5 Marketing Technology Trends for 2020 and beyond
Now we’re a couple of months into 2020, it’s now we can look back and see that 2019 was a pivitol year for MarTech, and looking forward thought we’d highlight where we think activity will be concentrated going forward.
Here are Team6ix’s top 5 marketing technology trends for 2020 and beyond:
Marketing operations drives continuous transformation
A trend on the rise is that of marketing operations. According to Martech: 2020 and beyond, the top priorities in Martech budgets for next year will be market research as well as competitive insights.
The emphasis on marketing operations this year and beyond reflects not only the necessity for teams to get full value out of the company Martech spend, but to revalue how marketing teams operate effectively to get the job done. This includes and increase in digital technology implementation, project management and improving business management at the core of marketing activity. For a great number of teams, a strong marketing operations function underpins the flow of the digital transformation they are now undertaking.
AI will be a big game-changer when it comes to improving all aspects of marketing
Nearly half of all companies (49%) already have an artificial intelligence strategy in place, according to Microsoft, with those who were early adopters in the UK seeing a 5% improvement in productivity and performance compared with companies that haven’t implemented AI.
So what can we expect from AI in 2020?
From the use of natural language processing to understand and improve customer service (Dubber are an example of a company enjoying success when to comes to developing AI that records and analyses sentiment on customer calls), to gathering and providing deeper data insights: How AI will be used in marketing is growing.
The use of chat-bots who have the ability to understand natural language queries is just one example that springs to mind, or the emergence of platforms which automate routing of tasks and activity based on learned patterns.
Overall Marketing Budgets will shrink, but Martech spend will increase
Marketing spend is expected to decrease overall for the first time in 5 years according to the annual Gartner CMO Spend Survey for 2019-2020, which surveyed more than 340 marketing decision makers from the UK and US.
However, within the last year Gartner reported Martech spending rose over a quarter to take up to 29% of total budgets. The global marketing technology market is now valued at an estimated $121.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of 22%. That growth is unlikely to decrease any time soon given the many factors fuelling it and the increasing advances in technology. These technologies draw audiences into new channels, meaning that companies need to think about investing in new areas, such as the aforementioned AI technology.
We don’t expect martech spend to continue increasing at the same, fast rate, but it should grow steadily. Many companies only utilise approximately two-thirds of their current martech capability. We expect better use to be made of platforms that perform multiple tasks, and investment will increase in new and developing areas.
Increased emphasis on improved marketing process automation
When faced with tightening budgets, where is best to spend your money: On marketing activity, reducing staff, or by generating efficiencies in other ways?
Additional moves to rein in costs will mean that marketing teams that continue to employ inefficient, dated processes to run their businesses are in for a potential shock.
Reflected in a growing interest in work management tools, planning tools, process management tools, content syndication tools, 2020 will see enterprise marketing teams look to automate as many of their business’ processes.
Platform-based ecosystems will expand reach and influence
Arguably one thing preventing Martech from delivering on its promise of a scalable, measurable, smoothly functioning marketing machine is the problem of integrating all the various technologies that teams use.
A huge number of businesses say that their marketing technology is not delivering, with CMOs and other marketing executives frustrated with the lack of integration between their marketing tools.
This year we’re predicting a higher percentage of marketing teams will start turning (if they haven’t already) to platform-based ecosystems to help greater integration between tools.
See some of our other martech-related blogs here