The last two years have been strong for digital marketers, who have seen the benefits of companies being forced to move their business online and rethink the way they market their products and services.

According to the MarTech Alliance, the martech industry is now worth around £252.65 billion globally.

With such a huge valuation, and global businesses adopting marketing technology more than ever, it looks like the next year will see even more growth in this space.

However, CMOs will be facing pressure in 2022 from reduced budgets and cost constraints, as well as having to match leadership both with agility and cross-functional connections to succeed.

Benjamin Bloom, Vice President, Analyst at Gartner, gives his take on the changing marketing technology landscape, how it shifted in 2021, the main challenges marketers need to consider, and what we can expect over the coming 12 months.

Martech in 2021

Marketing technologies, like digital asset management or content marketing platforms, became more prevalent last year and are looking likely to be even more widely adopted in 2022.

According to Bloom, marketers will begin to see the benefits of integrating more of these into their practices.

Previous research reveals the extent to which tech adoption rose last year, with mobile marketing platforms seeing a 17% rise in uptake, content marketing seeing a 23% increase and analytics and BI solution adoption boosting by 41%.

Overall, general investment in AdTech and demand-side platforms increased by 73%.

“Brands are highly motivated to seek technology to deliver the consistent, premium content they’re investing in creating,” Bloom says.

“This represents the hybrid nature of customer journeys that are becoming so hard to measure and manage.”

Bloom continues: “Getting the consistent understanding of ‘here’s what’s happening in the areas where physical shopping is available, versus here’s what’s happening online. Are these the same customers? How do I grow or influence the behaviour of those different customer populations?’ That became a consistent challenge for brands and for the marketing technology stack.

“Those were things that brands really had to adapt to and technology certainly supported that in 2021.”

And this adaptation must continue into 2022, Bloom admits. The nature of strategic planning going forward needs to be much more agile.

“I think we’re seeing maturing marketing technology, pressure to be more efficient, and that agility that’s really needed to be able to respond to changes in the marketplace as the things that challenge rigid marketing teams,” Bloom says.

“They force companies to be less focused on technology, and more focused on how their individual internal teams get their work done, as well as what customers want,” he adds.

Martech challenges

In 2021, Bloom says a major point of contention he and his team observed was customer data management, which he identifies as a “substantial challenge” for marketers.

There was a big focus put on assembling a 360-degree view of the customer and a boost in investments in technology for that purpose, however Bloom notes “unrealistic expectations” about the extent to which tech could help to solve that problem.

Marketing teams grappled with customer data through last year, whether in terms of advertising tech collecting information, or gaining consent to target new customers or retain existing ones, to drive their business forward.

Bloom comments: “Collecting and unifying data on your known customers across the marketing technology ecosystem is a persistent challenge in which I think marketing teams have unrealistic expectations.”

He continues: “There’s a sense that with sufficient technical capability, a brand could assemble that 360-degree view of the customer and we’d seen investments in technology based on unrealistic expectations about the extent to which technology could really solve that problem. Among a sample of over 1,300 brands, customer data platform adoption increased 55%”

A recent Gartner report released at the end of last year showed that only 14% of respondents achieved a 360-degree customer view. The lesson for organisations that have not yet achieved this milestone is to re-set expectations, given the “substantial hurdles” to get there.

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“This is the state of where we are with the challenge of collecting, managing and then orchestrating customer experiences that really deliver what customers want,” Bloom adds.

As we move into the new year, Bloom discusses what changes he has observed since the same period last year in the martech landscape.

“Number one, I would say that the friction that we have observed related to customer data just isn’t going away,” he says.

“Having made it through a year of fits and starts in the pandemic, now there’s a sense that these new behaviours are setting in and the martech stack really needs to evolve to accommodate new customer journeys.

“We certainly saw an increase in the importance of a number of key marketing technology solutions, while a number of enterprises also increase their exposure to some of those larger integrated suite vendors,” he says.

Digital marketing trends in 2022

From the perspective of things to consider over the next 12 months, brands need to continue the journey to improve their utilisation of the technology that they already have, Bloom says.

They must ensure that they maintain clear, customer-focused value propositions for new technology investments that they want to make.

“The macroeconomic environment could change very quickly, and so agility is really the name of the game in marketing technology planning,” Bloom comments.

“An agile approach to that marketing technology roadmap is something that about 10% of brands have done to date, but I think that’s something essential moving forward.”

Bloom believes that the current ad targeting and measurement landscape is turbulent with tech such as data clean rooms becoming of greater interest in marketing teams.

“These can bring datasets together across different ad tech platforms or with your business partners in a privacy safe way so that you can still do the analytics or targeting or measurement, but without necessarily having to move and expose individual level personal data across too many different platforms,” he says.

Additionally, Bloom says he would be considering content operations thinking more deeply about digital asset management or content marketing platforms.

Businesses should start implementing solutions that are “essential” for ensuring that the right content is produced, that you get insights from how that content performs, and can deliver that across a multi-channel customer journey.

Bloom concludes with some words of advice for marketers over the next year: “I would encourage the marketing teams to be as focused as they can on ensuring they have a “Why?” A compelling reason for the tech they are acquiring as opposed to merely continuing down the path they have already been on.”

MarTech Summit 2022 | Scotland’s Marketing Technology Conference

The 2nd annual MarTech Summit will be held on 10th May at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh, and streamed live through our virtual conference platform.

The programme will discuss the advancement of digital marketing amidst an explosion of new tools and technologies – from web analytics, AI and SEO to, CRM, BI and personalisation.

Book your FREE place now at www.martech-summit.com.