Matthew is a marketing expert focusing on the SEO & martech spaces. He has written over 500 marketing guides and video scripts for the WebFX YouTube channel. When he’s not striving to put out some fresh blog posts and articles, he’s usually fueling his Tolkien obsession or working on miscellaneous creative projects.
Marketing technology (or martech) changes practically every day, and sometimes it can feel hard to keep up. One of the biggest types of martech in recent years is marketing automation, which is a type of marketing technology that handles certain routine marketing tasks for you.
These types of tools are obviously a huge asset to businesses. But the way you use those tools changes over time. Each year brings new marketing automation trends that companies like yours will want to take advantage of. So, what are the latest martech trends going into 2024?
On this page, we’ll cover 10 trends to watch out for, including:
Keep reading to learn more. And if you want to stay on top of the latest marketing automation trends and tips, subscribe to Revenue Weekly!
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1. Data transfers
Data is a critical component of marketing. It allows you to evaluate your customer base and campaign success so you can continue to optimize.
But to use that data, you often have to transfer it between different tools. Not only does that consume valuable time and effort, but it also tends to introduce a lot of human error when done manually. That’s why it’s becoming more and more popular to do this with automation.
This isn’t a new trend by any means — it’s been happening for years. However, it’s still going strong in 2024, and only increasing as we head toward 2025. Each year, more marketers realize the value of letting an automation tool move data between platforms. Not only is this faster, but it introduces fewer errors.
2. Full-funnel omnichannel marketing
Between paid ads, social media, web content, and more, customers can interact with your brand across multiple channels. Many of them will also interact with your brand throughout multiple stages of the marketing funnel.
While this variety creates incredible opportunity for marketers to expand their reach, it also presents a challenge — no matter how many channels your customers use to engage with your brand, they still want a unified experience.
That’s why omnichannel marketing continues to be one of the biggest marketing automation trends for 2024. With omnichannel marketing, you create a seamless experience across multiple marketing channels, as well as across multiple stages of the funnel.
Of course, you can imagine how complex this process could become, which is why automation is a key factor to implement it successfully.
Expert insights from
Pete ConnorsDataTech Solutions Team Coach at WebFX
“We have seen some uptick in clients looking to have multiple touchpoints with prospective customers and existing customers across different channels. Really, it’s a full-funnel approach now from an automation perspective. This typically involves an automation strategy that begins at the very first touchpoint a prospective customer has with the client’s business.”
Technology like a CRM platform can help you keep track of your sales pipelines and automate customer interactions. Using these tools, you can build a successful set of marketing campaigns that span multiple channels and funnel stages.
3. Automated social media marketing
Automated social media marketing is another trend that’s been around for some time, but is only growing more popular as we head into 2024.
Social media usage is constantly growing — in 2022, there were 5 billion people on social media, which was up from 3.4 billion in 2019. As more people gain access to social media networks, this will only continue to increase.
Social media platforms are one of the most important places for you to engage leads and get them more familiar with your brand. If you want to keep your company top of mind, you need to post content often. With automated social media marketing, you can do that more easily.
Automated social media marketing allows you to create posts weeks in advance and schedule them to publish at a specific date and time. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer make it easy for you to schedule content for the month and see the full scope of your campaign.
When you automate your social media marketing process, you can save your company time and focus your energy on other important projects.
4. Generative AI
It should come as no surprise at all that generative AI is one of the most significant martech trends of 2024. Tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E have made enormous waves ever since their release in late 2022, and as time goes on, more and more companies are finding way to use them for marketing purposes.
Tools like ChatGPT can help you generate email subject lines, blog outlines, and more. Meanwhile, you can harness AI image generators to help create pictures for your ads and blog headers.
Of course, you’ll want to be careful not to rely too heavily on AI. These tools are new enough that using them is still largely uncharted territory, and if we know one thing, it’s that they aren’t capable of replacing humans.
So, while you should take advantage of AI as a helpful tool, don’t try to treat it like a replacement for human workers.
5. Personalized content
Another of the most essential marketing automation trends for 2024 is customized content. It’s not enough to add someone’s name to an email to personalize their experience. Users want more, and the future of marketing automation centers on personalized content.
Personalized content allows you to focus on your audience’s specific behaviors and product preferences. With machine learning and AI, you can get to know your audience and compile helpful information. You can then use that info to create automated customer profiles.
These profiles contain data you gather from social listening, on-site behaviors, and more. You can compile that data to discover your audience’s preferences and buying habits. Then, you can deliver personalized content that fits user interests.
This marketing technology trend allows you to deliver content based on users’ interests. You’ll provide content to them at the right time to help nudge them towards conversion. If you want to stay on top of the future of marketing automation, you need to produce personalized content that resonates with your audiences’ interests.
By the way — since Google is eliminating third-party cookies, this trend also finds businesses searching for new ways to gather information about users that can help with personalization.
6. Chatbots
If you haven’t started using chatbots, you’re missing out on one of the top marketing trends for 2024. Chatbots play a critical role in enhancing customer service and engagement. With chatbots, you can have interactions with your customers and answer their questions without lifting a finger.
Chatbots are an essential part of marketing automation in 2024 because they help save your business time. Instead of having to find time to answer every question you get on your website or social media profiles, you can use bots to answer simple questions.
Take a moment to think of questions that you get multiple times a day. Now imagine having a tool that can handle those questions for you, freeing up your time to answer more complicated and complex problems. With chatbots, you can make that situation a reality.
In 2024, chatbots will play an integral role in helping your business boost engagement. You’ll be able to better help your customers and build stronger relationships with them.
7. Predictive AI
We’ve already talked about generative AI, which helps you create content like text and images. But there are other types of AI out there, too, and one of them — predictive AI — is among the biggest automated marketing trends of 2024.
Predictive AI analyzes your marketing data and, as the name suggests, predicts what you can expect to happen in the future. By identifying patterns in previous years and quarters, it can give you estimates of what might happen in future ones. Because it can pick up on things you might not, it’s more effective than trying to make predictions manually, and much faster as well.
With predictive AI tools, you can more accurately prepare your marketing for the months and years that lie ahead.
8. Email drip campaigns
Email marketing has long been one of the best marketing strategies for reaching your target audience. But trying to handle your email campaigns manually can be exhausting — not only do you have to send out each individual email yourself, but you also must figure out when to send out those emails.
Thankfully, marketing automation can take a load off your shoulders in that department. In fact, marketing email automation continues to be a leading marketing technology trend — specifically, email drip campaigns.
Expert insights from
Pete ConnorsDataTech Solutions Team Coach at WebFX
“For more middle funnel sequences, we commonly see drip sequences used heavily to keep the client top-of-mind in the user’s mind.”
With an email drip campaign, you set up specific emails to go out to users when they take specific actions, or at specific times following those actions. Say someone subscribes to your email list. You might send out a welcome email immediately, followed by another email a few days or weeks later.
You can achieve all that through automation.
9. Review management
Reviews are a pretty big element in marketing. When your audience sees positive reviews from your existing customers, they’ll be much, much quicker to trust your business.
Of course, the trick is getting those reviews. Often, people will only leave reviews if you directly encourage them to. But it can be a hassle reaching out to each individual customer about that, which is why one big automated marketing trend in 2024 is automated review management.
Expert insights from
Pete ConnorsDataTech Solutions Team Coach at WebFX
“Even post-sale, automation plays an important part. We can again continue drip campaigns — or, better yet, utilize a tool such as ReviewAccelerationFX — to garner more positive reviews for our business. Once a client is updated to something such as a “Closed Won” or “Customer” status in our CRM, that data is reflected in our marketing automations and a message is sent to the client prompting them to leave us an online review.”
Automating requests for reviews makes it go much more quickly and smoothly, sparing you the time to work on other things.
10. CRM data reporting
We’ve mentioned CRMs a few times already on this page with strategies like email marketing. But one of the best ways to use a CRM is generating reports based on the data you gather about your customers. You can then use those reports to help you refine your audience targeting.
The key part of this, though, is that you don’t have to generate those reports manually. Many CRMs will do it for you, which is why a key marketing technology trend for 2024 is to generate those reports and implement them into marketing campaigns.
Expert insights from
Pete ConnorsDataTech Solutions Team Coach at WebFX
“In the past year or so, we’ve definitely seen more interest in clients integrating CRM data into their marketing strategies and reporting. This helps tie metrics such as revenue earned or the number of qualified leads captured back to each marketing channel to help you see more accurate ROI and have a better understanding of which marketing strategies are actually leading to growth for your business.”
Measuring the metrics that affect your bottom line.
Are you interested in custom reporting that is specific to your unique business needs? Powered by MarketingCloudFX, WebFX creates custom reports based on the metrics that matter most to your company.
Put these marketing automation trends for 2024 to work!
If you’re looking to take your marketing automation to the next level, you need to take advantage of these marketing automation trends for 2024. By utilizing these trends, you’ll see the best results with your campaigns this year.
Feeling overwhelmed by all these trends? WebFX has your back. With our software, MarketingCloudFX, we’ll help you automate your campaigns and take advantage of these trends to grow your company’s leads, sales, and revenue.
Craft a tailored online marketing strategy! Utilize our free Internet marketing calculator for a custom plan based on your location, reach, timeframe, and budget.
Craft a tailored online marketing strategy! Utilize our free Internet marketing calculator for a custom plan based on your location, reach, timeframe, and budget.
Matthew is a marketing expert focusing on the SEO & martech spaces. He has written over 500 marketing guides and video scripts for the WebFX YouTube channel. When he’s not striving to put out some fresh blog posts and articles, he’s usually fueling his Tolkien obsession or working on miscellaneous creative projects.
