Top 10 Marketing Automation Trends for 2024 to Boost Your ROI

Marketing is a numbers game: digital pros constantly experiment, refine, and iterate to boost key metrics, especially return on investment (ROI). 

Nowadays, boosting ROI is synonymous with using marketing automation to achieve better results, faster, and with fewer resources. Staying ahead of the latest marketing automation trends will enable you to get the most out of these paradigm-changing solutions so that you can deliver transformative marketing results for your clients. 

Read on for the top 10 marketing automation trends of 2024: whether you’re starting a new AI agency or ready to take your existing business to the next level, this blog is for you. 

1. Increased Use of Behavior Analytics

Whenever a prospect or customer interacts with a business online—for example, by navigating their website or engaging with a newsletter—data about their behavior is collected. Behavior analytics puts this valuable information to use to help businesses and marketers better understand customer preferences, leading to more personalized marketing efforts.

While this principle has been in use for years, marketing automation integrations turn up the effectiveness by compiling vast quantities of data from multiple sources and automatically applying it to improve ROI.

Here’s how this can look in action: Tracking a visitor’s journey on a website reveals which pages or products they’re most interested in, informing content and product recommendations. Then, data from email engagement is used to refine messaging and timing to increase open and click-through rates (CTRs). Follow-up automated emails provide dynamic content tailored precisely to that user’s preferences. 

This combined effect produces a hyper-targeted approach that automatically drives engagement, satisfaction, and sales. Once a purchase is made, purchasing history data is also incorporated into the marketing automation strategy to encourage repeat business.

2. Focus On Account-Based Marketing

Not all accounts are created equal: some might be of significantly greater value to your AI startup than others. Account-based marketing (ABM) takes this reality into account by enabling agencies to target specific, high-value accounts differently than their broad audience. Automation tools can be used to effectively identify and engage these accounts.

By using customer relationship management databases (CRMs) with AI-powered funnels, identifying these high-value accounts is straightforward. Account information and behavioral data like buying signals are used to rank leads, enabling your team (or your client) to see exactly where their efforts are most likely to be rewarded. 

Then, those high-value accounts can be given personalized attention, such as live meetings or personalized strategy proposals. 

Marketing automation trends extend to ABM accounts, too: Automated systems can be used to deploy personalized, multi-channel campaigns tailored to each key prospect. For example, email sequences, dynamic social media ads, and AI content marketing can all be set up to address the unique needs of key accounts.

The marketing automation ROI of ABM can be significant: these accounts deliver some of the greatest returns to marketing agencies, and thanks to automation, they can be targeted more effectively than ever before.

3. Reliance on AI and Machine Learning

AI has gone from an impressive novelty to an indispensable tool over the last couple of years, making this new tech an unignorable marketing automation trend.

There’s no shortage of ways to make money using AI by automating key marketing activities.  

Popular applications include:

• AI email marketing: Using AI to generate personalized email drip campaigns and run A/B tests
• AI content creation: Using AI to speed up copywriting and graphic generation
• AI campaign personalization: Personalized content recommendations, message delivery times, and more
• AI-powered sentiment analysis: Interpreting behavioral data to deliver more effective campaigns by gauging real-time audience sentiment
• AI predictive analytics: Using machine learning insights to predict future trends
• AI lead automation and scoring: Finding and scoring optimal leads using AI
• AI website building: Faster creation of client sites and landing pages

If you’re serious about building your own AI automation agency, this video is a must-watch:

4. Shift to First-Party Data

Data privacy regulations have become more stringent in recent years, and consumers are increasingly opting into more privacy protections.

What does this mean for digital marketers?

It makes first-party data—data collected directly from customers—more valuable than ever. Collecting and owning data without a third-party intermediary empowers businesses to deliver more targeted and personalized messaging effectively and to build stronger, long-term relationships with clients.

Tapping into this marketing automation best practice requires the use of lead generation tools like email subscriptions, surveys, or customer accounts. Using AI integration services to drive leads from various lead sources to lead capture forms where their contact information can be collected. Once they’re in your CRM, you don’t have to worry about Meta, Google, or another major ad platform interfering with your hard-earned customer data. 

5. Implementation of Mobile Marketing Automation  

Mobile usage continues to climb: American adults consumed a third of their media on mobile last year, double the previous years’ figures (EMarketer). This has important implications for marketing automation for small businesses. Digital-first campaigns are increasingly important since they enable businesses to go where their customers are—scrolling on their phones.

To capitalize on this increasingly mobile-first landscape, marketers are pivoting more of their budgets toward strategies like personalized app push notifications and SMS marketing. This can be a powerful application of AI for small business clients, thanks to impressive engagement and conversion rates. 

This feedback from a Statista May 2023 survey of American marketers about why they’re increasingly using SMS illustrates the value of this marketing automation trend: 

6. Increased Process Automation

Whatever your agency’s niche is, I can bet your clients share one thing in common: they would pay for more hours in the day. No matter how many new tools and trends emerge, time will always be limited, making it a perennially valuable resource. Press automation is one of the best ways to make money with AI because it essentially buys back time. 

Repetitive marketing tasks can take up a great deal of time, so any solution that provides automation in this area enables businesses to allocate more time to other areas of their operation. 

Key services in this area include:

• Lead automation: Help clients find, score, and manage leads automatically
• Automated social media posting: Stay active on multiple platforms without daily manual posting
• AI-powered ad campaign management: Run and optimize campaigns on autopilot
• AI consulting services: Help businesses better implement AI solutions into their operations

7. Adoption of Conversational AI

Conversational AI, including chatbots and virtual assistants, facilitates high-quality real-time customer interactions at scale. Without overburdening support teams, this marketing automation trend enables businesses to provide immediate responses to queries, handle FAQs, and provide personalized recommendations. The result? Enhanced customer service, increased efficiency, and improved user experiences—all at a lower cost.

Use cases for conversational AI are vast. For example, an ecommerce site might use chatbots to guide customers through the purchase process, offer product recommendations based on browsing history, and even handle returns or exchanges.

Customer service also has conversational AI applications, with chatbots resolving common issues that are only escalated to human agents for more complex cases. 

How can automation make your agency more efficient and productive? Download “Agency Marketing Through Automation” to find out.

8. Social Media Marketing Automation

Social media is a double-edged sword: it’s incredible for lead generation, brand-building, and community engagement, but it’s time- and resource-intensive for small businesses. Marketing automation tools solve this problem by putting many of the most time-consuming tasks on autopilot.

AI business ideas in this area include solutions for creating posts through generative AI, automated posting, and performance analysis that can be used to refine strategies over time. 

A related marketing automation trend is the use of AI for social listening and the monitoring of brand mentions. This gives your small business clients the power to act based on customer sentiment, be more responsive, and develop a top-notch reputation among their audience, all of which pay off through higher conversions and more loyal customers.

For example, Vendasta's Social Marketing tool allows users to plan, create, schedule, and publish content from one easy-to-use product, which will then automatically post to multiple sites. The tool uses AI to generate relevant posts, images, and content calendars.  You can leverage this tool yourself or rebrand and resell it to your clients—learn more here.

9. Omnichannel Orchestration 

Maximizing ROI requires thinking in terms of the customer journey rather than any single, isolated touchpoint. Omnichannel marketing recognizes this and prioritizes creating a consistent brand universe: a cohesive experience across all channels and devices. 

Automation tools give small businesses the ability to deliver rich omnichannel experiences that would have been too complex and expensive to orchestrate with past technologies. 

The key to success is integration. The more your client’s solutions can “talk” to each other by having multiple connected data sources, the better their various touch points can draw on real-time behaviors and preferences to deliver a personalized, cohesive experience from web to social to ads and beyond.

10. Funnel-Optimized Content Automation

We’ve just talked about the importance of the customer journey, but marketing channels aren’t the only relevant area of consideration. Funnel stage is just as important. Funnel-optimized content automation is based on the reality that new prospects just learning about a business have different content needs than educated prospects who are close to making a buying decision. 

By automatically tailoring content to match each stage of the marketing and sales funnel, prospects and clients receive messaging that is appropriately aligned with their requirements. This boosts ROI by speeding up their passage through the funnel, building trust, and helping them feel confident enough to convert.

Conclusion

Marketing automation trends in 2024 continue to show that AI, machine learning, and automation technologies are revolutionizing the way businesses engage with their customers to maximize ROI. 

From leveraging behavioral analytics and speeding up processes to implementing omnichannel strategies, these trends are empowering businesses to better connect with their dream clients and get more conversions. By adopting these solutions—and offering them to your clients— your agency can provide significant value and become the go-to partner for local businesses.