These are twelve things I wanted to see more of in marketing automation when I wrote this in 2021. They are personal predictions and wishes, rather than a report on what subsequently happened or a list of capabilities every business needs today.
Yes, I wanted machine learning and AI to take on more of the repetitive work. I still think it is worth exploring what those tools can do—with a helmet. Giving a system a task also means deciding its boundaries, checking its output and keeping someone responsible for the result.
Audience segmentation
- 1. Automated audience segmentation: systems that suggest and create useful audience groups from customer behaviour, with less manual list preparation.
- 2. Content-interest segments: tools that help rank the subjects and individual pieces of content a person may find useful, so messages can be more relevant.
The attraction here was less time assembling lists and more time deciding what to say. The prediction should not be read as a claim that a segment reveals someone’s intentions with certainty.
Integrations and access
- 3. Physical-location integrations: ways to connect permitted in-store interactions with marketing workflows, rather than treating a shop visit and an online visit as entirely separate experiences.
- 4. More natural messenger integrations: online messaging services that connect helpfully with existing customer-service and marketing systems.
- 5. Better access for smaller budgets: simpler, minimum-click tools that make useful automation practical for businesses without large specialist teams.
I would want those integrations to make the experience easier for the customer as well as the marketer. A connection between two systems is not automatically a good reason to collect more information or send another message.
Media planning, buying and reporting
- 6. Automated website tagging: tools that reduce repetitive implementation work and help teams check their measurement setup.
- 7. Automated reporting: reports that explain noteworthy changes and offer AI-assisted insights, rather than simply moving numbers into slides.
- 8. Automated media planning: systems that use reporting and audience information to help propose a plan for a marketer to evaluate.
- 9. Automated ad generation and placement: workflows that connect the proposed plan to creative production and delivery.
An attractive report can still tell the wrong story if its data or assumptions are wrong. A plan or creative suggestion would need review before money was committed or a message reached a customer.
Media beyond the familiar screen
- 10. Smarter digital out-of-home placements and inventory: better ways to plan and manage ads on digital screens in physical places.
- 11. Smarter ride-hailing integrations, placements and inventory: useful ways for those services and advertisers to work together.
- 12. Online audiences informing digital out-of-home planning: approaches that help connect audience understanding with location-based media, using appropriate permissions and aggregation.
These ideas were a starting point for discussion in 2021. I am leaving them in that context rather than treating the passage of time as evidence that they came true. A proper follow-up would compare each prediction with documented outcomes, including what did not work.
For the practical foundations behind this list, read my introduction to marketing automation. Which of these ideas would actually solve a problem for your team?