Why is Personalized Martech Gaining Popularity?

Top trends in Martech – All you need to know

Modern marketing has become inseparable from technology. Today, marketing, technology and management (Martech) are intersecting in organizations and that is the way ahead. Martech is now estimated to be $121.5 billion market worldwide. With a wisely chosen martech stack, marketing processes can be streamlined and multitude of marketing channels can be managed with ease.

Today, the success formula to connect with your customers is personalized interaction. To accomplish this marketing goal and receive insight about our customers, competitors, and market, there are ample tools available in the market. As a marketer, the big question is, how to cut through the technology clutter and find the solution that is right for the business.

Let’s look at the top 10 MarTech Stack that is in trend in 2019

Machine Learning

According to McKinsey, AI and machine learning will contribute a staggering USD 2.6 trillion in marketing and sales by 2020. The focus of all organizations today has moved from gathering enormous data to creating a data strategy to utilize it wisely to improve business processes and outcomes.

Using machine learning algorithms, predictive lead scoring and artificial intelligence, any large data size can be efficiently analysed to deliver patterns in customer behaviour, re-targeting of messages and offers, and create a personalized interaction.

Artificial Intelligence

Though the potential of AI is humungous, presently it is deployed in marketing as a spy to spot popular trends, identify competitors, for programmatic advertising, content marketing and in customer service. Programmatic advertising is a process that uses a combination of automation, big data, and AI to buy and place advertisements based on targeting algorithms. By next year, industry expert estimate 86% of all online ads will be purchased using automated channels.

Digital asset management

With the most advanced Digital asset management (DAMs) available today, multiple use cases in a system are unified effortlessly through imagery. For instance, large sets of data captured from smart connected devices can be managed easily using analytic solutions like cloud-based content analytics and asset tracking solutions. For most enterprises, DAM has become a key marketing enabler. This is quite clear from the Forrester study that confirms that DAM is set to clock $1 billion by the end of this year.

Integration

According to a Marketing Technology Trends Survey conducted by Ascend 2 in 2018, “57 percent of marketers say integration is still the most challenging barrier to marketing technology success”. For a seamless personalized customer experience, data collected from all the departments in an enterprise have to be knitted together. This task is slightly complex, for the following reasons:

Enterprises use various systems and applications in the cloud and on premise.
To analyze customer behaviour data, enterprises have to obtain data from internal and external systems and social media platforms.
To obtain a single view of a customer today is not easy as most of them switch across devices during their customer journey and visit multiple purchasing channels (in-store, online or mobile).
The sheer number of marketing platforms and tools available in the market.

Enterprises are looking beyond point-to-point integration and using API-led connectivity to facilitate multiple software products to interact with each other. With APIs, customer data from various sources can be integrated to create better personalization, any information can be added or deleted, and assets too can be plugged or unplugged with ease.

Omnichannel/Multichannel marketing touch points

To generate consistent business and build a positive customer experience that boosts your customer retention rate, it is important to create touch points on all the channels your customers use. Podcasts, apps, brief video such as Facebook and Instagram stories, live chat, ads, events, chatbots etc. all come under the basket. According to the Aberdeen Group, those companies that strongly vouch for omnichannel marketing have seen high customer retention of nearly 89%, and a 9.5% year-on-year increase in their annual revenue.

Video Marketing

Traditionally, the best form of marketing has been word of mouth. The same concept can have a global reach today through Video Marketing. Videos created on customer testimonials, events, webinars, and informative brand stories can be more appealing to customers than plain content. For example, Facebook Live is a platform that offers marketers the opportunity to directly hit the target audience. According to Hubspot, simply “adding a video to an email boosts click-through rate by a staggering 200–300 percent, and putting one on a landing page increases conversion rate by 80 percent”.

Chatbots

The global chatbot market is reaching $1.2 billion with 24 percent annual growth rate, informs Grand View Research. Chatbots are quicker than humans in answering queries, much more cost-effective, and can offer personalized customer service anytime. Chatbots are used as shopping assistants at self-service points and as a guide while browsing a website to answer general queries about the company. By creatively using AI and machine learning, chatbots can be integrated well with a website or with a social media platform.

Virtual assistants are becoming increasingly intelligent as advances happen in deep learning processes, natural language processing, and conversation interfaces. Making your search phrases more conversational for voice search (Siri/Google) would be a good SEO strategy.

AR & VR

Augmented reality and virtual reality is expensive but there are companies like IKEA, Nivea, Starbucks and Volkswagen to name a few, that are using it in novel ways for an immersive experience to connect to a consumer.

CRM

To acquire 360-degree view of your customer, CRM market leader Salesforce leveraged the power of the cloud. Now by integrating with Tableau, Pardot and DemandBase, Salesforce can provide your entire sales force with up-to-date, customized views of data. Similarly, other CRM platforms like NetSuite, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sugar, Apptivo and others are making vital tie-ups too.

SEO and Analytics

Earlier, analytics was used to measure the post-campaign performance and effectiveness of other marketing tools. Today, it is used in a more advanced form to refine marketing activities as a whole and enhance customer experience and to get exact feedback. Through analytics tool providers like Google analytics, Mopinion, Clicky, Kissmetrics to name a few, one can study closely the conversion rate of potential visitors visiting a website and receive messages that are relevant to them.

Positive outlook

Until few years back, most of the organizations hesitated to allocate budget for marketing technology as they were unconvinced of the ROI and the revenue growth it could generate. It is apparent now that it is difficult to offer customer experience with legacy marketing technology.