It was the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who famously said, “Change is the only constant in life”. This holds true in marketing, too; it’s a landscape in which new technologies and innovative practices are always being implemented in an effort to reach the right audiences more effectively and efficiently.
The maturation of certain trends and technologies, especially AI and automation, is set to precipitate even more significant changes in the way marketing initiatives at large are planned and conducted in the future. In this article, we’ll take a stab at predicting what some of these changes could be and how they would affect marketing activities. Here are a few likely changes in the future of marketing that CMOs can look forward to:
Advanced Attribution Technology
Customers today seamlessly switch between multiple channels during a purchase process. For instance, they may see a social media ad for your product on mobile, research the product on desktop and finally make the purchase in a physical store location. Considering this, it’s important that you’re able to track the customer’s behavior across all touch points, online and offline, to attain a single customer view or unified golden record.1
It comes as little surprise, then, that one of the key findings of Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey 2018 was that attribution technology is an area that’s attracting considerable investment from marketers. If maintained, this boost in investment should drive attribution technology advancement to a point where your analysts will have no trouble attaining that oh-so-important unified golden record of the customer. With a complete view of the customer in hand, the possibilities for analyses and optimization are endless.2,3
AI-Powered Asset Creation and Optimization
The applications of artificial intelligence are virtually limitless; for now, though, we’ll focus on its ability to create and optimize marketing assets. Until now, A/B testing has been the go-to method for marketers to test the effectiveness of different asset variants. Its downside, however, is that it’s a heavily time- and resource-intensive method. Artificial intelligence nullifies these limitations.
With AI, you can now test numerous asset variants simultaneously, all created by the technology itself. What’s more, these assets will continually optimize themselves in real time according to customer behavior. Going even further, the software can take into consideration various factors such as customer age, location, behavior history, etc. to display those variants that are most effective for each distinct group of users. This process can be used to optimize every aspect of your sales funnel, from ads and landing page designs to emails and calls to action.4
Proliferation of Digital Work Management Solutions
Organizations and their business activities are only becoming increasingly complex with time, and that’s unlikely to change in the near future. Such complexity can often lead to confusion, inefficiency, poor collaboration, lack of an overarching view of the business and a number of other issues, both, internally as well as with business partners.3
Take heart from the fact that digital work management solutions are on the rise, as evidenced by the results of Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey 2018. 53% of respondents said that they’ve either already deployed or are in the process of deploying work management solutions. These solutions serve to provide all stakeholders with the level of transparency necessary to overcome the challenges mentioned above; there will be no more doubts about task ownership, project status, delivery dates, approvals, etc. If this trend of work management platform adoption continues, the issue of lack of transparency will become a thing of the past.2,3
Recommendations and Automation for Customer Journey Touches
This is another area in which artificial intelligence will have a major role to play. Deciding what to do next in order to keep your customers advancing through their journey path will no longer be a purely human-driven exercise. Simplifying things further, the execution of these touches can be automated to varying extents.
Armed with unified golden records for your entire customer base, AI-enabled solutions can make optimal next-best-action recommendations customized for each individual customer. This level of granularity would be practically impossible to achieve without the support of AI. Not only does this keep customers from falling through cracks in your customer journey, it also greatly reduces the load on you and your team. Most touches, save those requiring human interaction with a customer, can be automated – creation of landing pages, sending emails and so on.3,5
Optimized Event-Triggered Marketing
Event-triggered marketing is all about taking action at the right moment in time – the right moment from your customer’s perspective, that is. It’s a practice that’s far from new, but, as with many things, AI and machine learning present the opportunity to optimize it in ways that were previously not possible.6
You’ll no longer have to create large segments based on assumptions about when your customers are most likely to open an email or browse through social media. Machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence can definitively extract such information for each one of your customers. These technologies can tell you what type of message to deploy on which channel at exactly what time in relation to a trigger event, thus giving you the best chance to reach your customer at the most opportune moment.3,7
All of these trends and technologies already exist and have been impactful, but they’re not yet the norm. Given a few years, though, it would be quite the surprise if they don’t become mainstream. When they do, a number of the challenges CMOs face today will be eliminated. But of course, this will bring with it a whole new set of challenges to overcome. When everybody has access to the same technology, how will a brand differentiate itself? This will be one of the next big hurdles that CMOs will face in the near future, and those that navigate it effectively will have set themselves up for success.
References:
https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/building-bridges-between-your-online-and-offline-data/
https://www.gartner.com/doc/3891975?_ga=2.225749848.398977326.1548043243-1097278382.1547707706
https://www.concured.com/blog/why-ai-is-better-than-a/b-testing
https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/event-triggered-marketing
https://www.clickz.com/how-artificial-intelligence-is-changing-email-marketing/113211/
