The startling pace of innovation means the business world is evolving at a much more rapid rate than any point in history. For businesses that want to stay on top of the latest trends and enjoy the benefits of maximum efficiency and output, understanding these trends and implementing the appropriate tools and systems is leading to greater success.
Martech is one field that’s especially interesting intriguing.
What is Martech?
Martech is simply the industry buzzword for marketing technology – which is one of the hottest areas of innovation in all of corporate America. It’s a sweeping term that’s broad in its definition and usage, but it’s significant, nonetheless.
“Every piece of technology a marketer uses to reach a potential customer is martech,” says John Koetsier, mobile economist at Tune, a mobile analytics and performance marketing company. “Everything from an email marketing system like MailChimp to social media marketing platform like HootSuite.”
In almost every case, Martech companies operate on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model. Brands pay these vendors a monthly or yearly fee to use their software, which makes the technology highly scalable and low-risk (in terms of financial investment). There’s also the benefit of not having to maintain on-premise solutions, which offloads some of the responsibility and frees up internal resources to be allocated in other areas.
The Top Martech Trends Worth Watching
The past 12-18 months have been catalytic in the martech niche. Big things are happening and promising new developments are paving the way for powerful change.
Here are a few of the top martech trends leaders in the business world are keeping an eye on:
1. Emotion Analysis
One of the more intriguing trends in martech is what’s happening with facial recognition and voice analysis. Advanced tools are able to evaluate the sentiments and emotions of customers across multiple touchpoints – including social media and customer service. This allows brands to put interactions into context and do a better job of engaging customers where they are.
2. Personalized Marketing
“Many know how industry leaders such as Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube have utilized personalized marketing to dominate their respective markets,” management consulting firm Credera explains. “These organizations leverage a user’s history to recommend additional items for purchase or possible content to explore. That being said, other companies such as TD Bank and Hilton Worldwide have also seen success by creating a culture centered around the customer and their needs.”
This is the new shift in personalized marketing. It’s no longer just traditional technology companies that are using personalization to reach customers. Companies outside of tech niches are also using it to tailor their customer experiences and create competitive advantages.
3. Voice Assistants
Most people are aware of the rise in voice assistants over the years. Almost every leading technology brand has some sort of investment in a voice platform. From Apple and Google to Amazon and Microsoft, it’s all hands on deck here.
What will be most interesting to watch is how these tech companies address the content side of things. There are huge marketing opportunities here, and the belief is that voice assistants will play a key role in brand-consumer interactions in the very near future.
Big Developments are Coming
With as much innovation as there has been in the martech niche over the past year and a half, the expectation is there will be even more in the coming months. Businesses and business leaders would do well to keep an eye on some of these shifts, evolutions, and progressions to get a better idea of where things are headed.
As a result of this need to stay on top of martech trends, the expectation is that there will be an increase in martech hiring over the course of the next year.
“Once relegated to simply another emerging role that would eventually be forgotten, the marketing technologist role has instead been fully accepted as a necessary C-level role for marketing-driven companies,” says Tim Johnson, CEO of Mondo, a leading digital marketing and IT staffing company. “Companies that don’t explicitly have a chief marketing technologist will be reevaluating their CMO’s skill set to ensure that he or she has the technological skills martech demands.”
In this sense, martech has the potential to galvanize significant change at an executive leadership level – a huge shift that could have lasting ramifications throughout the business world.
