What are your big bets for digital marketing in the next 1-2 years? As a marketing strategist and practitioner inside a major brand, I need to focus on what will accelerate and improve business in the near term in addition to building a foundation for tomorrow.
So, timing is everything. As I look back on the past few years and where momentum is growing, here are the few trends that I really do expect significant activity and gains over the next 12-24 months.
Practical Applications of AI
The subtitle of Ajay Agrawal (co-authors Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb) Prediction Machines is “The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence.” Hearing Ajay speak recently, I have come to appreciate the simple idea that AI enables more efficient predictions which are key to decision-making. Think about operations in marketing where we could use some cheaper predictions – like which audiences will respond to specific marketing efforts, which customers are more likely to buy a next product or which customers are most likely to become your most valuable.
Targeting, segmentation, creative and messaging are all ripe territories for machine learning improvements. Clearly the “digital gatekeepers” – Google, Amazon, Facebook – are all over AI. Google appears to be investing about $3.9 billion; Amazon about $871 million (from TechRepublic). Their interests go far beyond marketing yet you can bet they are using AI to enhance their leadership in that space.
AI could easily become the new every-year prediction like mobile did for many years – “this is the year of mobile.” Still, we will see more brands practically using AI in their marketing efforts.
Marketers will find it easier to rent AI solutions even as they negotiate with internal IT teams to establish a competitive edge capability in-house.
Persado integrates AI to control advertising messaging and essentially predict which messages will drive the most action. Gone are the clumsy days when we craft multiple exections and optimize to the high performer. Persado can improvise at scale (I know, it’s hardly improvisation – just good old machine learning)
A lot of brands will gain experience with AI via a big platform like Salesforce Einstein. From big ambitions around workflow automation to narrow use cases like email send time optimization, marketers will gain experience via these partners. As eMarsys puts it, AI will “identify the optimal time for emails to be sent for each contact – not segments, not groups, but individuals.”
More ‘Full Stack’ B2B Sales and Marketing
We have been doing some terrific work with Account Based Marketing (ABM) over the past couple of years and will continue to lean into it in 2020. One of the by products of trying to make the full potential of ABM work is establishing a more complete martech integration between your marketing automation and sales automation capabilities. While some companies may already have that level of sales and marketing sophistication, many more are like us – in the process.
This year, we will see more brands putting that “full stack” into service to run fully instrumented marketing and sales programs. That may be why there is softening in martech investments (from Martech Today).
Brands have the tech, they just don’t have all the talent they need or haven’t connected it all. As Martech Today puts it,
“Martech allocations may be down in 2019, but according to Gartner, marketing leaders continue to see martech as a tool for driving customer engagement and growth. According to last year’s survey, marketers indicated they only use 61% of the functionality available in their martech portfolio. A reported lack of resources was identified as a common organizational challenge.”
More brands will do the hard work of connecting sales and transaction data to track the impact of integrated sales and marketing activities. I would peg 2021 or later for serious weighted attribution analytics to understand better how various channels and tactics contributed to that sale.
A Strategic Commitment to Conversational Marketing
There is a profound shift for marketers embedded in the term ‘conversational marketing’ - a shift towards designing marketing to solve customer problems; a shift to catching up to what Google already knows about people (they are seeking answers not your Web site); a shift towards brands embracing their authority.
The folks at Drift point out the frustrations people have getting answers on the Web:
When brands deploy digital agents or ‘chatbots’ designed to get people to helpful answers quickly or navigate a process as simply as possible, that’s conversational marketing. When brands design voice skills on Alexa that simply must be of-use to people to even get enabled, that’s conversational marketing. When brands deploy live chat across platforms to become pervasively available, that’s conversation marketing.
A prediction that we will see more AI-powered chatbots this year isn’t much of a prediction (we will). If anything, chatbots as the primary manifestation of conversational marketing will give way to more complete strategies around interacting with people in new, streamlined ways to get them the answers they need. This customer-focused approach pays off for the brand by building greater consideration through every useful interaction.
As marketers, we need to solve peoples’ pain points, make their lives better and save them time and anxiety while doing it. Conversational marketing does that.
The less obvious benefit or outcome for brands answering questions or simplifying a process for people is to firmly place the brand in a position of authority on topics. It builds trust. And in an online world full of dodgy, untrustworthy information, brands need to step up. One company that is building a business around creating brand authority is Yext (disclosure: we are doing some work with these folks right now). They ask a simple question,
“Every day customers ask questions about your brand. Shouldn’t the answers come from you?”
They are setting up services that aim to put brands in the driver’s seat of answers. It may start with listings and local search but the application and the intersection with conversational marketing is huge. For packaged goods companies, it might be consumer questions on ingredients or nutritional value. For an insurance company, it might extend beyond core product attributes to authority on risk prevention.
Three Trends in 2020
Three trends in digital marketing for 2020 include the everyday application of artificial intelligence, the hardening of the full stack in marketing and sales automation, and the prioritization of conversational marketing. These are practical predictions from a marketer within a rather large enterprise brand. That means they are more about what I expect to happen within 12 months, not ‘maybe someday’ predictions.
What do you see coming around the next corner?
Other Good POVs:
Four Digital Marketing Trends Poised to Disrupt in 2020 - Prophet
2020 Digital Marketing Trends - Adroll
How AI Will Transform Marketing in 2020 -Martech Advisor
Trends in 2020 to Look Out For in Digital Marketing - Entrepreneur
Conversational Marketing Guide - Hubspot
From NextNow Digital:
Simple Customer Journeys Drive Marketing Strategy
One of the real gems of planning methods, Drivers and Barriers, examines a particular customer persona at a stage in their journey, e.g., discovery, education/engagement, etc., and using any available research, identifies the drivers and barriers. Click the link to learn more.
How Generative AI Will Change Visuals in Marketing
AI-generated text is one thing, but visuals are a different story. MidJourney, DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion are super-interesting visual playgrounds creating extraordinary fantasy images or increasingly realistic people or creatures. Click the link to learn about the innovators like KittyKat.
The Next-Gen Digital AdvertisingToolbox
A lot of businesses may be wasting their money on digital advertising. They struggle to use it well and gain enough efficiency for a positive return on their media investment. Here's a toolbox that works in the face of higher ad costs and lower effectiveness. Click on the link.
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