5 new Marketing Technology trends that marketers like you need to know about!

5 new Marketing Technology trends that marketers like you need to know about!

Marketing Technology is the future of advertising. Defined as the tools and efforts that harness technology to achieve marketing goals, ‘martech’ is slowly becoming the most important weapon in any successful CMOs arsenal. Budgets reflect this; a recent Gartner study revealed that martech is now the single biggest area of investment for marketing resources and takes up 29% of CMO budgets.

If so much energy and money is being spent on martech, which specific areas is it going to?  

These 5 technologies are creating the most buzz going into 2021:

1. Blockchain for Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising made up an impressive 68% of the ad industry’s total digital media ad spend last year. Due to the  increasing reliance on this  automated medium, recent years have seen significant investment into improving it. Some of the major problems facing programmatic advertising include ad fraud, brand safety irregularities, and lack of transparency between stakeholders.

The lack of trust involved in programmatic marketing, due to the increasing number of intermediaries, has been remedied by introducing blockchain technology. Blockchain provides the means for recording transaction data on a decentralized ledger, thereby eliminating data duplication threats and increasing transparency. This ensures that companies are only paying for ads that have been served on viewable, brand-safe, and fraud-free platforms.

2. Brand Chatbots

According to Salesforce, 69% of consumers in the U.S. prefer using chatbots when engaging with brands since it often yields a quick and informative response. Brand chatbots can also efficiently answer customers’ questions at all hours of day and night. Why is it that so many SMEs are reportedly unaware of the benefits of upgrading their site with a brand chatbot?

Improving the overall quality of your customer experience with a brand chatbot can lead to significantly higher customer conversion rates. AI powered chatbots can act as the cornerstone of your website’s CX strategy, employing controlled brand messages 24/7. The best chatbots on the market employ machine learning to improve functionally over time and are able to gather and analyse useful customer data that helps you to improve your product. 

3. Data Flow Automation

The quantity and complexity of campaign success metrics have exploded in recent years. CMOs and agencies have to track results, improvements and reactions across several clients, mediums and platforms. This situation means that marketers have to deal with a huge amount of data that they may not be prepared to handle properly.

Data flow automation fixes this issue. After introducing data automation bots to their marketing workstreams CMOs can benefit from increased trust in their findings, more detailed reports, and a significant decrease in time and money spent on tracking metrics. Gone are the days of needing a full-time data analyst to work on your project, an army of bots will fix all your data problems in a far more cost-effective manner.

4. Hypertargeting through Machine Learning

Hypertargeting your audience allows marketers to focus their advertising to an inch wide and a mile deep. Machine learning technology is taking the process to new heights through ever increasing levels of specificity and accuracy. This is because ML models can overlay and extract data on ideal audiences in ways that no previous technology could. The online behaviour, on-site activity history, geo-location and many other important stats that users leave behind are deconstructed and processed with incredible speed and efficiency.

Additionally, machine learning AI gets better at its job over time as new data and contexts of focus are introduced to it. This is important within audience targeting because of the ever-changing ecosystem within which customer data is tracked and analysed. ML allows hyper targeted campaigns to be flexible and to increase in accuracy as they work.

5. Personalisation for Customer Journeys

Consumers want to feel connected to a brand now more than ever. They also want their experience of a brand to be easy and pleasant. Exhibiting the true extent of this, a McKinsey study found that as much as 70% of buying decisions were based on how the customer felt they were being treated.

The personalisation of consumer journeys through technology allows brands to excel at making their customers feel both connected and understood. Equipped with actionable data, marketers can launch several versions of one campaign. Each one of these versions can have bespoke design and messaging that travels directly to their ideal target audience. Unique nuances that personalise customer journeys will allow your brand to strike a chord with the target audience and will significantly improve ROI.

References:

• https://martechtoday.com/gartner-cmo-spend-survey-29-percent-of-2018-marketing-budget-allocated-to-marketing-technology-232633
• https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/blockchain/why-blockchain-occupies-a-unique-seat-at-the-advertising-table/
• https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181120005213/en/