It’s not just about the martech stack anymore. This is the CX stack, the tried and true methods of capturing customers you don’t want to forget.
In a challenging economic landscape, marketers are forced to evaluate which technology is truly impacting business and revenue goals.
We’ve identified six martech categories—three legacy and three emerging—that no marketer can afford to ignore right now. But using them in the same old or limited way can be counterproductive in the evolution of today’s landscape. These six martech categories are “must-haves,” but they’re also “must-haves.”
1. Email Marketing
Email: A key pillar of “property marketing” is more important than ever in a world of first-party data. It has stood the test of time, even as a new and complex ecosystem of marketing technology has grown up around it.
This has led to two challenges. First, he said Will Devlinvice president of marketing a MessageGears, is figuring out email’s place in the overall marketing mix and making sure it works cohesively with all other CX touchpoints. Second, its legacy status often misleads marketers into making a typical mistake: not investing enough or in the right way to upgrade their email marketing technology capabilities.
Eyal ManorProduct Director of Twilio, he also cautioned against posting on large lists full of inactive or unresponsive customers. Not only do they reduce overall engagement rates and annoy customers, they also put you at risk of increased spam complaint rates and breach of privacy laws.
what to change
Update your email strategy and technology!
For the former, focus on smoother integration into new and complex CX workflows, data, privacy and compliance, and evolved measurement metrics.
For technology, explore ways to leverage email’s visual advantage. Mobile-optimized email, video in email, seamless social media connections, click-to-share and chat links, and interactivity with polls, quizzes, and gamification are all worth exploring. “It would be foolish to overlook upgrading this component of the technology stack,” Devlin said.
2. Marketing analytics
In a 2022 Twilio report, 63% of consumers said they are satisfied with personalization, but want brands to use their own data and not data from third parties. Marketing analytics stacks that collect and analyze proprietary data help brands be both consumer and privacy first.
This means that instead of expanding, collecting disconnected data from each channel, next-generation marketing analytics will focus on digging deeper into each customer’s life. The goal is to analyze a connected (non-fragmented) view of each customer’s life across all the channels they use, with prescriptive, predictive and real-time marketing analytics to support smarter decision-making.
what to change
Find ways to reframe your marketing analytics around the customer instead of the channel or campaign. This approach will not only support your CX goals, but also increase customer lifetime value and reduce customer acquisition costs.
Also, invest some time in exploring the hidden parts of your customer journey: unseen interactions that marketing attribution systems can’t track, but that affect customer decisions at every stage of the journey.
Related article: Removing vanity metrics from the Analytics portfolio
3. Search engine optimization
Arguably, the biggest evolution in search engine optimization (SEO) is in the areas of voice-activated search. This will be a new skill for marketers as consumers’ voice search behavior is different from text search, with longer and more nuanced sentences delivering tone and involvement. Coupled with increasingly AI-based search engines, search results are not only more powerful, but also much more granular and predictive.
what to change
Without delay, start preparing your content for video and voice search, image optimization, and overall improvement of content credibility and authority.
4. Video experiences and virtual events
While video seemed like it would be the next big thing when the pandemic hit, the challenge now is to sustain the use of video and virtual events to continue to engage audiences.
with 66% of consumers willing to pay for a virtual event that has better content production and quality, Manor said the bar is already high when it comes to creating personalized virtual event experiences. “It is estimated that 20% of all online conversions will be driven by short and live video in 2026, but winning is about the quality of the content.” He gave the example of Barry’s Bootcampwhich has grown 6x in membership by investing in videos that closely mirror the physical interactive classroom experience.
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There is no doubt that consumers watch relevant video content. But relevance is more than the message: it’s also the channel, the timing and the context. Figure these elements in full for the winning formula; that is, your video content is found, clicked, consumed, and preferably shared.
what to change
Optimizing video search, getting captions right so videos can be viewed effectively without sound, and ensuring contextual relevance between text and video content are key tactics to hit right now.
5. Chatbots and conversational AI
Instant messaging, text, SMS or voice chatbots are evolving rapidly and offer a great time to help brands provide 24×7 access and customer service. A Juniper Research study Growth in consumer retail spending facilitated by chatbots pegged at nearly 400%, from $2.8 billion in 2019 to $142 billion in 2024.
For marketers, chatbots are all about elevating CX. Pieter Buteneersdirector of machine learning (ML) and AI engineering at conversational AI and CX platform Sinch, endorsed the growing sophistication of chatbots and other conversational AI assistants that are no longer affected by typos, regional slang, or topic changes. “Thanks to NLP, today’s chatbots can meet and even surpass human performance in tasks such as language understanding and image recognition.”
Applications in marketing and sales, payments, order processing and customer service are key opportunities for brands to explore right now. With consumers saying they would spend 20% more with companies that offer conversational messaging, marketers should focus on emerging entry points, a data-centric approach and constant iteration, Manor said.
For example, he suggested exploring click-to-start messaging ads, which provide a more engaging experience than a static landing page, provide an early entry point into a conversation, build higher trust in the funnel, and increase conversions and loyalty because “businesses can use zero and first-party customer data to continuously display information and iterate messages so agents can help consumers complete purchases.”
what to change
Customers want to initiate chats on their favorite platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Slack or text messaging, or on social networks and localized marketing applications such as maps and search. Go beyond your own websites or apps. Explore the full range of conversational AI channels and find what best serves your business and your customers.
Related article: How will conversational AI transform the customer experience?
6. Podcasts
Every major publisher has a head of audio, and the number of team heads is growing. Almost everyone—brands, publishers, and individual influencers—has a podcast or several, the podcast production and distribution ecosystem is more accessible than ever, and competition between podcast platforms is intensifying. Now there’s no denying that this channel is common.
New formats are also emerging: live streaming podcasts on social platforms, “immersive” podcasts using the latest sound production technology, crowdsourced content, exclusive branded content for inner circle customers and more are all trending let me see.
what to change
Assuming your brand already has podcasts in production, dive deeper into exploring ways to monetize your audio content and better track or measure the results of your podcast advertising investments. Audience growth strategies designed to attract younger, learning-focused audiences should be a core focus area for the year.
Finding your method in the Martech madness
Martech stacks are quickly giving way to “CX stacks” built around robust databases that better balance privacy and data enablement. Updating your use of key martech will help you stay aligned with the larger business goal and get the best results from your technology investments.
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