Marketing Automation Trends Shaping 2016
The developments that mattered in marketing automation in 2016: ABM going mainstream, predictive scoring tools maturing and Marketo going private.
If one theme defined marketing automation in 2016, it was account-based marketing moving from a niche B2B talking point to a mainstream strategy that platform vendors scrambled to support.
Account-based marketing became the strategy everyone was building toward
For years, automation platforms had been built around scoring and nurturing individual leads. ABM flipped the unit of measurement to the account: instead of chasing individual contacts through a funnel, teams identified a target list of companies and coordinated marketing and sales around winning those specific accounts as a unit. 2016 was widely treated as the year this went from a conference buzzword to a strategy vendors actively built features for, adding account-level scoring, account-based advertising integrations and account engagement dashboards on top of platforms that had previously only tracked individuals.
Predictive scoring vendors started integrating directly with major platforms
Predictive analytics companies focused on lead and account scoring, using modeled data rather than manually assigned point values, began building direct integrations with the established automation platforms rather than operating as standalone tools marketers had to stitch together themselves. The pitch was straightforward: instead of a marketing ops team guessing at scoring weights, a model trained on your closed-deal history could assign scores automatically and update them as new data came in. Adoption was still early, but it signaled where scoring was headed.
Marketo went private
In a deal that reshaped the competitive landscape, private equity firm Vista Equity Partners acquired Marketo in 2016 in a transaction valued at roughly $1.79 billion, taking one of the category’s most visible independent public companies off the market. For a platform that had positioned its 2013 IPO as proof the category had matured, going private again just three years later was a reminder of how much consolidation and financial engineering, not just product innovation, continued to shape who owned the tools marketers relied on.
Conversational tools started showing up alongside automation
Facebook opened its Messenger platform to bots in the spring of 2016, and marketing teams began experimenting with chat as a parallel channel to email rather than a replacement for it. Most of this activity in 2016 was still exploratory, early integrations and simple automated replies rather than anything approaching the sophistication of an established email nurture program, but it marked the first real signal that automation platforms would eventually need to think beyond the inbox.
What this meant for a marketing team in 2016
None of these shifts required an overnight overhaul. Teams that had solid lead-level automation in place were well positioned to layer account-based thinking on top of it, since the underlying discipline, know who you’re targeting, understand their behavior, coordinate content and outreach accordingly, was the same discipline that had defined the category since Eloqua and Marketo’s earliest days. The bigger risk in 2016 wasn’t missing a specific feature. It was mistaking ABM for a checkbox to add rather than a genuine change in how sales and marketing needed to plan and measure together.
Keep exploring: browse more Email Marketing guides, see everything we published in 2016 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
