The world of marketing is going through a stage of structural transformation driven by technological advances that promise to change the way marketers work in the upcoming years. We review the top 5 tecnologies that will revolutionise marketing in the future.
Long gone are the days when technology was only domain of the IT department. Today, pretty much all areas of a business use technology in their daily tasks and are influenced by technological advances that shape the way they work and the way they understand business operations.
Marketing is undoubtedly one of the business areas that has experienced the greatest evolution in terms of the adoption of technologies that automate and optimise marketing processes, as well as altering the way in which the activity itself is conceived. It is no secret that marketing is increasingly moving towards digital marketing, marketing intelligence and data-driven marketing.
According to Forrester, global investment in marketing automation will continue to grow year after year until 2023. The martech market is also exponentially gorwing.
However, technology does not only affect marketing on the technical side. Technological advances have changed the way customers think, with customers getting used to personalised customer experiences and automated customer journeys. In fact, consumer expectations are moving faster than marketing itself, so companies must strive to drive data-driven transformation and move their business culture towards a customer-centric perspective.
Those companies that have not yet invested in martech technologies and embraced the latest marketing trends are already late, since technology will revolutionise the industry even further in the next 5 years.
The adoption of artificial intelligence to optimise marketing processes is nothing new. Marketers are already applying it to better collect customer data, as well as for personalised recommendations. AI is one of the key technologies in terms of one of the most promising marketing trends of recent times: the move towards creating content, campaigns and any kind of communication tailored to meet the client's interests. In this sense, strategies such as customer segmentation also play a fundamental role, as well as tools to better understand customers.
In the years to come, it will be essential for brands to have their buyer personas well defined and to have a complete understanding of who their target customers are in order to offer them exactly what they need.
Artificial intelligence has a leading role to play in all of this. According to a research conducted by Verified Marketing Research at the end of 2021, the global AI market will grow from $51 billion in 2020 to $641 billion in 2028. Thus, AI will continue to be a key part of future marketing, whether in the use of chatbots, predicting consumer behaviour or creating intelligent algorithms..
Due to the importance of content and customer experience personalisation, as well as companies' growing need to know more and more information about consumers, the creation of 360º customer profiles is one of the most important trends for the future.
When we talk about 360º customer profiles, we are referring to the constitution of an information base that integrates all customer data in order to build a complete profile. Today, the vast majority of corporations have more customer data than they make use of. One of the main reasons is that customer data is stored in different systems across different departments. In other words, customer data is not unified and information is not shared. This makes it impossible for the marketing department to have a single and complete customer view.
However, there is a new technology is changing the game: the Customer Data Platform (CDP). CDP promises to be one of the most influential technology systems in marketing in the next 5 years.
When Facebook announced its imminent name change to Meta in October 2020, most of us heard about the Metaverse for the first time and thought Mark Zuckerberg had lost his mind. However, months later, the Metaverse is already a reality and a large number of the leading companies in the market have already invested in it. According to Bloomberg, investment in the Metaverse will reach 800 billion dollars by 2024.
The new virtual world will not only transform our sense of community, but will also push us further towards a multi-sensorial digital marketing that must necessarily embrace virtual reality and augmented reality to survive.
Although we are in the early days of the Metaverse and do not know how it's going to be yet, companies must begin to prepare for it. Many are already doing so.
Are you still not convinced about the huge influence the Metaverse will have? Well, the new virtual world is already suggesting that Web 3.0 is about to change the Internet.
Incredible as it may seem, we are still at the Web 2.0 stage. However, the proliferation and growth of technologies such as cryptocurrencies, blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are already transforming the Internet and bringing us closer than ever to Web 3.0.
One of the most significant features of Web 3.0 from a business point of view is decentralisation. The new Internet will allow users and companies to access and store data and information simultaneously from anywhere in the world.
In marketing, Web 3.0 is expected to enable professionals to create multi-sensory and immersive content and campaigns through artificial intelligence. In addition, advances in natural language processing will improve search engine results and, together with the Metaverse, open new doors for communication, marketing and advertising.
Beyond the Metaverse, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are already well established in the martech world, with numerous examples of companies using these technologies to create immersive customer experiences.
Certainly, the use of VR and AR in marketing is not yet mainstream, but everything suggests that their usage for creating multi-sensory virtual experiences will only increase in the coming years.
Conclusion
The next few years are going to transform the business world and marketing. Predictions on the impact of technology can cause both companies and users to feel scared. However, all evidence suggests that the 5 technologies mentioned in this article are already unstoppable. So, those companies which do not want to be left behind need to start preparing for the new era.
At Kale we are experts in digital transformation and we offer complete support to companies that want to start their journey towards data-driven and customer-centric transformation. In addition, we are also experts in the deployment and implementation of CDP systems.
Are you ready to initiate this exciting journey? Talk to us, we would love to guide you!