Which Trends Will Shape the Future of Marketing Technology?

Optimove is a Business Reporter client.

Playing the “I told you so” role can be an unforgiving, ungrateful task. But sometimes, somebody has to do it—and when it comes to the future of marketing technology, we’re 100% up to the challenge.

Why do we feel comfortable to say where things are going? Because from where we’re standing—with more than a decade of working with and consulting to digital marketing teams—the future of marketing technology seems fairly sorted.

Here are 10 microtrends shaping the future of the sector that everyone, from marketers to vendors, should pay close attention to:

1. Free marketers from tedious and repetitive tasks

As the richness and complexity of data and customer demands continue to rise, marketers will no longer have time to create complex workflows and sift through large data sets. Successful martech vendors will provide their users with AI enhancement across use cases.

Soon, marketers will choose vendors based on how good they are at allowing marketers to spend more time understanding and leveraging customer insights, rather than doing unscalable manual work.

2. Gain customer intimacy

Personalization is not just the most used buzzword in marketing, but a true priority for both the marketer and end customer. This means that any marketing strategy not focused on creating value-based relationships with its audience is destined to fall behind.

That’s why marketers will continue to focus their investments mainly on technologies that provide them with the customer insights that allow them to gain customer intimacy—the kind of familiarity that is direly needed to create personalized and timely marketing programs across all the channels that customers expect.

3. Derive campaign ideas from data, not creative

In recent years, everyone’s been chasing “all the data.” But in reality, no one needs all the data to create hyper-personalized marketing strategies—you just need the right data. This understanding is fast becoming prevalent among marketing leaders.

So, marketers will focus more on building campaigns based on quality data and insights. Trained by the challenges of the past two years, they will look for customer insights to drive campaigns and tone of voice, and not necessarily product drops or calendar events.

4. Personalization will start from the back of the workflow

While in the past, personalization has been mostly relegated to last-touch interactions—such as product recommendations on a website or a simple “Hi, (Name)” in an email—this is no longer enough. Nowadays, users expect an experience that is inherently personalized in its messaging, timing and relevance.

To cope with this demand in the coming years, personalization will move further back in the campaign workflow and lean into a combination of segments, channels and messages.

Marketing tech that does not make it incredibly easy to create such innately personalized experiences will find itself left behind.

5. Accept that multichannel is everywhere

The unprecedented growth in customer data capabilities will drive a significant paradigm shift in marketers’ approach to multichannel marketing.

First, if marketers’ desire to create more intimate interactions is to be fulfilled, they cannot be expected to decide where each new message falls within new or existing manually mapped customer journeys.

Secondly, if proper scale is to be reached, marketers need assurances that they will not end up clogging customers’ devices and inboxes, drowning them in conflicting messages and achieving exactly the opposite of what marketers set out to do.

That’s why, in the next few years, marketing tech will offer increasingly flexible, AI-based multichannel decision frameworks.

6. Work cohesively

The importance of marketing hubs will increase in the coming years as marketing organizations continue to move to less siloed setups.

Vendors will have to acknowledge that large marketing teams face increased challenges and pressure to work as cohesive units. As a result, successful vendors will provide consistent, unified experiences at every level of their solutions, allowing effortless collaboration and enhanced transparency for marketing plans, strategies and campaigns.

In other words: more hubs, more one-stop shops and more integrated solutions.

7. Keep frameworks open

Although a preference for integrated suites over best-of-breed solutions will continue as the market matures and consolidates, marketers will want these solutions to be even more open—enabling them to combine one vendor’s integrated suite with another’s best-of-breed point solution for specific use cases.

But openness doesn’t stop at the solution level; it also refers to allowing users to add to their solutions independently, without the need for third-party vendor services—in other words, no-code and self-serve.

Marketing technology solutions that also allow users to add new integrations, create new customer attributes and adjust campaign objectives without external help will be more popular in years to come.

8. Overcome the perils of digital acceleration

Recent years pushed companies to adopt digital experiences faster than anticipated. They now face challenges stemming from this acceleration—mainly a lack of employee skills and incomplete utilization of newly acquired technology .

As brand scrutiny of underutilized and overpriced marketing technologies increases, vendors that can prove to their buyers that they can help bridge these gaps will succeed moving forward.

For vendors, this means providing non-technical solutions for technical challenges, such as no-code attributes and event builders, and an upskill plan for teams to learn to maximize their solutions, such as through an internal training academy or professional training service.

9. Build trust with buyers

Buyers—marketers—are looking for a partnership. Similar to how customers want to be engaged by brands with meaningful interactions, marketers expect to feel listened to by their vendors, and vendors must have various feedback loops to ensure that their users’ voices are heard.

Successful martech solutions will be those that understand customer requirements and deliver them in a timely and satisfactory way. The old promise of placing features and capabilities on a roadmap that will never come to fruition is long gone. Both marketers and vendors understand that trust must be built via better communication and increased transparency.

10. Say goodbye to vanity dashboards

Finally, changes driven by operating systems will lead marketers to adopt more business-driven and scientific attribution measuring, even if they do so not out of desire, but because they have little choice.

Although some exceptions exist, most marketing campaigns are still measured either by performance metrics such as opens, impressions and clicks or by non-exact methods such as email revenue or last-touch attribution. However, with privacy changes spearheaded in the past year by big tech firms, these measurements will become more and more obsolete.

With marketers not able to trust the accuracy of their channel data and platforms not allowed to track customers across sites and apps, marketers will finally look to adopt more advanced measuring approaches such as incrementality.

Marketers will require vendors to provide significant measurement capabilities beyond traditional vanity metrics. They will seek to understand the incremental value of each campaign they launch, and with which customers. The desire to approach management with results from incrementality tests—without a contingent of marketing analysts—will be greater than ever. As a result, marketers will look for platforms that can perform these tests with minimal effort. And maybe even help predict the future.

This article originally appeared in Business Reporter. Image: iStock id1201073174