Why is the overall MarTech ecosystem important for business and marketing? What does the future of ‘no-code’ hold? And can ad agencies develop their own in-house software? Who better than Scott Brinker (the mastermind behind the Marketing Technology Landscape) to answer these questions for us.
As a leading figure in the MarTech space, Scott explains how marketing has evolved during the last few years. What once was a consistent industry now has seen an incredible digital revolution, especially in how marketers harness technology to improve their results. According to Scott, the pandemic caused a shift in prioritization and pushed businesses to focus more on their digital engagement, leading to an explosion of new startups, products, and services.
In this episode of the Identity Revolution podcast, Scott talks about the importance of the MarTech ecosystem in business and marketing and how customers today hold more power over brands than ever. He ultimately gives his professional outlook on hot industry topics, from the latest MarTech and AdTech trends to building in-house software (and of course, he includes some of his predictions for 2021).
With the digital revolution giving massive power to customers, the MarTech ecosystem became even more critical in business and marketing
“The discipline of marketing has gotten through this incredible period of just advancement and evolution. But it’s bigger than that because, at the same time, part of this whole digital revolution…was brands really did become defined by customer experience primarily because customers are finally in a position of great power to be able to share what their experience is to the rest of the world very easily. [And] it’s like, ‘wow, how do we think about customer experience holistically?’
And we look at all these touchpoints across the customer life cycle as a part of our marketing engine. And when you think about it, the scope of doing that and doing that well is just huge.”
How COVID19 triggered innovation and digital engagement in companies
“Because of the shift in prioritization [of companies] getting serious about digital engagement, how they run their businesses digitally, how they engage with customers digitally…there was an explosion of startups in the MarTech space. I mean, certainly some categories more than others. Like if you look into the virtual event space, it is freaking on fire. We’re using Squadcast to report this, things around like podcasting and better ways of creating video content, like a tool like Descript. There’s all this innovation that got triggered.”
Trends in approaches to marketing that have emerged during the past year
“I know this has been hyped to death, but it’s becoming very, very real. It’s the application of AI in marketing. I mean these machine learning models are now being embedded in so many different products. Some of this generative AI technology that, over the summer, there were a bunch of these examples with that openAI, GPT-3 project, but no, actually people are starting to ship products that are leveraging that engine and it’s pretty crazy what some of this stuff can do.”
Scott also discusses the aspect of no-code solutions in the marketing space. “I’ve gotten really amazed with over this past year of what people call no-code. And I think of it really broadly. It’s not just about no-code like, ‘Oh, can you build an app by dragging and dropping?’ It’s almost like a shift in saying, ‘Hey, there are all these things that people used to require an expert professional to do for them, whether it was building an app or integrating two products or doing this graphic design. And now we’ve got software that lets a non-expert, just a general marketer business user to be able to build these things, create these things with it.”
[5:18] “Brands really did become defined by customer experience primarily because customers are finally in a position of great power to be able to share what their experience is like to all the rest of the world very easily.”
[14:46] “Because of the shift in prioritization the companies to get much more serious about digital engagement, how they run their businesses digitally, how they engage with customers digitally, is there was an explosion of startups in the MarTech space.”
[17:37] “There are all these things that people used to require an expert professional to do for them, whether it was building an app or integrating two products or doing this graphic design. And now we’ve got software that lets actually a non-expert just the general market or business user be able to build these things, create these things with it.”
