Customer data platforms, artificial intelligence, blockchain for advertising, and real-time marketing are the top MarTech trends.
The analyst firm’s Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising report confirms blockchain for advertising, customer data platform, artificial intelligence for marketing, and real-time marketing are the technologies that will create a difference to marketing into the future. Marketers continue to be aware of and monitor other technologies such as multi-touch attribution and conversational marketing, which are moving forward and high impact.
Marketers must strike the perfect balance between delivering significant customer experiences that differentiate the brands and focusing on the real value to the business. Marketers’ expectations for CDP remain as the top priority, but the use of the technology differs, with some confusion around vendors and how they overlap with similar techniques.
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Half of the B2B marketers have deployed a CDP in their CRM system, which signifies a confusion of its unique and purpose differentiators. Blockchain holds tremendous promise for advertisers. However, there are some significant challenges of performance, scalability, and adoption that need to be overcome before it gets due usage. Companies have introduced experimental blockchain platforms for advertising, but there is, as yet, nothing to speak of viability.
AI has been known to augment the functioning of marketers in various ways- automated
content tagging, real-time personalization, to mention a few. In the next 20 years, AI holds will drive pervasive shifts across the Martech ecosystem, effectively transforming the marketing practice.
Technology advancements are creating an environment characterized by on-demand
marketing, not always-on marketing. Social media and search technologies make it sharable and comparable, allowing to rate experiences in real-time. Brands are combining marketing automation and behavioral analytics to deliver customized, and on-time offers based on specific customer behaviors.
Read More: Revisiting the Simple Marketing Mantra – “Listen, Personalize, Engage”
Gartner maintains that many multichannel marketers struggle for relevant customer
engagement even if they lack a vibrant business case for real-time engagement. As per
the 2019 Multichannel Marketing Survey, less than 50% of respondents use rigorous testing or predictive modeling to determine if a real-time response is necessary when designing event-triggered marketing.
To close the gap, marketers need to revamp processes and make greater use of marketing
technologies for customer data gathering, analysis, and activation.
