Gartner: Six technologies defining digital marketing

The research firm explores where on the hype cycle different technologies are and how they will impact the discipline of marketing in the short- and long-term, as discussed at the Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo 2021.

Why it matters

New technology is great if it’s useful. Many of the technologies that were expected to be game changers in the space of five years are taking longer than expected, while others are maturing into real usefulness. Understanding the place of a technology on this cycle will help marketers to allocate budget to maintain an innovation pipeline that will set your department up for the future.

The tech

• AI in marketing promised a lot: accelerating and sharpening insight-generation and prediction, enhancing scale. However, the tech, while expected to yield serious productivity gains in around 5-10 years’ time, it remains at a point of disillusionment for many marketers.
• Multichannel marketing hubs, platforms that organise communication and promotion across different channels using consistent consumer segments are core to CRM efforts and are fast reaching a point of productivity by helping realise personalisation at scale.
• Influence engineering (IE) is the integration, at scale, of behavioural science techniques into algorithms that control certain aspects of a brand’s digital experience in a way that can nudge consumer choices in the brand’s direction. This, though extremely promising in a time of increased focus on CX remains a long way off as an innovation trigger with a realisation timeline of around a decade.
• Customer data ethics is the attempt to align business practice with ethical standards. Effectively, the short term ROI dip that marketers will see if they embrace privacy-first data reductions will more than pay for itself in the long-term reduction in risk of regulatory or PR backlash.
• Event-triggered marketing is, ultimately, an old idea but a good one, and can improve customer acquisition, by responding to product discovery behaviours, conversion rates in digital commerce, and retention of customers through integration into cross-sell and loyalty programs.
• Mobile marketing analytics is crucial with such high rates of mobile usage over the course of the pandemic. Effectively, there is more data flowing from mobile devices than ever and it is, in many cases, actually useful. However, privacy considerations are paramount to preserving consumer confidence.

Sourced from Gartner. Image: Gartner