5 Martech Trends to Act on Now for 2020
With greater technological advances, marketing professionals and organizations need to stay ahead of their competitors. Elizabeth Gallagher, CRO of Lineate hones in on the 2020 martech trends companies and marketers should act on now.
Over the last decade, martech has evolved to keep up with changing consumer behaviors and the development of new media channels. With the industry growing faster than ever, 2020 promises some exciting marketing technology developments.
Because technology is ingrained in every element of modern marketing, changes in the martech world will impact not just digital marketers but virtually any business that leverages marketing strategies.
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Below, I’ve listed five critical martech trends brands need to take reigns of for the upcoming year.
Understand Automation Is the Future of Work
While automation platforms aren’t new, the amount marketers now rely on them is – and it will only grow in the next year. This is because it allows them to instantly take care of repetitive tasks across multiple channels – tasks that could take up a tremendous amount of time. Automation helps to streamline key marketing processes such as email strategy,lead generation,and scoring. Here are the key objectives of an automated strategy:
- Optimize productivity
- Increase campaign ROI
- Improve campaign management
- Acquire more customers
- Improve database quality
- Align marketing and sales initiatives
- Measure performance more accurately
Let’s circle back to the email example. Without question, marketers spend a large chunk of their time crafting messaging. A big part of email marketing is figuring out how to speak to different audiences and testing which messaging works and which doesn’t. Now, however, automation platforms collect and organize customer data in advance–making it easier to provide the right messages at the right time based on data-driven insights. In other words: Before, marketers would draft messages for each segment manually, but now, these systems allow marketers to identify the right message to send and connect with customers without all of the heavy lifting.
While some marketers may still be testing messaging in more manual ways, automation platforms will only grow–especially as brands realize their potential for making it easy to reach customers no matter where they are in their lifecycle.
Get Real About Using Machine Intelligence
With AI (artificial intelligence) already a major part of marketing technology, machine learning (ML) is expected to see explosive growth in 2020. Arguably the most important application of AI in marketing, machine learning is essentially a process where computers learn from large sets of data to improve their ability to make predictions and recommendations.
ML makes it easier for marketers to find, engage and keep customers, therefore, to figure out what may work and what won’t: what type of content is most likely to perform? What’s the best way for us to answer customer service requests? Which customers are most likely to make a return?
To identify the best ML solutions for their needs, brands need only define the primary problems they are trying to solve. For example, a predictive analytics model can be used to study historical and existing data so systems can more accurately recognize purchase intent. To streamline customer service, natural language processing (NLP) can help teach voice and chatbot systems to understand customer questions and respond appropriately. Brands seeking to improve in-store shopping experience should consider introducing computer vision, which can enable capabilities like visual search via mobile device cameras by teaching systems to process images like humans.
Once a decision is made regarding which type of ML the business needs, you’re faced with another decision – do you develop ML specialties in-house or bring in a third-party vendor? Most companies are concerned with the fact that choosing to build a system from the ground up could take some serious time. On the bright side, third-party solutions can be readily available after the issue is diagnosed and the model is properly trained. In the end, business owners need to identify its strengths – not only in terms of technology and budget–but also talent and the ability to execute. From there, you can determine whether you need a third-party to fill in the gaps.
Together, AI and ML guide strategic investments in business models, ultimately solving the company’s biggest challenges. More importantly, AI-powered and digital platform companies are the future. Why? They’re powered by better capital allocation and improved, data-driven decisions to drive long term value, growth and profits.
Go Mobile
The rollout of lightning-fast 5G WiFi from cellular networks is predicted to increase efficiency for all aspects of business and marketing. 5G will bring download speeds of up to 20 times the speed of 4G, empowering companies to develop richer personalized experiences and real-time ad targeting.
In addition, 5G is expected to herald in a new age of precision and accuracy through improved location intelligence. By connecting new tech devices back to users, homes, retailers and other businesses, 5G opens the door for the development of next-level innovations and services – much like 4G did for apps such as Google Maps and Uber.
With ultra-fast communication between internet of things devices (IoT devices), companies could theoretically leverage insights from connected device data to improve campaigns in real-time using AI and marketing automation. Before this could happen, however, certain data privacy concerns may need to be addressed. Data privacy concerns are discussed more in-depth within this piece.
Optimize for Different Types of Search
Moving into 2020, both mobile and voice search will continue to expand. Already, research has found that more than half the site traffic in the U.S. comes from mobile devices and 77 percent of consumers use their phones to compare prices on products while browsing the aisles of stores. Rather than relying on text-based searches, a growing body of mobile users are researching and buying through voice searches. In 2020, it’s forecasted that at least 50 percent of online searches will be conducted verbally on smartphones and internet-enabled devices like Alexa and Google Home. As voice recognition and voice search become more predictive, brands can position themselves to reach target audiences by optimizing their online presence for how customers speak verbally. Among other strategies, this means favoring natural language rather than keywords in web content, ditching overly technical language and developing a companion app that exceeds the desktop experience.
With the increase in voice searches and as other major search engines begin to provide more sophisticated answers, customers are being retrained to search by asking questions. Now, customers expect relevant, personalized answers everywhere – including the search bar on company sites.
To stay current, companies should ensure internal searches are optimized for their site’s specific content. As a strategy to enhance internal searches on their website, businesses should capitalize on machine learning. To anticipate and answer consumer questions in their intended context, companies can leverage a combination of ML solutions like natural language processing techniques to predict the next search word based on the context of the previous sequence and predictive analytics to suggest relevant queries based on existing customer data.
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Ensuring Customer-Centricity While Complying With Data Privacy Laws
Spurred by incidents like the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, newly introduced legislation like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is raising awareness on how companies and marketers collect and use customer data. As these data privacy laws roll out and others follow, it could significantly limit or put an end to the increasingly frowned-upon practice of purchasing third-party data to learn about customers.
For customer-centric brands, the global push for more data privacy creates new, interesting challenges. While customers are increasingly expecting brands to be able to prove that their data is safe and private, they also demand personalized marketing material that is relevant to their interests.
To remain customer-centric amid new data privacy laws and growing consumer concerns, brands must tackle the challenge of collecting “zero-party data”. It’s not new. It’s basically first-party data given with consent. In other words, rather than being inferred from purchasing behavior or cookie-collected information, zero-party data is freely offered up to brands by customers themselves. Zero-party data may not be new, but it is becoming increasingly valuable as more emphasis is placed on consumer privacy.
Zero-party can benefit businesses by providing a more holistic understanding of our customers that goes beyond deducing preferences and intentions through data points like their age, gender and income. And by interacting with consumers directly, brands can build trust, boost loyalty and keep the conversation going with audiences.
But convincing our users to voluntarily share valuable information about themselves requires increasing engagement and trust between consumers and our brands. In exchange for zero-party data, companies can introduce interactive experiences that provide a tangible exchange of value between brands and the user – for example, offering interactive questionnaires and polls with incentives like coupons, giveaways, or access to hidden content. To create a culture of transparency, brands should be open about the information gathered through interactive experiences, in addition to why and how it will be used.
When it comes to digital marketing technology, the past adage rings true: the only constant changes. To take on the forever and rapidly evolving field of martech, we must remain equally dynamic to keep abreast of trends and stay ahead of competitors. With 2019 coming to a close, now is the time for brands to assess their marketing strategy and optimize for 2020.