Top 5 marketing automation trends for 2023 and how Adobe Marketo Engage fulfills them

Adobe Marketo Engage is a digital experience platform from Adobe that assists with non-transactional B2B and B2C consumer marketing. A leader as per the Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Adobe Marketo Engage helps you deliver the marketing impact you expect while promising a superior digital experience. For marketers who wish to improve marketing ROI, grow lead pipeline and revenue, provide superior user experiences, and maintain pace with innovative tools and technologies, Adobe Marketo Engage and its modern marketing automation features are a smart investment.

Is Adobe Marketo Engage the right tool for my business?

Like all the other things in today’s competitive landscape, Adobe Marketo Engage is not the only marketing automation tool you’ll come across. But why are we pitching this tool and not others? Because Adobe Marketo Engage is not only a tool for markers but professionals involved in demand generation, sales, product management and marketing, and brand administrators.

Of course, your organizational goals, budget, and possible ROI of your use cases will play a predominant role in narrowing down the choices, but if your answers to the following 5 questions is yes, then Adobe Marketo Engage is the right tool for you.

• I want to build personalized marketing campaigns, operationalize strategies, and measure my marketing ROI.
• I want to align my sales and marketing departments and provide my sales reps with higher insights around prospect behavior for better contextual engagement.
• I have teams across countries and regions at different maturity levels.
• I want to use the marketing automation platform for different business lines, products, and brands.
• I want to align my marketing investments with the sales pipeline and revenue.

The manner in which your company employs Adobe Marketo Engage is vast, depending on the goals you wish to accomplish and the people who use the platform. From lead management,, nurturing, and scoring to bi-directional CRM sync, email marketing, SEO, revenue attribution, retargeting, program and campaign analysis and more, there is nothing that Adobe Marketo and its extensive marketing automation features can’t fulfill.

The marketing automation trends for 2023 and the role Adobe Marketo plays

Now that you know the importance of intelligence and automation in marketing, let’s discuss the top marketing automation trends for 2023 and how Adobe Marketo Engage can help you deliver, achieve, and accomplish your goals.

#1: Personalization and funnel-based content optimization

A report by Adobe states that 72% of consumers state that personalized messaging is what drives user attention and engagement. In 2023 and beyond, marketing personalization will result in higher conversions and better ROIs. However, to deliver on the personalization promise, brands need to look for tools that collect and manage customer data, employ the power of AI to analyze it closely, and optimize/segment content based on different audience groups/behaviors/job roles.

How Adobe Marketo Engage helps:

Leveraging Adobe Marketo’s Web Personalization tool, you can tailor web campaigns (Web Personalization), derive insights on your existing customers and engagement to identify more revenue-driven opportunities (Account-based web marketing), remarket to segmented audiences (Website Retargeting), and utilize AI-driven content recommendations for better site experiences (ContentAI). Other ways you can achieve web personalization in Adobe Marketo Engage is:

• With triggers and filters, you can automate account and lead-based experiences while personalizing content to offer only relevant solutions to your buyers.
• You can analyze, vertical-related, geolocation-based, and behavioral data even for anonymous visitors to personalize their experiences right from the start.
• Test content that works best for your advantage with A/B testing and automated winner selection.
• Leverage the power of Adobe Sensei to automatically identify the best performing web content and scale your efforts across verticals.
• Assess the performance of your personalized web campaigns with reports on website campaign performance, impression, clicks and conversions, top referrals, and so on. You can view all these insights on a single dashboard.

#2: Automate cross-channel marketing efforts

Today, consumer journeys span across more channels than ever. From social media, search/display ads, and emails to mobile, in-person events, and so on, marketers struggle to keep tabs on their customers/buyers throughout these ever-evolving number of channels. Cross-channel marketing is one of the latest trends in marketing automation. Therefore, an imperative task for marketers will be to derive more engagement across the complex user journeys and interact with buyers regardless of where they are.

How Adobe Marketo Engage helps:

With Adobe Marketo, you can organize, manage, and track all your cross-channel marketing activities from a centralized hub. Let’s explore how:

• Email Marketing: You can design responsive and personalized emails (Rich Text and HTML) with dynamic content based on the viewer in minutes. All these emails can be previewed for different screen sizes. Based on when the engagement happens, you can trigger emails across channels based on a user’s activity/inactivity. You can test your emails via A/B testing to assess which version performs better and generate performance insights reports or view the same on a single dashboard.
• Event Marketing: You can set up, automate, and personalize events (both online and offline) in Marketo in minutes. From sending invitation emails and post-event emails to setting up engagement triggers, scoring attendees, and providing Event Check-in from mobile, you can accomplish all. You can also leverage pre-built event partner integrations to automate activity and workflows.
• Text Messaging: Trigger personalized text messages based on user behavior across channels to boost SMS engagement. Marketo’s built-in compliance management allows buyers to opt-in and continue their journey on their preferred channel. Marketers can also measure the effectiveness of their SMS messages via Marketo’s advanced marketing analytics.
• Social Media Marketing: Adobe Marketo allows you to launch social media sweepstakes and referral campaigns with social ad form fills from within the platform. Moreover, you can directly publish landing pages on social channels enabled with social sharing buttons. And when it comes to analyzing your social efforts, you can leverage Marketo’s detailed analytics with social audience, social share, and social funnel metrics.
• Paid Marketing: Adobe Marketo offers native integration of paid social media channels such as Google AdWords, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Once integrated, you can sync audiences across platforms and target known and anonymous visitors with personalized ads. You can integrate your lead gen forms to your Marketo instance and set up triggers to move them to email or nurture programs. The best part, marketers can analyze and optimize their ad spend using multi-touch attribution.

#3: Automate lead generation, segmentation and targeting workflows

A lead generation strategy that leverages a clear pipeline and results in high-quality leads is one marketers dream of. With increasing competition, lead generation channel evolution, and changing user browsing patterns, enterprises need to look out for personalized approaches to create demand and forge meaningful connections with multi-channel buyers.

How Adobe Marketo Engage helps:

When it comes to lead generation as one of the marketing automation trends, Adobe Marketo Engage can help you generate high-quality leads, send more marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to the sales team, utilize lead scoring and nurturing to qualify sales-ready leads, and positively impact your marketing ROI.

• Targeted personalization is one of the most powerful marketing automation features and with Marketo Engage you optimize content across emails, landing pages, social media channels, webpages and more.
• With powerful behavioral, geographical, and firmographic analytics, you can listen to customer behavior and implement changes in real-time.
  Leverage advanced lead scoring models to qualify leads before sending them across to the sales team for conversions.
• Optimize and test emails, landing pages, calls to action, content, imagery, etc. to garner maximum high-quality leads via A/B testing and multivariate testing and send the winning version to all your prospects.
• You can set up triggers and filters to assess lead engagement and only send marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to the sales team.
• Enable a seamless bi-direction sync of account lists, campaign activity, and engagement between your CRM and Adobe Marketo Engage.
• Create granular audience segments based on their real-time engagement across the journey to set up dynamic marketing strategies.

#4: The implementation of AI marketing automation

An Adobe survey states that 91% of top-level enterprises believe in the power of AI for marketing automation and expect to use leading technologies in several marketing processes from customer acquisition, audience targeting to customer engagement, retention, account-based marketing, and ROI measurement. With AI marketing automation and machine learning, marketers can execute complex strategies and build a culture of successful results and high-quality leads.

How Adobe Marketo Engage helps:

Adobe Marketo Engage leverages the power of Adobe Sensei, the AI and machine learning tool to personalize experiences, optimize content, and measure marketing performance across channels. You can implement AI and machine learning in Adobe Marketo to accomplish the following tasks:

• Predictive Content: Marketo Engage along with Adobe Sensei analyzes behavioral, demographic, and firmographic data to identify the right piece of content for your users and prospects and deliver it to them across the right channel at the right time. Marketo scans and catalogs all your content assets and automatically adjusts to your prospect’s preferences as they move across their journey.
• Predictive Audiences: When hosting an event, Adobe Marketo identifies people in your database that are more likely to register or attend without driving opt-outs. Predictive Audiences in Marketo Engage also pinpoints people who will not hit the unsubscribe button when you send them an email that doesn’t resonate with their pain points.
• Account profiling: When practicing account-based marketing, AI-led marketing automation via Marketo Engage helps you identify accounts that are almost-ready to convert. With the Account Profiling feature, you can create predictive best-fit lists, cross-sell/upsell lists, and quick-win lists.
• This helps marketers devote time engaging the right accounts.

#5: Aligning marketing with sales for improved results

Operational alignment between sales and marketing teams is definitely a recipe for success in 2023 and one of the most advantageous marketing automation trends. Seamlessly connecting your sales and marketing personnel drives growth and helps deliver cohesive experiences. As for lead-generation and revenue growth, a closer alignment between two powerful departments of your organization will result in higher engagement and more informed decision-making.

How Adobe Marketo Engage helps:

When investing in marketing automation, Adobe Marketo Engage is how you can orchestrate an efficient engagement between sales and marketing. The following marketing automation features within the platform helps you fulfill this marketing automation trends for 2023:

• Sales Insight: This feature is baked into your CRM and helps share valuable insights with sales regarding lead behavior and engagement. Salespeople can track lead activity like email opens, website visits, form fills, etc. to assess the next step they wish to take. They can send custom emails, run multi-step campaigns, and assess a lead’s interest in the product/service. All this data is synced between Marketo and your CRM, resulting in seamless cross-channel experiences.
• Sales Connect: Empower your sales reps with real-time detailed insights about high-scoring leads from both sales and marketing touchpoints via Sales Connect. Marketers can also assess sales engagement in the Activity Log across channels to formulate the right experiences for each prospect. As complete visibility is enabled for both sales and marketing, they can identify the best ways to convert leads and drive revenue.
• Targeted Account Management: The combined power of automation and data analytics in Adobe Marketo helps you forge custom inbound and outbound ABM strategies. As Marketo Engage seamlessly integrates with your CRM, it allows both salespeople and marketers to work together, focus on high-value accounts, launch personalized journeys across channels, and strive towards the common goal. The best part, all this information is available on a single dashboard for both your sales and marketing people to assess attribution and ROI of combined efforts.

Accomplish your sales and marketing goals with Adobe Marketo Engage

When it comes to marketing automation, there is no other platform as versatile, data-driven, and resilient as Adobe Marketo Engage. In fact, this powerful platform from Adobe lets you fulfill all marketing automation trends in 2023 and beyond. Although we’ve summarized quite some powerful marketing automation features and functionalities of Adobe Marketo Engage, our experts can walk you through a live demo of the platform and how it can add value to your enterprise’s marketing and sales goals.