Five trends to improve your martech strategy in 2019

It’s been a very exciting year for martech and we’re ready to make the most of 2019 by following the latest trends. Here’s everything you need to know.

Marketing technology is having an increased focus among marketers. More of us realise how the right tech can boost our marketing efforts and we’re now ready to adapt our strategies for 2019.

As martech becomes more important in a digital strategy, the biggest challenge is to decide how to use your time, your budget and your skills to ensure that you use technology to your meet your goals.

After a closer look at the martech stats of 2018 and the insights that we’ve been covering, we are looking at the key trends that will shape our martech strategy in 2019.

Improved data measurement

Marketing technology allows you to access an endless number of data. The problem is that it can also be intimidating for many marketers.

According to our recent survey, 33% of brands feel that their biggest challenge in marketing measurement is the ‘data’ complexity’. This means that the more data they access through new technology, the harder it gets to analyse it.

Moreover, 34% of our respondents said that they are currently analysing less than 20% of all the consumer data that’s available to them. This leads to missed opportunities or even wasted budget in technology that they’re not taking advantage of it.

Despite the ‘data complexity’ there seems to be an increased interest in understanding data and using technology in the most efficient way.

A good way to welcome 2019 more confidently in data measurement is to start asking the right questions. Find your key metrics and discover the right tools that will help you reach your goals.

Increased investment in martech

There is an increased investment in marketing technology, which is not expected to slow down in 2019. Martech budgets have increased by 44% in 2018 and the current market size for martech is estimated to be of $99.9 billion.

According to Gartner’s report, marketers spent 29% of their marketing budget in technology.

What’s also encouraging is that according to WARC’s recent report, 63%of the tech budgets in North America are spent in-house. This means that there is a growing understanding that martech can be a long-term investment and they are willing to use the budget and the time towards it.

We’ve also found in our own report that 43% of marketers are ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ to invest in new measurement tech in 2019.

What can we learn from all these stats? More marketers are interested in understanding the benefits of martech. It’s not enough anymore to increase your budget, but it’s now becoming critical to analyse the data that you are getting access to.

The rise of attribution technology

Traditional attribution strategies cannot be effective anymore, More campaigns are spreading across different channels and audiences and it’s important to measure their success. It’s not enough to say that marketing is probably influencing a purchasing decision. We now want to find as many details as possible of the best-performing channels and the best attribution points.

That’s how attribution technology got popular with more marketers investing time and budget on it. We’ve found in our report that 29% of the respondents use attribution technology on all their digital marketing campaigns.

However, there’s still a long way to go, as only 9% of marketers have an ‘excellent’ understanding of what multi-touch attribution is.

As more attribution tech choices show up, it’s time to understand which tactics are more helpful for our own campaigns.

There’s no need to invest time and money in new platforms if you’re unsure how you define success and which channels currently work best for you.

Thus, one of our new year’s resolutions for martech would be to spend more time on analysing our touch points and how they affect our funnels.

Using the right number of platforms

Once your team agrees that it’s time to invest in marketing technology, you need to decide on the platforms that you want to try out.

A good way to get started is to set your objectives and the challenges that you want to overcome. Choosing the right technology can be a difficult decision. But you can make it easier by prioritising your needs and your business objectives.

It is estimated that businesses currently use an average of seven platforms. There is even an interest to invest in more platforms in 2019 from many marketers.

What we all need to remember is that each platform requires time and budget to set it up and make it work for our campaigns.

You need to get your team on board to make the most of it. Most importantly, you need to find a way to organise the data.

As the martech landscape keeps growing, marketers should focus on the key platforms that will benefit their strategy. If you’ve managed to supercharge your marketing tactics with e.g. ten platforms, then feel free to try additional ones that can help you even more.

However, if you’re currently using five platforms but can’t tell how to unify the data to draw valid conclusions, then maybe you need to spend more time on your current data.

There will be more consolidations coming up in the martech world. There will always be new platforms showing up. All we need is to find the right platforms to invest in.

Bringing the human element to automation

Marketing automation can be a powerful addition to your strategy. However, it’s tempting to automate too many tasks in your campaign. This brings out the risk of losing the human element in your work.

As technology evolves, the biggest challenge will be to stay authentic and true to your brand voice. Customers won’t appreciate an experience that lacks the human element. Whether it’s AI or machine learning, we will still need our team to make technology work to our own goals.

And this is an important lesson that we can learn as we spend more time with new technologies. As Scott Brinker says, “martech isn’t about your stack, it’s about your impact.”

Overview

2019 should be another exciting year for martech. As we tend to acknowledge its benefits, we are more eager to explore additional uses to improve our campaigns

A good way to start the year is to decide on your key objectives and the challenges that you want to overcome.

Start small with the tools that can be more useful for you and pick the metrics that you’ll measure your success.

Let’s focus in 2019 more on marketing enablement and the humanisation of our strategy to allow technology to fill the gaps that matter the most.

The post Five trends to improve your martech strategy in 2019 appeared first on ClickZ.

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