This week, MMW caught up with Ensighten Chief Strategy Officer Pelin Thorogood to discuss the most compelling marketing trends that will help marketers and business optimize their business plan in 2016.
The predictions shared were too good to not share with readers. Check them out below.
- Brands Will Re-think Their Need for Traditional Enterprise Web Analytics in a Changing Data Landscape – Web analytics has long been a significant part of the marketing mix, but it will no longer be the centerpiece or an organization’s analytics strategy. This year, digital analytics expand beyond the web analytics umbrella into something much greater. Marketers will start to see brands augment and even replace their traditional enterprise web analytics package with in-house analytics to gain more power from their data. Coca-Cola has already begun the journey, according to this article in AdExchanger.
- Marketers Will Seek to Crack the Black Box of Digital Measurement: According to a recent Forrester Research report, only 43% of digital business professionals use mobile analytics. Why? Measuring activity on mobile apps, compared to mobile web sites, is more difficult, requiring software integration, rather than web integration. It’s a true black box of measurement for many. So what will change in 2016? That process just got a lot easier, thanks to a new crop of enterprise tag management tools that greatly simplify the process of implementing and adjusting mobile metrics on the fly, without having to rebuild and re-certify the app through the platform provider (iOS, Android, etc.). If marketers don’t start measuring these experiences, they can bet their competitors will.
- U.S. Marketers Will Stop Paying Lip Service to Issues of Data Privacy and Security – European marketers have been more privacy conscious than their U.S. counterparts for years, given the stark differences in regulations. But that may be changing due to several factors, including the recent invalidation of the Safe Harbor Act, which was developed in 2002 to allow U.S. companies to collect and store European visitor data on U.S.-based servers. The impact of that ruling is still being worked out, but it has heightened interest among U.S. marketing and IT professionals. Then there is the issue of data security, and how various digital interactions and information is being handled through an increasingly complex array of quasi-connected digital marketing eco-systems. All these issues will bubble up in 2016, and enterprises will seek ways to comply with and adapt their data ownership and management policies.
- Marketers Will Implement the “One Profile to Rule Them All” – Consumers are demanding more connected experiences, and marketers are coming around to the best way to provide this: universal customer profiles that contain key pieces of the customer journey, and can be shared among marketing execution systems for action. This is not a new concept, but in 2016, marketers will strive to put the one profile strategy into practice. This unified customer profile will contain key pieces of the customer journey, and be shared among marketing execution systems for action. A very simple example is a customer who buys something on a website, and then is later retargeted via display ads with a logical upsell. In this scenario, systems are communicating with each other and understanding the buyer’s unique interactions, instead of operating in siloes. This is the future of marketing, all made possible by the creation and distribution of the profile. But building these profiles and continuously updating them in real time is another matter, as many vendors claim to own the “one” profile that matters.
- Marketers Will Feel Hot under the Collar When it Comes to Showing Martech ROI – Marketers will continue their aggressive march on technology, spending an estimated $32.4B globally on marketing technology by the year 2018, according to IDC. In a 2014 CMO Council survey, less than half of marketers said the technology they were using was producing positive ROI. Something has to give, which is why you’ll see marketers make stronger efforts to: 1) eliminate martech redundancies – for example, replacing traditional enterprise analytics with in-house solutions – and 2) make these technologies work better together to produce better results through the use of a digital data layer, which standardizes data definitions across siloed applications, and through the use of the universal customer profile. In 2016, marketers will be under increased pressure to show a return on their martech ROI.
