Automation For The People: More Marketers Adding Automation To Email Marketing and Social Media Management (Report)

As technologies improve and software soars, it should be no surprise that the use of automation would increase for B2B marketers.

Still, looking at Insightly and Ascend2’s recently released research and seeing so many individual areas of automation get “significantly” increased use over the course of just a single year … well, it warms this automation-enabling heart!

B2B professionals from a variety of company sizes were surveyed for “The 2023 State of Marketing Automation,” and compared to 2022’s results, automation use was up in almost every single area.

Email marketing was the most popular area for marketing automation, utilized by 62% of respondents in 2023 compared to only 53% a year ago. Social media management only saw a slight increase (from 43% to 44%) as the second-most utilized area, but it and email marketing both led the list of areas that marketers plan to add even more automation in the coming year.

The areas of content management and paid ads both saw double-digit increases (from 30% to 40%, and from 23% to 39%, respectively), while the only area that saw a decrease was SEO efforts (from 22% to 19%).

Overall, the research found that 94% of B2B marketers said automation was “helping them to achieve strategic goals,” but there’s an even more-telling number amidst that 94%.

“Only 29% report that their marketing automation is very successful, or best-in-class, compared to the competition,” the report says, “suggesting that there is room for improvement in the automation tools marketers are using and also in the ways that it is used.”

More than a quarter (27%) of respondents “strongly agree” that their marketing automation platform makes it easy to build effective customer journeys, contrasted by 20% who say that their current platforms do not make that easy.

Considering that marketing automation budgets are “trending upward according to 70% of B2B marketing professionals,” that room for improvement is room for great opportunity all-around in the year ahead.