This time last year I put my pen down and stared into my crystal ball. What, I asked, will be the top trends in MarTech in 2023? My predictions settled around new channels that would require marketers to develop more sophisticated data strategies, more powerful consumers wanting greater transparency and a possible economic recession with the potential to change the behavior of both consumers and marketers.
Well, how did I do? I’ll let you be the judge of that.
In the coming 12 months I predict the focus will be on AI becoming mainstream, ethical AI usage and composibility. Let’s dig in a bit further shall we?
The AI genie is well and truly out of the bottle
In 2023 AI technologies emerged from experimental concept to mainstream in areas of the business such as call centres and chatbots. In 2024 the use of AI in these areas will expand. Through Improvements to the language and sentiment capabilities of the technology we will continue to see increases in satisfaction of customers who interact with these types of service functions.
We will see chatbots cross the divide from service support to conversational marketing applications where they will gather user preferences (zero party data) and recommend products or services based on the individual interactions and needs. What we will also see is the second wave of AI usage become mainstream. This will encompass techniques such as personalized shopping experiences on websites and embedded AI on platforms such as mobile phones and wearable devices.
Ethical AI usage
We know that consumers are more likely to buy if they perceive an experience is personalised to them. AI will form the core of many marketing strategies into and beyond 2024. Like the proverbial genie though marketers will need to maintain a tight control on AI platforms and their use.
The end game is to achieve an ethical and unbiased equitable AI usage model. With predictions that AI will advance to the point where it can see, hear and speak (ChatGPT for example already claims to be able to achieve this) it is critical that as marketers we maintain control over the information we feed our AI systems to support their activities. None of us want to have a petulant AI system representing us in a conversation with a customer where all the answers it provides are based on unfounded information sources or worse pure urban myth.
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Responsible Marketing
Given the demise of the 3rd party cookie and the new reliance on zero and first-party data, consumers are increasingly aware and concerned about data privacy. Pew research identified that 80% of Americans feel that risks of data collection outweigh benefits. In other words, consumers don’t see a fair value exchange. McKinsey suggests that organisations who do not address the value exchange issue will pay up to 20% more on marketing to achieve the same result as organisations who do address it.
Therefore, it is imperative that organisations address data privacy. Looking back at my 2023 predictions this is the central theme of what I referred to as the ‘dawn of data realization’. Marketers will need to create better marketing platform ecosystems that are both scalable and collaborative in nature. ‘Responsible marketing’ will become the by-line for this approach. Marketers must ensure these ecosystem platforms are architected to facilitate collaboration between different MarTech solutions and facilitation of consumer generated content. Fair and equitable data exchange and usage based on a value exchange and recognition and reward of those contributors within the ecosystem who support brand objectives and goals is also necessary.
Composability Becomes Mainstream – Welcome to the new version of plug and play.
My final prediction is that the way MarTech stacks are built and maintained will change to a building block approach based on the needs of today and predicted needs of tomorrow. Composable MarTech enables a business to choose and integrate the best-of-breed solutions from several vendors, allowing them to build a tech stack specific to their business needs or demands. This approach helps organisations quickly respond to market changes as the ‘plug and play’ nature of the components mean they can easily add or remove elements. Supporting this trend is the emergence of MarTech vendors who have moved away from the total platform approach and focused on a single feature or function and the connectivity of that into the broader ecosystem platform. This change in approach has been driven by no-code and low-code solutions delivered as SaaS solutions, making the plug and play option much more achievable. 2024 will see more of these specialist single feature MarTech products emerge and there is already strong evidence that the demand exists.
Its an exciting time to be a marketer and the potential is there to not just think outside of the box but to build outside of the box as well. We are entering an age for a marketer where if they can think it then they genuinely can deliver it.
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