Evolution of our MarTech Economy Part One - Our Markets Leading Us

By Jethro Grainger-Marsh, Head of Digital, Marketing, and National Sales - APAC, Alsco Australia

When we consider technological change, I think we can all agree that the pace of that change has never been quite as fast. Platforms and technologies can move from cutting-edge to main stream to hovering around obsolescence in a handful of years, and we as both individuals and as organisations are struggling to keep up.

In this first article on the changing face of the market and how our technology either enables or drives this, I will talk about the consumer behaviour driving our change.

Consumers Driving the Change

Technology and platforms can be used to influence or dictate consumer behaviour, or at least, that is a belief that has been held in some quarters. However, how accurate a belief is that? For every Facebook post that we feel is driving our behaviour, there is a Google Plus that fails to hit the mark. Lest we forget, one of the most ubiquitous technology providers in history’s attempts to enforce a social media channel fell furiously flat, leading to the famous meme of uses of social media channels listing Google+ as “I am a Google employee who eats donuts.”

So, truly, it is largely the consumer behaviour that disrupts. That counts just as heavily in the Martech space as it does anywhere else. With 36 percent of all Australians audited by ‘We Are Social’ at the start of 2019 for possessing Ad Blocking technology on their device or laptop, the ability for cookie enabled and tracked advertising to have a meaningful impact is being diminished. Never has the one-to-one experience of a customer been more paramount.

Probably our biggest challenge as marketers and business leads is to transition our organisations away from last click attribution to a more mature attribution model. As a bottom line, we no longer live in a world where we can always uniquely attribute a single interaction with our digital assets with an outcome.

Technology and Platforms can be used to Influence or Dictate Consumer Behaviour, or at Least, That is a belief that has been held in some Quarters

How far we have moved towards holistic attribution? That remains a work in progress.

Automation as an Equalising but Uninformed Force

Marketing automation as a technology enabler, as another example, is intended to meet that one-to-one experience challenge. The technology exists to be as complex and flexible as you like; and marketing automation suites are giving the ability to smaller organisations to punch above their weight, to engage at a level and on a scale hitherto the domain of larger, more richly resourced alternatives.

However, there are two elements that marketing automation has a critical dependency on. One of these is clear understanding of the process and the skills required, which is frequently ignored in this as in other technology implementations. In many instances, small to medium sized businesses will stake everything on an automation suite and then sit back to look at it, waiting for it to transform their business. I like to think of this as the “Field of Dreams” approach to marketing technology – if we build it, the customers will magically appear!

The reality is that technology both brings and relies on knowledge as the true power. In order to truly benefit from the improved customer engagement rates, the improvement in experience, and the bottom line benefits, business leaders need to devote sufficient time and resources to upskilling their teams to deliver automation that meets the customer requirements.

This leads into the second element, which will form the bedrock of my second article on the subject—we now live in an era where data is king, and I will talk further about this in my next article. For now, it is crucial that we realise that, for all the pixel based tracking, beacon marketing, retargeting, and automation that we deploy, we are being driven to this by changes in customer expectation.