The world of martech (marketing technology) has seen tremendous growth in the past 3 to 4 years. The migration from traditional marketing to digital marketing has been unprecedented. Companies are increasingly investing in new and innovative martech tools as well as developing their own software. A recent survey from Sirkin research stated that 60% of businesses across the globe are planning to boost their revenue by 2X by increasing their martech spend in the next 1 year.
The COVID-19 pandemic has also been one of the primary root causes for marketers switching to digital to market their products and services. Last year, according to the CMO Spend Survey, martech spending had risen to 26.6% when compared to 12% in 2016. This number gives an inclination of how much importance companies are placing on martech tools to achieve their marketing goals and objectives.
Owing to the intense interest in martech, vendors are coming up with cutting-edge solutions that are generating a lot of excitement among marketers. As a result, let’s take a look at some of the most important martech trends for 2022:
4 Important MarTech Trends for 2022
1. AI-Powered Marketing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a number of opportunities for enterprise marketers to craft and deliver the ideal digital experience for their customers. It can be integrated with any martech stack to make it better and operate at scale. An estimate from IDC states that globally, 45% of B2C and B2B enterprises will make use of AI and machine learning (ML)-powered smart personalization for contextual customer engagement by 2023.
Some of the applications of AI and ML in digital marketing are risk prediction, smart analytics, 1:1 personalized targeting, intelligent chatbots, evolved pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, intent-based marketing, etc. In fact, AI chatbots and conversational AIs are termed as the next big thing in the martech world. A study by Salesforce revealed that in the US, brand interaction is faster for 69% of consumers using AI chatbots.
2. The Metaverse
Last year, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook Inc. (now Meta Platforms), declared that his company was committed to developing a metaverse. Microsoft also revealed that it was already developing immersive features for the metaverse. So what’s the metaverse? In simple terms, it’s an iteration of the world wide web as a single, universal virtual world that offers consumers a fully immersive experience. The technology is in its nascent stage but companies have already started their push towards it in 2022.
The metaverse has a wide variety of applications in areas such as fashion, real estate, marketing, e-learning, etc. For marketers, it’s a golden opportunity to keep consumers engaged in a virtual world by orchestrating a captivating personalized experience. By this year-end, a few metaverse-based martech tools are expected to be launched.
3. Data-Driven Insights
The impending deprecation of third-party cookies has increased the cost of customer acquisition for brands. Brands have realized that they need to focus on improving customer engagement and retention to boost their customer lifetime value (CLV). In order to do this, they are looking to invest in martech tools that specialize in these features. Tools like the Customer Data Platform (CDP) help in leveraging a brand’s first-party data to drive personalization to their customers.
The CDP has the capability to aggregate customer data from disparate data silos and unifies it to create a single view for each individual user. It gives marketers an overall view of each customer which gives insights such as their complete user journey to date, buying propensity, online and offline behavior, active-inactive status, etc. These data-driven insights enable marketers to develop a customer engagement and retention strategy which can help boost their overall CLV and create an omnichannel end-to-end customer experience across multiple channels.
4. Privacy
The decline of third-party cookies started with consumers becoming more aware of their rights around data privacy and security. 2022 is going to be a year where marketers can invest a considerable amount in martech tools that have data privacy and security as a primary feature. Today’s digital consumers are more intelligent and powerful than before. They are happy to share their first-party data with brands provided it’s not shared with others. They expect brands to use their data to deliver contextually-relevant personalized experiences. They no longer want non-personalized, generic messages.
Privacy-focused advertising and contextual targeting should be the main routes that marketers must take to cater to and target audiences. Therefore, the solution here is to invest in martech tools (such as CDPs) that deal with first-party data and have robust data privacy and security features.
Final Thoughts
Of the 4 trends above, only the metaverse is expected to take its time to develop as most vendors are still figuring it out. However, the other 3 trends are already on their way to becoming a raging inferno among vendors. The competition is becoming fierce and vendors who are proactive and invest in the right trend for their business are bound to come out on top!
By Bijoy K.B | Senior Marketing Manager at Lemnisk
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