10 micro-trends that will shape the future of marketing technology

Playing the “I told you so” role could 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 per cent up for 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 under our belts – the future of marketing technology seems pretty sorted.

And so, here are 10 micro-trends that will shape the future of the sector – that everyone, from marketers to vendors, should pay close attention to.

      1.       Free the marketeer (from tedious and repetitive tasks)

As the richness and complexity of data and customer demands rise, marketers will no longer be able to spend hours creating complex workflows or sifting through large data sets. Successful martech vendors will provide their users with AI enhancement across use cases.

In the near future, marketers will choose vendors based on how good they are at allowing the marketer to spend more time understanding and leveraging customer insights, rather than doing too much (unscalable) manual work.

      2.      Gain customer intimacy

Personalisation is not just the most used buzzword in marketing but also a true priority on both the marketer and the end-customer sides. This reality means that any marketing strategy that isn’t focused on creating value-based relationships with its audience is destined to fall behind.

That’s why marketers will 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 the personalised and timely marketing programmes across any channel 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-personalised marketing strategies. Rather, you need the right data. This is an understanding that is fast becoming more and more prevalent among marketing leaders.

And so, marketers will focus more on spending their time on building campaigns based on quality data and insights – instead of trying to create a campaign based on a muse-infused creative. Trained by the fire 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.      Personalisation will start from the back of the workflow

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

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

Marketing tech that does not make it incredibly easy to create such innately personalised 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.

Firstly, if marketers’ desire to create more intimate interactions is to be met, they cannot be expected to be able 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 more and more flexible, AI-based multichannel decision frameworks.

      6.      Work cohesively

The importance of marketing hubs will increase in the coming years, as marketing organisations are consistently moving to less siloed setups.

Vendors will have to acknowledge that large marketing teams face increased pressure and challenges to work as a cohesive unit. As a result, successful vendors need to provide a consistent, unified experience at every level of their solution, 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 more open suites – enabling marketers to combine one vendor’s integrated suite with a best-of-breed point solution for specific use cases.

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

Marketing technology solutions that will 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 newly acquired technology utilisation and employee skills.

As brand scrutiny of underutilised and overpriced marketing technologies increases, vendors who can prove to their buyers that they can help bridge these gaps will be those that succeed moving forwards.

For vendors, this means providing non-technical solutions for technical problems such as no-code attributes and event builders and providing clear upskill plans for teams to learn how to maximise their solutions. (such as “academy” or professional services).

      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. Vendors must have various feedback loops to ensure they allow their users’ voices to be 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 such as iOS and Android 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 being able to accurately trust their channel data and platforms not being 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 look to understand the incremental value each campaign they launch has and on which customers. The desire to be able 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 from time to time.