New challenges in creating seamless customer journeys

Why is it important that adtech and martech are integrated? Let’s take a look at how the digital marketing world changed over the past year and why creating a seamless customer journey has become more challenging than ever. 

Accelerated digital transformations 

COVID-19 caused the digital transformation path at many organizations to accelerate. With in-person trade shows being cancelled and social distancing required, many brands have turned more and more to digital, which has made the buying journey less linear and more complex. 

An increase in digital content consumption

Customers are consuming more digital content than ever. While this gives brands more opportunities to engage with their audiences, these customers are consuming content in more ways and in a more fragmented manner. In a single minute during 2020, people were:

• Sending 19 million text messages 

• Sending 190 million emails

• Viewing 4.7 million YouTube videos

• Watching 764,000 hours of Netflix

• Creating 2.5 million Snapchats

• Spending $1.1 million online

The emergence of new advertising channels

Not only are new advertising channels, such as podcast advertising, emerging, but they’re experiencing rapid growth. A July 2020 study by the IAB and PwC found that podcast advertising revenue is still projected to grow 14.7% year over year to almost $1 billion in 2020, despite COVID-19. 

This shows that marketers might need to rethink how to capture their audience’s attention and in what channels to best invest their budget. 

Authenticity and purpose

Consumers nowadays want more than just a good product or service. They’re looking to connect with a brand, whether it’s through ads or content. This is especially true of millennials and Generation Z, who will make up 30% of the workforce by 2030. The younger generation expects more inclusion and diversity in brands as well as purpose, standing for something, and performing altruistic works. 

Disconnected adtech and martech systems

Disconnected systems add unnecessary complexity and make it harder to create a seamless customer journey, preventing brands from getting to know a customer well enough to properly connect with them.

Integrating adtech and martech makes a marketer’s life easier

Statistica found that there are about 8,000 martech solutions available right now. Technology exists to make your life and career easier. However, investing in the right technology can make a huge difference rather than having too much of it. 

Too much technology creates additional complexity and can cause costs to add up when a marketer should be looking to simplify their tools and processes to maximize their outputs. The right martech helps marketers gain a better understanding of customers and what they want, allowing them to put that information into action in their campaigns, overall marketing strategy, and branding. 

It allows brands to better serve customers at any given moment and forge a deeper connection with them that can grow over time. 

The convergence of adtech and martech allows for a seamless customer journey

Adtech and martech come together to help marketers craft a consistent, connected, and seamless customer journey by:

• Optimizing your investments in advertising: Use the right data and context to get to know your prospects and by what channels they might open to hearing your message. This can help you get a higher return from each impression. 

• Creating a single view of the customer. A single view of the customer across business functions allows marketing teams to create real-time, personalized experiences that can meet rapidly changing customer expectations. 

• Simplifying martech stacks. Simplify your stack by focusing on technologies that are integrated and support a seamless customer journey from consideration to adoption and advocacy.

• Focusing on marketing automation and AI. Reducing complexity will better allow for the advancement of AI technologies to simplify work processes and tools, creating more efficiencies. 

• Marketing leading the way in CX. Marketing sits at the center of many touchpoints customers engage with across a customer experience (CX),. This puts CMOs in a prime position to lead their brands into a period of recovery and growth. Doing so requires focusing on the total customer experience—including everything from consideration (such as ads) to engaging with prospects and customers pre-and post-sale (martech). 

Simpler is better. Invest in the right adtech and martech and focus on using them together to simplify and streamline your processes to create better marketing that better strikes a chord with customers.

For more information about martech and the impact it has on your digital marketing campaigns, please check out:

• 5 New Technologies for Your Martech Stack
• 3 Advantages Chatbots Give to Digital Marketers
• How Oracle Unity Brings Adtech and Martech Together into a Connected Experience

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