The Importance of Marketing Automation in Your Modern Marketing Future

We asked global experts to provide their thoughts on the future of modern marketing and several of them highlighted marketing automation as the key to success in the future.

Let's look specifically at some of those predictions.

Top Performing Businesses Use Marketing Automation

Yoav Schwartz, CEO and Co-Founder of Uberflip, says that 84% of top performing businesses are using or will use marketing automation in 2016. Marketing automation needs leads, and while content is the most potent fuel for lead generation, managing and leveraging that growing library of content will be vital in order to fully utilize marketing automation.

This one is pretty clear because it brings together content and technology and highlights those who succeed. Many businesses use content marketing to generate leads, but without the technology in place to manage those leads, a business is not fully realizing the benefit from their content. Top performing businesses know that and incorporate marketing automation systems into their technology stacks to score and qualify their leads, nurture their leads and capture and maintain the known information about their prospects.

Conversion Rate is Measure of Success

Jordie van Rijn, email marketing and eCRM consultant with Emailmonday, says that the most useful measure of marketing automation performance is conversion rate, say 70% of very successful marketing automation users. Modern marketers will focus on their conversion rates in 2016.

This is another prediction for 2016 that is simple and straightforward. Those who use marketing automation focus on their conversion rate. This is the key to your success in future. Conversion rate. It speaks to the quality over quantity debate. When you have more of the right prospects, you are actually converting at a high rate. And that's better than having a pile of leads that never convert.

Technology Needs to Connect

Alp Mimaroglu, Marketing Luminary at Symantec, shares that 51% of marketing execs say their marketing technologies and data are only loosely integrated, or not at all. Modern marketers will be required to build cohesive marketing technology stacks to ensure future success.

And finally, modern marketers still need to get their marketing technology house in order. Too many systems still don't connect. It's time to stop using Excel spreadsheets as the glue that holds your marketing operations together, manually collecting data from disparate systems. Whether you are using marketing automation tools that are part of a larger suite or ones that are part of a partner ecosystem, this coming year is when you need to do the work to pull it all together.

Are you seeing these same trends or do you have your own predictions about the importance of marketing automation in the future? Let us know on Twitter using #MMInsights.

To read what global marketing experts think will have the most impact across all areas of modern marketing in 2016 download The Future of Modern Marketing: 2016.