3 MarTech trends to watch in 2020

2019 brought its share of breakthroughs in marketing technology (MarTech), and 2020 is on pace to bring more of the same. To help you better identify the opportunities and challenges the coming year will bring, here are three trends that will likely have an impact on many organizations.

1. THE CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM

The issues related to the use of data in business are numerous. Although we theoretically know what we are trying to create as an experience – the famous “omnichannel” experience –, the path to get there through the maze of data often seems less clear. With a series of specialized tools for email, advertising, web analytics and more, how do you create complete and consistent experiences? The challenge is real for marketers, and in order to fulfill the promise of the omnichannel experience, many of you will acquire a customer data platform  (CDP).

If you do not yet know what a CDP is, I invite you to read my article on this subject . We are probably not the only ones to believe that CDP will be one of the important trends in 2020. Gartner has also named CDP  as one of four technologies that will change the  MarTech ecosystem  in the years to come.   

The CDP will play a leading role in 2020 because of the multiple issues that such a tool can address. First, it will help marketers create true omnichannel experiences by centralizing information in one place, avoiding siled experiences. The CDP will also facilitate the management of customer data by offering advanced protection tools in addition to simplifying compliance with laws and regulations such as the GDPR .  

Finally, the CDP will establish itself as the tool allowing organizations to ensure that the management of their audiences is not dependent on an activation channel. The CDP makes it possible to create an audience and activate it where it is needed, whether for sending by email, online advertising, personalization banners on your website, your analytical tools, your conversational agents ( chatbot ), your mobile notifications, etc. We can therefore say that in 2020, the theory of omnichannel will become a little more tangible thanks to the democratization of the use of CDPs.

2. MANAGING OMNICHANNEL AUDIENCES

Audiences are the most concrete expression of the fact that your data is a real asset for your business. Think of it as the energy that propels each of your marketing activities, because every time you have to ask yourself the question: "Who do I want to talk to?" ". It is by segmenting your user data that you can target an audience that meets your needs.

Audience management is becoming an increasingly important practice for a variety of reasons. First, to deliver an omnichannel experience, we need to manage our audiences to interact with our user based on where they are in their journey. We must not only respect the context, but also act in the right place by deploying our audiences on the right channel.

Audience management will take center stage in 2020 in part due to the increasingly opaque nature of third-party data. Indeed, data from platforms such as Facebook, Google and others do not have a clear definition as to their content. In this sense, third-party data becomes a kind of black box whose real quality cannot be established. For example, if you are targeting fitness enthusiasts, you will have a hard time knowing how Facebook or Google decided to include or reject a potential user.

In 2020, the notion of audience, which we have mainly tended to associate with the field of web advertising, will extend to all marketing channels. And audience management will allow organizations to be more efficient and relevant.

3. ADDING NEW OWNED COMMUNICATION CHANNELS

In many organizations, email is the only proprietary communication tool available to communicate with their users. This dependence on a single communication channel will disappear in 2020 with the appearance of new communication channels.

The reliance on paid media and its changes in user tracking is one reason for adding owned channels . Indeed, with the arrival, among other things,  of technologies limiting the tracking of users through various websites , organizations must ask themselves whether the nature of their product allows them to sell it within a short period or nope.

This question is important since if we look at the Safari browser, for example, the duration of the  cookie  used to identify a user on your website is no longer two years as in the past; it can now be as short as 24 hours! ( See full details on browser protection tools here . ) For organizations that offer products and services that require a longer purchase process, migrating to a owned communication channel will therefore become a priority in order to maintain leading communication. to transactions.

To maximize the migration from paid channels to owned channels, email will no longer be sufficient; it will be necessary to join the forces of all the direct channels to be effective. Thus, e-mail will be combined with direct messaging tools on the website, chat tools, text messages and mobile notifications. Organizations that have taken control of their user data should have little trouble increasing this leveraging of owned channels.

For those of you who have already laid the foundation for good customer data management, 2020 will be a year for continual optimization. For organizations still catching up on the data front, the coming year might just be one where challenges compound quickly.