Top 5 Martech Trends in 2019 That CMOs Need to Heed

Martech Trends

The coming year will allow marketing technologies to deliver deeper customisation, agile responses and much more precise tools.

AI will add massive bite to  Personalization 

The style of interaction that Millenials and Gen Z have with media, will be the secret weapon that marketers can use. Various surveys have pointed to one fact- not influencer marketing but personalised messaging that reflects their unique sense of style- will be the biggest buying influence for the new age buyers. This means much bigger volumes of content out there! Social media is precipitating the process, and so are personalised tech-products like VR, AR etc. It will be a beast with an insatiable appetite for content.

Since this generation is willing to share personal information, creating this content will not be very difficult. But brands will need to craft more sophisticated approaches to content- with extra layers of intelligence acquired through machine learning and AI into their marketing tech. This could be just the birth of an era of mass personalisation, as quoted by an imminent CMO.

 Full Customer Journey Will Matter More Than Last-Click Attribution  

With the objective of actively engaging with customers, there will need to be several and continuous touch points for customer satisfaction – and not just a single point connect or last click attribution. That remains only one part of the brand building story.

Another senior CMO has attributed the trend as “democratization of attribution”. The soon to be released Google attribution and just released FB attribution will provide the guideline, going forward, and marketers will need to learn all the tricks of the new branding era.

5G will make communication sing

Adobe Digital Insights released a report in March that said that 5G mobile speeds — expected to be available in 2019 — will translate into an additional $12 billion in mobile commerce revenue for retailers in just three years. The faster speeds will power emerging tech that’s really still in its infancy, such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and IoT. The advantages that 5G will bring will lead to a convergence of connected devices and places- giving marketers a bigger playing field.

To keep up, brands need to possess and leverage large data volumes, the infrastructure to process that, have the ability to adapt to new communication media and updated and modern approaches. With changing martech and strategies, the market will be forced to keep up as well.

Increasing  Unified First-party data management

As the volume of data grows, is collection, storage, processing, analysis will become a bigger challenge. If it needs to be used to identify customers, managing it will become a bigger challenge.   This has given rise to a number of customer data platforms (CDP) to manage data. Despite this, these may not be the only answer to solving all consumer data problems. With time, most companies will move away from end-to-end systems and more toward unified tools.

  New look on Federal Data Privacy Law

GDPR and California’s recently passed consumer-friendly data privacy law talk about a Federal data privacy law has heated up. A Federal law, though, could have far-reaching implications both for businesses that process data as well as those that rely on data for marketing and advertising.

The current draft federal privacy legislation introduced in November by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), imposes harsh penalties that include the possibility of jail time for executives who misuse customer data. To make it a little easier, enterprises and companies as well as technology groups and associations have been lobbying Congress with the hope that a federal law would pre-empt California’s law before it goes into effect in January 2020.

The new law, however, may not be all negative for consumers or for companies that anyway would like to market judiciously.