According to several estimates the expectation is that spending on marketing automation software will hit $32 billion by the end of the year and continue to increase for the next several years. The primary drivers of this growth are more sophisticated tools and the many technological improvements that are occurring with machine learning, chatbots and analytics. Here are four trends to keep an eye on as the year progresses.

Social Media Outreach

According to a recent study conducted by Marketing Sherpa 58 percent of social media users follow brands on social media. At the moment there are over 2 billion people who utilize one or more social media platforms globally and that means marketers have the opportunity to interact with enormous numbers of prospects through social networks.

Social media tools such as SocialDrift help marketers to automate certain interactions that are tedious and cost money to complete manually. SocialDrift takes care of these interactions that drive social media users to do things like follow your brand, or visit your enterprise’s website.

Behavior-Based Email Workflows

We are probably all familiar with typical  email workflows. These automated flows uses Boolean logic to communicate with contacts who are already in a marketing database. You create specific rules that trigger emails intended to nurture existing contacts and to move them down the marketing funnel.

The new piece of email marketing automation is integrated workflows that use other marketing channels (like social ads) in addition to email.  Ad Espresso and LeadsBridge are two programs that make it possible to trigger retargeting ads when contacts enter specific workflows.  These marketing workflows can also be triggered by various customer behaviors, ensuring the messages are highly relevant and personalized for where your prospect is in the sales funnel.

 Predictive Lead Scoring

Most companies put together an ideal customer profile that includes the attributes associated with your best customers. New tools allow organizations to unleash the power of machine learning on lead scoring by using probability calculations.  Software platforms like Infer provide highly reliable determinations about what leads are most likely to convert to customers.

When companies use predictive lead scoring and analytics, it helps marketers to pinpoint the best-performing channels without having to wait weeks or months for leads to move down the funnel.

Personalized Content Recommendations

Digital companies like Amazon and Netflix consistently show us how powerful personalized content is when it comes to engaging audiences. Marketing automation technology currently allows marketers to create personalized content to website visitors. This year the use of personalized content will expand as new marketing automation tools make sharing it easier and more effective. As an example, Optimizley Personalization and Adobe Target allow marketers to share the right content with the right people across channels and devices.

Content marketers can develop content for types of target accounts, or a specifically targeted account. Personalization platforms will display specific pieces of content to website visitors based on their IP address.