When we entered 2021, Incubeta pointed out that the digital marketing crystal ball was broken. Behavioral patterns had been overturned, making algorithmic decisions nearly impossible. The forecast for 2022 is still tricky, but we can say with confidence that the conversation has moved beyond digital transformation.
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Johan walters |
Marketing leaders are now focusing on digital maturity and how technology can help them stay ahead of their competition. Technology will also be the cornerstone of preparing your brand for the metaverse, which we believe should be on the radar of all marketing leaders by 2022.
Here are six technical pieces of information to help you prepare for the year ahead:
1. A few nasty surprises in store for those who have fallen behind in their privacy efforts
If 2020 was the year of readiness for all privacy requirements, 2021 was the year of action as brands rushed to revalidate databases and activate privacy policies.
We see 2022 as the year that will prove how effective businesses have been in preparing for PoPIA and ending third-party cookies. Unfortunately, many brands will find that there is still a lot of work to be done and that audits and privacy workshops, if not already completed, will become an urgent agenda item for many local businesses.
2. The democratization of martech finally in sight
The introduction of GA4 heralded that the era of enterprise technology is finally within the grasp of all businesses. This is great news for our local businesses as it gives them access to machine learning, AI and BigQuery. However, this empowerment of non-commercial brands also comes with certain challenges. Accessing the right skills to help marketers deal with all new technology can be difficult in today’s market and working with partner agencies while building an internal skill pool is the best solution to this immediate situation.
3. The maturity framework to the rescue
One of the best ways to meet the challenge of connecting and automating new marketing technologies is to use the Google Maturity Framework. Using the framework to rapidly increase the maturity curve will allow forward-thinking brands to outperform their competition. This will allow them to connect all of their different technologies to really experience the power that comes from combining ad, platform, and website data with internal business data. Once this is achieved, companies can also start using predictive modeling to explore segments of lifetime value and other information that will give them a real competitive advantage.
4. Digital transformation is dead, long live digital maturity
We believe 2022 will see the conversation finally move away from digital transformation and instead focus on the more manageable, small-scale efforts of the digital maturity curve. We view the technology connection’s incremental maturity efforts to give your organization a more user-centric view as the key to achieving digital goals.
In a privacy-driven world, it will become more difficult to see the full user’s journey, and there will be an increasing need to mix technologies and further exploit machine learning in order to fill in the gaps left by users. recent privacy efforts.
We also see automation and scale occupy the minds of marketing leaders as we head into 2022. These will remain the key to their success as the year progresses and brands try to. find better ways to have one-on-one conversations with their customers.
5. Collect, analyze, activate the key to expanding into new markets
As more brands expand into new markets, understanding the nuances of their new customers is critical. To achieve this, brands need to take a simple three-step approach to their martech. By asking them how they collect data, analyze the data and then activate that information, brands can determine what technology will help them meet their goals and what is needed to improve their performance. This simple gap analysis can be a powerful tool in what might otherwise be a daunting task.
6. The metaverse is here, take care
Connoisseurs describe the metaverse as the “successor state” of the Internet – the sum of all of our virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet. And, as technology becomes more accessible, AR and VR experiences will soon be within the reach of the average consumer, making the metaverse a priority for marketers.
Big brands are already rushing to create virtual communities with content, fashion, art, experiences, and even currency for the metaverse. The marketing goal needs to be found in the metaverse first and SEO will be key to achieving that. It will also be important to include visual search to ensure that search engines can identify and serve your brand to meta-consumers.
Content strategies, on the other hand, will undoubtedly need to include more AR and VR elements if they hope to be ready for the metaverse and as social networks like Facebook quickly prepare to move from a 2D world to a world. 3D, familiarizing yourself with these technologies becomes vital.
As intimidating as it all sounds, technology has once again come to the rescue. Retailers can now rely on new AI technology to create 3D images of their SKUs at scale and at a fraction of the cost, which goes a long way in making their inventories suitable for AR crawlable sites.
In short, 2022 will be the year when martech becomes accessible to businesses of all sizes. However, getting the most out of it still depends on the digital partners you choose to work with.
