In a world where digital noise is deafening, capturing a buyer’s attention has become more challenging than ever. We asked a panel of experts how marketing automation is transforming the buyer’s journey and helping businesses cut through the chaos.
The buyer's journey is no longer a straightforward path; it's a winding, unpredictable route influenced by countless touchpoints, devices, and interactions. Businesses must rise to the challenge of staying relevant, fostering trust, and guiding prospects toward decisions—all while juggling declining conversion rates and soaring consumer expectations.
We asked a panel of experts to share their thoughts on the role marketing automation plays in the buyer’s journey. Their insights reveal how automation transforms modern marketing by addressing challenges, building connections, and delivering measurable results.
Let’s explore how.
Enhancing digital efficiency
"In a context where digital touchpoints are growing exponentially and user conversion rates continue to decline, companies are facing a crucial challenge: achieving digital efficiency. Marketing automation represents the ideal solution, allowing brands to cultivate leads at every stage of the sales journey and scale their operational capacity, maximizing available resources."
As Alessio Farina from Exetera explains—achieving digital efficiency is key. Marketing automation helps businesses work faster by making the best use of resources, scaling operations smoothly, and handling many interactions at once. In today’s complex digital world with so many touchpoints and varied customer behaviors, automation gives companies the tools they need to tackle these challenges. By streamlining workflows and ensuring timely communication, it allows brands to scale their efforts effectively, engaging with customers across different stages of the buyer’s journey.
“Furthermore, it drives business growth without being solely dependent on available resources, becoming a strategic lever to scale ROI and maximize results.”
Guiding the buyer’s journey
“Marketing automation can guide leads through the buyer's journey by delivering targeted, timely, and relevant content at each stage. It helps brands engage with prospects efficiently, improve customer relationships, and increase conversions, ensuring consistent, personalized engagement at scale.”
Carrie Redmon from EE Tech shares insight into why marketing automation is fundamental for developing customer relationships. Marketing automation supports every stage of the buyer journey—awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase—by delivering the right content and interactions at the right time. This continuous, tailored engagement helps guide customers smoothly through their journey, ultimately driving conversions and fostering long-term relationships.
Michelle Brown from ZAG Interactive breaks down how marketing automation plays a role in different phrases of the buyer's journey:
“Marketing automation helps create relevance at different phases. At the awareness phase, marketing automation can help send blog posts or white papers after someone takes a qualifying action like submitting a form. At the consideration stage, it can employ emails to deliver relevant content, while personalization can tailor site content to visitors. Sending offer-related emails together with site personalization can nudge buyers into action at the decision phase. Automation can also be used post-action to provide product/solution education, get feedback, or even refer other customers.”
Holding fluid conversations that resonate
“The buyer's journey is often perceived as linear, but this is rarely the case. It is better understood as a fluid, iterative conversation rather than a rigid funnel. It requires a delicate balance of delivering the right information at the right time to educate, persuade, and guide the buyer to another point in their journey—whilst always recognizing that it is their journey. Marketing automation plays a crucial role in managing this fluid conversation. It enables marketers to manage multiple interactions simultaneously whilst tailoring each experience to the unique needs and behaviors of individual buyers in real-time.”
Like James Jones from Modern Citizen explains, by understanding how customers interact at various stages, automation tailors its responses, making every interaction feel relevant and timely. This adaptability helps brands stay aligned with each customer's unique path, keeping the relationship strong and guiding them smoothly through their journey, no matter how it evolves.
Connecting deeper with customers
“Marketing automation isn't about automating marketing—it's about automating connections at scale. The most successful brands aren't using automation to push people through a funnel faster; they're using it to consistently provide answers before their prospects even know they have questions. The key is to flip the traditional model: Instead of using automation to interrupt more efficiently, use it to teach more effectively. The best automation creates a series of "yes, this is for me" moments, each building on the last.”
Automation delivers content that is relevant and specific to each situation, at scale, allowing brands to reach a large audience with messages that feel personal and timely. Both Ivan Adriel from Granite and Mike Wills from BlueModus share their perspectives on why this contextually relevant content helps build trust, create meaningful connections, and strengthen relationships with users.
“Especially when leveraging AI, marketing automation enables marketers to build connections, even relationships, with their audiences. By personalizing the automation, they can communicate, “we get you”, to diverse personas. By ensuring messages are spot-on, timely, and truly helpful, automated messages can transcend being inbox noise to become valued, relationship-building interactions.”
By delivering helpful, informative content at the right moments, marketing automation can guide customers through their journey, preemptively addressing their needs and helping to build trust and foster long-term relationships. This approach makes each interaction feel genuinely useful rather than just another sales push.
“Smart brands are using automation to be more human, not less. They're creating systems that recognize and respond to where each person is in their journey of understanding, not just their journey of buying. The magic isn't in the technology – it's in using that technology to make each interaction feel like it couldn't have happened at any other moment.”
Data-driven campaign optimization
“In a world with so much noise, it's essential to plan for multiple ways to communicate your brand's message. The old “Rule of 7” is alive and well, and buyers of all industries need to be told things multiple times. Marketing automation serves as the glue that holds the funnel together and connects all of those impressions, engagements, and conversions together.”
The "Rule of 7" is a marketing principle that suggests a potential customer needs to be exposed to a brand or message at least seven times before they take action, such as making a purchase or engaging more deeply with the brand, because repeated exposure helps build familiarity, trust, and recognition, which are essential for converting prospects into customers.
“Marketing automation plays a pivotal role in guiding buyers through each stage of their journey by delivering personalized, relevant content at scale. It allows marketers to ‘upgrade’ their campaigns through previously harnessed first-party data for personalization and better targeting, creating a continuous cycle of improvement. This approach transforms average campaigns into standouts.”
Matt Schott from Thunder::tech explains that through analyzing data directly from interactions with customers, businesses can better understand their audience’s preferences and behaviors. Over time, as these insights are applied and refined, campaigns become increasingly effective, leading to stronger engagement, higher conversions, and better overall results.
Keeping the competitive edge
“In the past three to five years, marketing automation has made a big leap, from an idea that was discussed at conferences and sales pitches to something that modern consumers expect. Whether they recognize it or not, today's online buyers have been conditioned to expect the journey—from prospect to buyer to advocate—to transcend channels and flow seamlessly over time. Basic marketing automation use cases like abandoned cart follow-ups or promotion reminders have quickly become as much a part of the buying journey for today's customers as product catalogs and shopping carts.”
Justin Sanders from BlueModus shares why modern buyers have grown accustomed to personalized, frictionless experiences at every touchpoint of their journey. These expectations have shifted automation from being a strategic advantage to an essential component of any ecommerce framework. The ability to create seamless interactions across channels not only enhances the customer journey but also fosters trust, satisfaction, and loyalty, making automation indispensable for staying competitive in a crowded marketplace.
“This is actually great news for marketing teams, because it means the tools they use to automate customer touch points at a scale that would be impossible manually is also seen as genuinely useful by consumers. It's critical that investment in automation is seen as a core requirement of any ecommerce website moving forward.”
Marketing automation: The key to meaningful engagement at scale
In today’s competitive landscape, meeting buyers’ expectations for seamless, personalized experiences is more than a competitive advantage—it’s a necessity. Marketing automation serves as the backbone for businesses to create meaningful, impactful engagements that resonate at every stage of the buyer's journey.
As the demands on businesses continue to evolve, our experts all agree that marketing automation offers the key to staying ahead. Whether you're just starting your automation journey or looking to optimize your strategy, now is the time to act.
Marketing automation is just the beginning—discover more tips for improving your customer journeys and advancing your digital experience maturity with our free ebook.
