1. Marketing budgets will shrink, but martech spending will rise.
According to the annual Gartner survey, top-line marketing spending will decline for the first time in 5 years. However, last year, Gartner reported martech spending rose to 29% of the total budgets. Usually, these remain at the same level around 25%.
Nevertheless, the global marketing technology trends show an increase of 22%, according to Martech: 2020 and beyond. That growth will not change as many factors fuel it.
These factors include:
- Advances in technology that attracts audiences into new channels, resulting in the need for investing in new areas.
- Growth in areas companies can’t neglect, such as artificial intelligence.
In the actual cautious economic environment, martech spending may not increase at the same pace, but it will grow constantly. While marketers use about two-thirds of their current martech tools’ capacity, according to a Gartner study, the actual toolset will be reassessed.
The savings will be made by rationalizing the tools that serve a single purpose, and by putting at better use platforms that perform multiple tasks while investment is redirected to new and developing areas.
2. AI will be applied to improve marketing efforts.
Half of all businesses already implemented an artificial intelligence approach, according to Microsoft. So what to expect in the quickly developing world of AI in 2021?
The variety of AI applications in marketing is expanding:
- Employment of natural language processing to recognize and enhance customer service.
- Customer engagement to organizing and presenting data insights for enhanced customization.
The use of chatbots with the ability to interpret natural language questions is just one of the more notable examples.
According to Unbounce, 2021 will be the year AI transforms the marketing brief.
AI will support marketers in creating the marketing strategy by anticipating, providing answers and feedback regarding:
- The measures to use to evaluate the marketing performance of the brief, campaign, or activity
- The competition relevant in the brief
- The inputs from customers ready to be examined
- The legal and regulatory concerns of a brief
- Type of media recommended and the estimated timeframe to complete the communication goals
AI can also:
- Outline a brief aloud in a foreign language for colleagues in foreign offices
- Repurpose and show the brief for a campaign for employees and stakeholders.
The practical application of AI to anticipate and improve marketing performance changes the course and increases retention of the marketing teams.
3. Conversational marketing spend will rise.
Conversational marketing focuses on measurable engagement with customers in real-time to provide them with what they want at the right time.
It simulates the conversational tone of human messaging, but it’s about urgency.
Conversational marketing intends to involve customers in a conversation immediately they reach your website to meet their needs with minimal friction.
For instance, if users want to talk with a salesperson, they won’t need to fill out a form, send an email, and wait to be contacted. They will simply make a request and your chatbot will present them offers or suggestions to advance them through the sales funnel faster or solve their customer issue.
4. Platform-based systems will expand.
Possibly the one thing hindering martech from delivering on its assurance of a measurable, seamlessly functioning marketing engine is the challenge of integrating the different technologies that teams employ.
Marketing teams will turn to platform-based systems to facilitate the synthesis of tools by taking advantage of current connectors.
Marketers will be able to connect their preferred marketing cloud that is expanded by large systems of functional third-party apps more strongly integrated.
5. Search snippets and the voice-based search will become prevalent.
Search engine optimization is moving from keyword-matching to intent-matching more rapidly, being powered by the growth in natural language processing.
Combined with this trend, voice-based search is increasing, especially over home devices and mobile.
According to PwC, 65% of 25-49-year-olds use their voice-enabled devices at least one time a day.
At the same time, the content structure will be critical to businesses. It will be the determinant factor those that anticipate voice search to be a determinant for them, while many of them withdraw from ‘position zero’ search snippets that compile key points.
Following this trend is the increase in zero-click searches, where users obtain the needed information from the home page of their search results. Hence, marketers should reconsider the development of the visual search as a key factor.
6. Emphasis on improved marketing process automation will increase.
As 2020 reflected the increasing interest in work management tools, in 2021 the focus will be for enterprise marketing teams to automate most of their operations.
Meanwhile, the next best action is to merge marketing processes across channels. Along with constant planning that includes real-time results, this merger will empower brands to swiftly react to ever-changing conditions in an agile way.
This coordination will become a competitive advantage just like AI-powered chatbots are transforming customer service.
7. In-house marketing will continue to expand.
Marketing skills are being practiced in-house more and more, from SEO to content marketing, to video production, although expensive brand campaigns will continue to be assigned to external agencies.
According to the ANA, 78% of marketing teams have some kind of in-house marketing agency and this trend is rising.
Handling and prioritizing needs into marketing becomes a crucial skill in this scenario, assisted by the proper workflow management technology.
8. The demand for low-code platforms will rise.
This martech trend is about enabling non-technical marketers to create apps, examine data sets, and map data between different cloud services individually, without involving the IT department, or even marketing operatives.
It’s a trend corporations such as Zapier and Microsoft have embraced:
- Zapier by enabling non-technical users to join different technologies.
- Microsoft by investing in the Power Platform, which empowers users to interpret data, build solutions, automate operations, and design virtual agents (bots) without having a technical background.
According to Forrester, the demand for low-code platforms destined for non-technical users is rising.
In marketing, this suggests that if the core marketing cloud of your martech stack enables it, your marketing team will have the capability of creating its apps to respond to customer or organizational requirements.
Bottom Line
This is a summary of the top martech trend arising in the year ahead. In this article, we admit we haven’t addressed big tech trends, such as blockchain, augmented reality, and personalization. We believe that they are inclined to become mainstream in the years beyond 2020.
No matter martech trends may develop, we hope your marketing team will leverage them and boost your bottom line.
PLEXKITS can help your marketing team market become brighter, agile, and stronger. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us for more information. We’d love to hear from you.