The Future of Marketing Technology

What really matters – The technology, or how you use it?

Foreword by Komal Helyer, Head of Marketing at Pure360

Reading through the results of the research Pure360 conducted together with Technology for Marketing, I was struck from the outset by one thought:

Our industry is becoming less open to technology vendors’ promises, and much more focused on the question “how will this help me serve my
customers better?” The appetite for new technology remains strong – over half of those who responded confirm that they are open to trying out new technologies.

However, when I drilled down into the figures around the things that people are trying to achieve with their marketing programmes, a strong trend began to emerge. Marketers want to get closer to customers and are more interested in using technologies that can help them achieve that ambition rather than just being early adopters. The survey confirms that one of the biggest challenges for technology to solve is the complexity of content marketing. The fact that almost as many respondents are prepared to invest in this area as recognise its importance, shows how widely marketers have come to appreciate that sending out mass messages to your customers is no longer going to capture their loyalty.

I was also interested by the irony that although two-thirds of our respondents see robotics as a key marketing tool going forward, only 5% of us feel any compulsion to invest in them! The most important aspect of any marketing technology isn’t how clever, new, or easy-to-use it may be, it is how well it helps you to improve the effectiveness of relationships with customers, who are in turn changing the dynamic of how they acquire and
research their purchases. We all saw how last December’s Black Friday turned out to be rather underwhelming for many retailers in sharp contrast to the hysteric scenes of 2014. Yet at the same time online sales soared away to yet another record level.

In the USA more people purchased online than in store for the first time. We’ve also seen how in Business-to- Business purchases, as few as 5%
of shortlists in some sectors are now made with input from vendors. These results show that customers are increasingly doing business with their preferred suppliers at arm’s length, whether in business or as consumers, and that companies in B2C and B2B are changing their approaches to satisfy that demand. Today’s technology focus for marketers is around those that can help develop greater, knowledge trust and intimacy with customers.

Creating successful online customer relationships means building up hugely detailed information about them that can be used to tailor the kinds of messages and offers you send. It means being able to keep up with their preferences, and ensuring that you strike the right balance between tempting them to make that extra purchase and hitting the 'unsubscribe’ button.

In turn that means not just having ‘big data’ but being able to manage it, interpret it effectively and use it appropriately. Which is where we come back to the most important element in the marketing tool kit – you.

Of course we provide a form of marketing technology. It is very good at what it does, yet across our customer base we see notable differences in the success rates enjoyed by different clients. When we try to identify the factors that drive this difference, it is almost always down to the marketing people behind those campaigns.

Those who do well are those who are most in tune with their customers’ aspirations and habits. They keep track of which emails people open, and here they click through. They can analyse how their customers react to different kinds of offers, and use that information to forecast those that will catch their interest and go on to become a sale.

They recognise those customers who fill their digital basket, only to baulk at the price when checking out, and those that can be tempted to continue the purchase with the right offer. In short, they are the companies that don’t treat their digital customers as trends, data, or click-throughs. They treat them as people with individual needs and reap the success of that approach.

No longer is it enough to be able to just send out an email, the pressure now is all around being able to profile to a great depth of detail. It really has become as close as you can get to marketing to an audience of one.

So it comes as no surprise that another key finding that came out from reading the survey results is that the kinds of marketing technologies that will be making the trends in 2016 and onwards, are those that will help us marketers to build customer rapport, and develop the trust and comfort that is the basis on which a good relationship is built.

It is also important to remember that while customers exercise their growing preference to deal online, and cut out the traditional sales person, it is the marketing departments that are driving the move into a front-line customer engagement role. It’s certainly an exciting time to be in marketing, and I hope you find the survey results as interesting and informative as I did. Please feel free to share your feedback – I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.

- Komal Helyer, Head of Marketing at Pure360

A short history of marketing technology

The discipline of marketing is synonymous with technological development. The one enabling the growth of reach and scope of the other; the other determining the encouraging advancements for further reach and scope.

New technologies in the 1980s were making two-communication with customers possible. This initiated the emergence of database and relationship marketing. The groundwork had been laid for CRM, MRM and the eventuality of marketing automation.

Search engine marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) emerge in the mid- to late 1990s with the launch of search engines such as Yahoo!, Ask.com and Google.

In 1999, Mark Benioff, a former Oracle Executive, disrupted the CRM space by reinventing the Monthly Licence (MLC) fee model of the traditional mainframe vendors when Salesforce.com was born along with Software as a Service (SaaS). Eloqua, an industry pioneer in the marketing automation space was founded in 1999.

2007 saw the rise of the age of mobile as 3G networks amassed 295 million subscribers worldwide – good quality 3G coverage drove the development of mobile devices and on 29 June 2007 the first iPhone was released.

While the first email was sent in 1971, it took some time for email to find its feet as a mature marketing channel. In the 2000s, sophisticated anti-spam laws and the rise of email databases helped to bring a level of sophistication to the channel and by 2010 with segmentation and targeting growing ever more refined, email marketing came into its own as the primary marketing channel for over half of all marketers.

By 2012:

• Mobile Internet users reached 113.9 million

• Mobile shoppers reached 72.8 million

• Mobile buyers reached 37.5 million

• Adult-aged eReaders reached 45.6 million

• Mobile video viewers reached 54.6 million (online video viewers reached 169.3 million in total)

Scott Brinker’s 2015 iteration of his Marketing Technology Landscape illustrates the growth in volume of marketing technology vendors and technologies – further complicating the buyer decision journey and the level of opportunities available to marketers to choose from.

Read more at pure360.com