Marketing automation necessary to achieve an omni-channel experience and increase RoI from data

Marketers are adopting marketing automation solutions (MAS) to make sense of unlimited amounts of customer data, turning it into actionable, intelligent leads for sales enablement.

Small- and medium-sized businesses are expected to contribute more significantly to growth than large enterprises as the MAS market moves toward $6.36 billion by 2025. High-tech and software and business services are the top verticals adopting MAS, with marketing agencies encompassing most business services use cases.

“MAS competition will be based on the breadth of functions and integrations, particularly with vertical-specific integrations,” said Melody Siefken, Research analyst, Digital Transformation. “Advances in analytics, especially predictive analytics, will be crucial to customers.”

Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Global Marketing Automation Solutions (MAS) Market, Forecast to 2025, examines the factors driving and restraining MAS market growth. It analyzes the technology trends impacting MAS product development and customer behavior for MAS, as well as the top MAS vendors and the ways in which they are approaching the market.

It also presents the adoption patterns of MAS across the regions of North America and Latin America (NALA), Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), and Asia-Pacific (APAC).

The NA and EMEA markets will continue to grow strongly. NA will be driven by the greater penetration of MAS among small- and medium-sized media organizations and new media platforms. The APAC market is, however, restricted by the slower pace of digitization of news.

“Due to the prevalence of SMBs in APAC and low labor costs, MAS adoption will be higher in NALA and EMEA in the foreseeable future,” noted Siefken. “However, APAC may be seen as a growth opportunity toward the end of or after 2025, particularly among large businesses and enterprises.”

For additional growth opportunities, vendors are likely to:

* Target local marketing agencies in Asia to indirectly sell solutions. This vertical is also the second-largest adopter of MAS. Building local offices in Japan, Singapore, China, and India will help vendors understand the selling points and cultural behaviors.

* Add partner management tools to existing offerings to become a one-stop shop for direct and channel marketing automation.

* Strengthen personalization and targeting capabilities for campaigns to achieve better account-based marketing (ABM) strategies.

* Improve artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics capabilities to build powerful bases for chatbots. Investing in chatbot creation companies and partnering with AI-based solutions will be winning strategies.