Marketing technology MarTech will play an even more important role in marketing as brands and advertisers continue to increase their digital spend and rely increasingly on programmatic advertising platforms, and voice technology and the Internet of Things will see more growth. All of this will make marketing more effective and MarTech will become a tool for deeper personalisation, faster and more accurate.
The challenges that marketers will face are as follows.
Getting ready for 5G
In March '18 Adobe Digital sight released a report stating that 5G is expected to be widely available by 2019, when it will generate $12 billion in mobile revenue for retailers in just three years. Faster speeds will drive the development of emerging technologies that are still in their infancy, such as AR, VR and IoT.
Todd Parsons, chief product officer at advertising agency OpenX, said 5G will force media platforms and advertisers to rethink their content strategies, saying, "5G brings big changes, such as in cars or sporting events, and it can facilitate the deep convergence of massive amounts of connectivity, such as with AR, and ultimately they will be used in exciting new ways to deliver content."
Parsons says that in order to keep pace with brands and ad technology, they should be able to handle larger volumes of data, adapt to new advertising media and innovative approaches, and build systems and processes to cope with higher transaction volumes. parsons say: "It's hard to pinpoint a specific timeframe, but at some point, existing planning and data infrastructure will need to be reconsidered and market structures will be forced to change to keep pace."
Higher demand for personalisation and AI-driven
As young shoppers age, marketers need to pay attention to the way millennials and Gen Z interact with media. In August, a VidMod survey found that younger users are not really that interested in KOLs, and are more likely to accept ads that are not only personalised, but reflect their own style. This means marketers need to find ways to keep up with the need for personalisation, and the corresponding sea of content.
Russ Perry, founder of graphic design services company Pickle, says: "The amount (and type) of content any brand can expect to produce will only continue to increase as new consumption models emerge, such as Instagram stories, 360-degree videos for VR and more." "Users are hungry for more and more content, and brands should know that if you don't go out of your way to give users better content, someone else will naturally replace you."
But the good news is that millennial and Gen Z users are actively giving up personal information for things they find valuable.
Amit Bivas, CMO of CRM Optimove, says marketers may have to rethink strategies that may have worked for Gen Z users in the past.Bivas says: "Unlike millennials and other generations, Gen Z expects brands to be loyal to them and expects highly personalised communications." "In 2019, we will see this shift drive brands to take a more sophisticated approach to their marketing technology, adding an additional layer of innate intelligence to the marketing stack through machine learning and artificial intelligence." We will see a shift across the industry to smart marketing with marketers relying heavily on rules-based marketing, where marketers simply need to set the framework of requirements and AI can start creating personalised marketing.
Mukund Ramachandran, chief marketing officer at personalisation platform Dynamic Yield, said marketers should take advantage of personalisation and the higher loyalty it will bring in the future.
"In the future, when you swipe your membership card at your favourite coffee shop, be prepared to receive personalised recommendations and ordering options, as well as promotions or offers offered to you based on your online browsing activity and payment card transactions when you go into your bank to apply for a savings account," Ramachandran said. "We're really just at the beginning of an era of mass personalisation."
The last click will (slowly) give way to the user's behavioural trajectory
Mollie Schane, director of marketing at PureCars, says: "Attribution will be a key area of focus for marketers in 2019, and the insights we can gain will continue to grow in the coming years."
Schane says: "Last-click attribution hasn't gone away, but marketers now need to focus on the entire user's behavioural trajectory to keep them engaged throughout and ultimately win their business."
Indeed, last-click attribution has given way to other metrics. Dave Pickles, CTO of demand-side advertising platform trade services company The Trade Desk, says other KPI metrics such as sales uplift and revenue increase may be more relevant to marketers.
"Last contact (attribution) has always been a convenient way for agencies to demonstrate the value they offer to their clients. But at the end of the day, it's not a metric that most brands care about because it only tells a small part of the brand-building story." Pickles said.
Simon Poulton, senior director of digital intelligence at Wpromot, agrees to some extent, "We talk about (last click) a lot, but it is greatly exaggerated because many marketers continue to use it as a 'source of truth'. " "If I had to choose a theme for 2019, it would be the democratisation of attribution," adds Poulton, "with the likes of the just-released Facebook Attribution and the soon-to-be-released Google Attribution, both of which will provide marketers with some basic attribution capabilities. Nevertheless, marketing leaders will still need a lot of education, and the process will be slow until they discover that none of the existing attribution solutions work. "
Reinforce investment in and management of your own data
The problem with the amount of data-related work that goes into collecting, storing, processing, analyzing and using to retarget customers is that there is a greater need to manage it and it is only becoming more difficult to use. A plethora of customer data platforms (CDP) have emerged over the past year to manage data, and David Raab, founder of one of these neutral vendor institutes, believes that CDP are not the answer to All user data problems are not a panacea.
Kabir Shahani, CEO and co-founder of CDP Amperity, agrees, arguing that companies will rely more on unified tools that in 2019 will allow them to use different types of third-party data collected with consent.
"Going forward, brands will continue to invest more in their own data." Shahani says, "They will still use second-party data to expand their audiences and fill in the gaps with third-party data, but the big difference is that they will come to use these assets in a more granular way." Once they have a unified, complete view of their own users based on their own data, they will automatically fill in the remaining gaps, although this will be very small, and they will use it in a way that complies with data privacy laws. The more they have control of their data, the less they will need to spend on other people's data, resulting in significant cost savings in 2019 and a more sustainable approach to customer relationships.
More data laws to follow
In addition to the GDPR, laws governing data are being tightened up around the world, for example in the US state of California where there has recently been an increasingly intense discussion about data privacy laws, as well as federal data privacy laws. It is clear that any law will have far-reaching implications for data companies as well as for those businesses that rely on data for marketing and advertising.
Omer Artun, CEO and founder of customer data platform AgilOne, says that despite the legislation, this won't necessarily have a negative impact on brands. "In fact, it will help create a more trustworthy relationship that users really want, as companies will only be able to market to customers who want to receive this kind of marketing and advertising. Users will get their marketing messages from the brands they want to engage with, rather than being bombarded with pitch after pitch from all the companies online."
Artun says this will create a stronger connection between brands and users, and in return, users will be more loyal to brands. It will also force brands to be smarter about investing in advertising to those users who are willing to accept their ads," he said. By respecting their privacy, brands can turn these new laws into a positive and win-win for them and their users."
