2020 MarTech Trends and the Emerging Marketing Skills Gap
The digital landscape is dynamic, changing at a pace that leaves business and brand practitioners overwhelmed, and constantly playing catch up!
It is a no-brainer trying to understand why keeping up-to-date with emerging trends, skills, and marketing technology solutions is such a huge challenge for both marketing teams and business leaders.
The infographics by Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com highlights the dramatic growth of marketing technology (Martech) solutions from ~150 in 2011 to nearly 8000, with a 13.6% growth in 2020.
The question that comes to mind is: how does this matter to my brand, how does this impact managing the strategic marketing process, and how does this shape my choice of external partners that support the process.
Martech Category Growth and Impact to the Marketing Process
(1) Data is by far the fastest-growing category, up 25.5%. This makes sense as a ton of data is available. The challenge remains how best to harness this data effectively.
(2) The management solutions category with project and workflow tools highlights significant growth at 15.2%. Often omitted from Martech despite the significant amount of time marketers spend using these tools to manage projects and campaigns. For this reason, this category must be well understood and integrated into existing workflows/skills competency maps across marketing teams.
(3) Within subcategory in each category, it’s interesting to see physical world interactions (print, retail proximity, and IoT), data privacy, video marketing, conversational marketing, project and workflow management taking the lead. Validating these reoccurring themes in the marketing space all through the past year.
A key insight from the trends shown above infers that the Martech solutions experiencing the highest growth rate correspond with solution areas driving the greatest impact to brands, customer engagement and business ROI.
A cautionary note for marketing and business leads: the expectation is not to learn or acquire every tool in the market. However, we must be conversant with the use cases for these broad categories and the trends surfacing around them. We must also exhibit clarity on what we expect from the tools we utilise; especially as it relates to the end goal: connecting our brands to customers at each touchpoint on the customer journey
Martech Tools Across Solution Areas
A few interesting tools in the Martech solutions space include:
> Advertising & Promo — AI unique model photos — Generated. photos
> Content & Experience — All in one audio/video editor — Descript.com
> Social & Relationship — Real-time, live statistics — Internetlivestat.com
> eCommerce — Influencer marketing, fake followers audit — Sparktoro.com
> Data — Email marketing, automation, and CRM — Activecampaign.com
Martech Expertise as a Competitive Advantage
In the knowledge economy we operate in as businesses, a competitive advantage we must intentionally create and manage is the competency level of both internal and external brand marketing teams.
Assessing these teams against global and industry best practice is key to ensuring we are leveraging cutting edge solutions and techniques that not only improve overall marketing team productivity and efficiency in terms of ROMI but more critically allows us to remain ahead of the competition and distinctively differentiated in terms of quality of execution.
Closing the Marketing and Martech Skills Gap
At all levels of the organisations’ hierarchy, striving for the ‘T’ competency model with specialisation in a niche area alongside broad expertise across key marketing and Martech disciplines is essential.
In conclusion, some helpful resources for skills gap benchmarking can be found at target internet.com in collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Marketing CIM.
Skills gap benchmark (team size 10 or smaller)
Skills benchmark report
Please feel free to share your thoughts on the new Martech tools you and your team have used in recent times.
