Engaging content that speaks directly to the relevant audience and drives business is a key goal of marketing strategies around the world, and marketing technologies or MarTech have quite a significant role to play in its realization. We are witnessing a shift from mere ‘marketing to customers’ to ‘providing ultimate personalized customer experience (CX)’ in order to gain their trust and loyalty. This includes a speedy, smooth, omnichannel, safe, and tailored user experience to the potential as well as existing customers. Even the consumers evidently value and stay loyal to the brand if they get a relevant and personalized experience.
The need for MarTech has risen owing to this shift, especially in the highly digitized world post covid, as it provides all the necessary tools to segment the market, provide a single view of the customer, personalization of advertisements, customer journey mapping, conversational messaging, automation, and all the other aspects crucial to a great customer experience. Hence, it is of paramount importance for any business to invest their resources and efforts in delivering the best possible CX to their customers and keep track of all the changes happening in the space to stay ahead of the competition and offer the best to their customers. It can potentially become a key differentiator for the business. Upon scratching the surface of CX and MarTech, Quadrant Knowledge Solutions identifies some of the most significant changes happening in the field and this article is an attempt to highlight those trends.
- Mixed Reality and Metaverse
Advancements in technology are now enabling marketers with creative ways to provide more immersive experiences with the help of augmented and virtual reality along with metaverse. New concepts of ‘gamevertising (Letting the users try products virtually and advertising them in online games)’ are already being adopted by many brands across industries. They are resorting to mixed reality to give their consumers a chance to try the product on themselves before buying. Virtual showrooms and haptic feedback devices that let people feel the product are a couple of other trends we are foreseeing to be a mass reality in near future. Moreover, coupled with developments in machine learning and natural language processing, marketers can provide hyper-personalized experiences to their users across platforms. Hence, mixed reality and metaverse are turning out to be mainstream marketing strategies today, far more outstanding than traditional blogs, infographics, pictures, or videos in terms of consumer experience and personalization.
2. Blockchain-based tools for marketing and anti-fraud platforms
Blockchain technology has emerged as one of the most efficient technologies not limited to just cryptocurrencies but finding applications in a wide array of industries. It is also becoming quite a helpful tool for advertising and marketing with blockchain marketing. Following are some of the key benefits it has to offer:
- Increases Transparency and Trust: The decentralized ledger technology of blockchains makes any changes in the transaction chains recorded in the public ledger. Customers can trace how the big businesses are using their data in their advertising efforts. Moreover, it offers supply chain transparency. This helps businesses gain the trust of their clients.
- Prevents Advertising frauds: Through User verification and removing the ‘third-party’ element. Such an open ledger helps the marketers track source of fraudsters such as bots, fake apps, and phantom clicks. This helps them combat advertising frauds and help business reduce misdirected spending on advertisements.
- Provides security and protects privacy: Security being an inherent feature of blockchains, it enables more secure relations between businesses and their clients with features such as smart contracts. These contracts are secure in the sense of verified and encrypted transactions. It also generates backups and duplicates, ensuring maximum security, establishing trust, and protecting the data privacy of the clients.
- It also helps the business with more accurately targeted ad campaigns and reducing transaction costs by removing middlemen.
3. No more cookies
This year has brought with itself a big stir in the privacy laws such as GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation), CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) protecting the privacy of consumers and leading to a gradual ban on third-party cookies. In the coming years, it compels the marketer to find alternative strategies to collect first-party data and generate insights about their customers. Although a shock, this also presents a great opportunity for the businesses to solve the complexity of identity management and gain tremendous power of first-hand data to better understand their customers, target ads and offer more personalized experiences without having to rely on the third parties that take up a lot of their investments. Hence, devising a robust first-party data strategy is going to be their new priority in the coming years.
There are some alternatives already under consideration. These include Interest-based advertising (IBA) proposed by Google where the ad is selected based on users’ interests inferred from recently visited sites, cloud-based privacy proxies, email marketing, Social Media monitoring, and some other techniques like differential privacy and tokenization. Some companies are endorsing Cookie-less Authentication tools or solutions. There are many barriers to overcome yet. In short, marketers now must adapt to these changing laws by forming cookie-less personalization strategies in the digital marketplace.
4. Omnichannel experience and hyper-personalization
Another noteworthy change is the growing importance of integrating all the sales channels (online and offline stores, social media, emails, websites, applications etc.) in such a manner that it gives a seamless switch between two platforms. Omnichannel personalization, individualized experiences to consumers in real-time, regardless of the platform of interaction, improves engagement and consistency in marketing efforts. Such hyper-personalization, both online and offline, throughout the customer journey creates brand value in eyes of the clients and increases sales across all channels.
In addition to these, usage of NFTs for community building and engagement, virtual events, Content Management Systems etc. are also some of the trends followed by the marketers. One thing certain is that marketing is no more limited to the mere promotion of personalized products. The concept is expanding towards making the customers feel special and connected with the brand, its values, and the products. Provided that the customers are also appreciating efforts for hyper-personalization, MarTech is evolving quickly and are being widely adopted in this changing landscape. Which new turn this industry takes in the coming years will be definitely something to look forward to.
Author
Vaishnavi Dave is a Content Writer at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions.
