done without customers having any human contact at all. This makes the system more efficient, and customers appreciate no-hassle buying when they can find what they want easily.
One challenge for the IT industry will be to develop user-friendly interfaces. Marketers will have to be constantly making user adaptation and learning more about the products they are selling. There will be a constant need to upgrade software to keep it current with all the data that is being gathered automatically. The technology will have to develop along with the marketing concepts. As IT industry growth continues there will be the need for the human touch just as there always has been.
Marketing will still be marketing, but it will need a more customer-centric approach to continue to get success in the 21st century.
