Marketing technology, or martech, refers to software or platforms that help organizations to achieve their marketing goals. The term covers everything from email templates to data analytics. Every company has unique martech needs.
In this century, the martech industry has seen tremendous growth. Martech technology has helped people to automate and optimize their marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look at some automated martech that is popularly used before considering how we are now moving beyond the current systems of automation.
Martech Landscape
Martech is a broad umbrella term that includes many different technologies and processes. It includes email marketing. According to surveys, 50% of people check their email ten or more times a day. Email marketing is an easy way to reach your audience. Email marketing automation can disseminate your emails and provide analytical data that shows how much response you are getting from your target market.
Content management systems can enable us to develop various websites; social networking, blogging platforms, static websites, news, and online stores. Managing website content used to be exhausting and time-consuming, but this new marketing technology allows many processes to be automated.
Data analytics can be utilized to gain an understanding of customer preferences. This can include where they shop and how they spend their time online. Diving deep into customer data sets can provide a map of how they operate online. You can follow a customer’s journey from initial interest all the way to making a purchase.
The Changing Landscape of Marketing
With the development of new AI technologies, martech is now moving beyond mere automation. Instead of simply focusing on the mechanization of email campaigns, app store optimization, and other processes, martech is now developing a marketing intuition. This means that it can actively predict what a customer is going to do or what they will want next.
Marketing was previously focused on educating consumers. However, customers now do their own research online about what they want to purchase. In this new landscape, the marketing focus moves from educating the customer to anticipating what they will do next. This means putting options that they are likely to buy in front of them.
Brand awareness has traditionally been the central tenet of marketing. Simply making your brand known, getting your product in front of customers, and letting them know why they needed it, was the central goal of marketing.
These days, customer engagement is becoming more and more central in the marketing world. With the internet, information about brands is widely available to anyone who wants them. Personalizing your message to each customer is now more key than ever to successful marketing.
Predictive Marketing
Marketing was initially done manually. This was very painstaking and time-consuming. It then moved to automation, and this led to a lot of time saved. We are now moving from automation towards predictive marketing.
A marketing team no longer needs to rely on their intuition or imagination to predict what customers will buy. They can use intelligent software tools that look at vast amounts of data and find patterns.
There are two primary needs for martech technology – engagement and insight. Engagement means knowing how to execute marketing campaigns across various channels. Insight can help with, for example, assessing which content a consumer should see next while browsing a website. It can also assess an individual customer and determine what would work best for them, i.e., which email sequence or product they should see next.
Martech Ahead
In the past, marketers would have to think about what to do once a customer abandoned their online shopping cart or what to do after a customer made their first purchase. They would likely look at previous data and then make a decision.
Today’s self researching customers have many thought processes before making a purchase. Marketers need to try and keep up, and this is where predictive marketing comes in. The software is smart enough to sift through vast piles of data and make decisions. It will decide what to offer a website visitor next, what email to send, which discount or product bundle will be the most appealing.
Sifting through this kind of data to make consumer predictions is almost impossible for humans. Predictive marketing goes a step further than automation, and it doesn’t only automate the mechanics of marketing but also automates decision-making.
This is the new, smarter automation. We could call it the “third wave” of marketing. Tracking, campaigns, engagement, analysis, and now also decision making can all be carried out by intelligent platforms. Let’s look at some more specific functions of this AI technology and how it can help marketers.
Smarter Segmentation
By crunching a ton of data, AI systems can help to put consumers into ever more refined categories and sub-categories. For example, an outdoor clothing store may have an audience segment of “hikers”. AI will divide hikers into smaller subcategories, perhaps splitting them into “family road-trippers” and “tech-savvy hikers”.
Product recommendations can then be tailored for these smaller subcategories, resulting in more precise targeting. Family road trippers may be shown hiking gear for kids, whereas tech-savvy hikers may be offered the latest solar lights.
Within these subcategories, this AI technology can also identify the unique traits of each customer. Marketing can be very individually tailored and used to build one on one customer relationships.
Lead Conversion
These AI solutions take the guesswork out of marketing decisions. Marketers can now personalize the customer journey. This leads to more successful transitions through marketing funnels and, ultimately, more conversion into sales.
Einstein Engagement Scoring uses customer data to assign a score to a company’s email subscribers. This predicts the likelihood of customers engaging with your email campaigns, and it can tell you how likely a customer is to open an email, click links, or stay subscribed.
Customers with a low probability of opening emails could then be targeted through other channels, such as social media or SMS.
Personalized Messages
AI algorithms can look at a customer’s age, browsing history, and recent engagement with a brand. They can then give them the landing page that is most likely to resonate with them. The same goes for copy used in advertising. AI can look at real-time data and select the copy that is most likely to strike a chord with a specific customer.
Engagement frequency can even tell you the optimum number of emails to send customers, so they don’t feel they are being spammed. It can tell you which customers are being communicated with too little or too often.
These days, a good product is not enough. Customers value their experience with a company more and more. AI can allow for more personalized messaging to be sent across all channels. This new technology boosts understanding of customer behavior and will enable companies to provide the optimum experience for each customer.
In Conclusion
Marketing technology, or martech, has long been used to help marketers achieve their sales targets. It has helped to automate many processes, from email marketing to content management systems. With the development of new technologies and AI systems, martech is now going a step further. These systems are developing a kind of marketing intuition.
By crunching huge amounts of data, these systems can predict customer behavior. This allows marketers to personalize the customer journey. Marketers can now offer different landing pages, copy, and advertising, according to a customer’s previous behavior trends. This increases engagement, customer satisfaction and helps to boost sales.
Welcome to the brave new world of marketing!