What’s Next in Marketing Automation – Mapping 5 Key Trends of 2025
A new fiscal year brings a newfound sense of focus and optimism to organizations looking to deliver renewed customer value, incremental growth, and aspirational cross-functional efficiency. As marketers look at their own challenges around how to deliver more with less, it’s worth exploring the key marketing automation trends that can help provide some resilience to marketing leaders in the face of rapidly changing buyer environments. What we’re seeing:
1) The transformative role of AI in marketing automation
Artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize marketing and evolve functionality in marketing automation. AI enabled technology brings forth the promise of efficiency, creativity, personalization and automation to organizations and the hope of seamlessly elevating customer engagement levels. Automation and generative AI are enabling organizations to develop personalized content at scale to meet the demand for customized interactions, without the burden of manual work. In addition, AI copilot and agent capabilities will continue to evolve to help with predictive analytics, large scale data analysis, buying propensity, campaign production, and strategy creation.
Action to take: Invest in tools with AI-driven content creation, campaign production, and predictive data analysis. (We’re obvious fans of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.)
2) Delivering a seamless experience across all touchpoints with true omnichannel automation
Customers expect a seamless experience stitched across all touchpoints and marketers are beginning to gravitate from a multi-channel go-to-market effort to a true omnichannel approach. Advances in automation are enabling marketers to create a unified experience across the full customer lifecycle by integrating data, messaging, and experiences across in-store, email, social media, websites, mobile applications, e-commerce, and more.
Action to take: As marketers look to succeed around omnichannel engagement efforts, focus on integrating data from all customer touchpoints and channels, including IoT and mobile. The right solution should provide a full view of the customer that enables marketers to create better levels of personalization, real-time triggering, and communications consistency.
3) Next level personalization to enhance signature moments and customer experiences
Marketing automation’s personalization capabilities will continue to improve, moving beyond simple segmentation marketing. Personalization will quickly extend to individualized experiences that incorporate factors like deeper customer insights, interests, preferences, needs, location, shopping habits, to deliver dynamic offerings and content at scale.
Action to take: Determine where automation can be used within the customer buying cycle—whether it’s real-time segmentation, tailored messaging, behavior can create triggers and machine learning can be leveraged to recommend products for prospective buyers.
Next, review your marketing stack. Is there an opportunity to consolidate solutions to achieve optimal automation without sacrificing data integrity? If yes, it may be time to explore.
4) Leveraging predictive analytics as cornerstone of data-driven forecasting and decision-making
Advancements in artificial intelligence are giving marketers better insights into customer intent, propensity to buy, and churn risk. These predictive analytic views give marketers the transparency needed to stay ahead of customers and provide more confidence in forecasting results around campaign planning and activation.
Action to take: Look for a solution that allows you to forecast customer trends, adjust segments in real-time, and identify patterns to provide insights and recommendations on campaigns, product fit, and future strategies. This will help optimize targeting, engagement, and overall conversion.
5) Empowering teams with future-ready skills and immersive training
As marketing automation technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, organizations will need to address the inevitable skills gap that exists around areas like AI utilization, data analysis, and digital strategy. Organizations will continue to be challenged to offset technology investments with business impact which will require teams and resources to continue to upskill at the speed of change.
Action to take: Advancing technology proficiency and data literacy are a necessity for marketers to execute insights-driven campaigns within rapidly evolving marketing automation systems. Organizations will be challenged to continue to invest in training programs or work with partners like Coffee + Dunn to build expertise on evolving features, functionality, and new releases on applications like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.