According to Gartner’s ”CMO Spend Survey 2018-2019,” Chief Marketing Officers(CMOs) are moving to spend more on technology in 2019 than on staffing. Marketing technology (martech) this coming year will experience a seven percent increase over 2018 with staff costs declining from 27 percent to 23 percent. The moveaway from human investment to tech appears to be influenced by the desire to measure the real impact of total marketing costs on the bottom line. Digital analytics, content management and email marketing are shaping up to win a larger share of marketing budgets in 2019. The ease by which digital marketing can be measured against revenue is a significant factor for its predicted growth.
Nielson’s 2018 CMO report indicates 82 percent of marketers will increase their digital marketing spend in 2019. Content, often considered“King,” will gravitate to the center of the entire marketing universe. As metrics become more defined, content will focus on personalization and qualityof message over quantity and strive to refine the delivery of the right message to the right target audience.
Chatbots are poised to receive more attention as marketers attempt to better understand consumer insights into brand messages and campaigns. Listening to the audience and reducing the quantity of messages seeks to alleviate much of the over-abundance of noise. Alternative search will become more important in 2019 as the popularity of voice search among tech hungry consumers motivates marketers to reevaluate and reinvigorate their organic search efforts.
Alpine data indicates that by 2020, 50 percent of all searches will be done verbally and Garner predicts that 75 percent of all households will soon have a smart speaker. The coming year will see an increased investment in voice search technologies in response to the anticipated disruption to traditional search platform methods.
The importance of protecting user data has been demonstrated thoroughly in 2018. As consumers and online users experienced the careless selling and sharing of personal data, they have been quick to recount their discontent with market actors who fail to properly handle their private information. Cyber security will continue to be a prominent line item in marketing budgets of small and large companies going forward. The trend towards technology over people is understandable as organizations focus efforts on optimizing the bottom line, but the enthusiasm for this trend should be tempered by a healthy realization that forces in the marketplace tend to be volatile and difficult to predict solely based on past measured performance. A successful marketing strategy will allow for humans to subjectively challenge machine generated assumptions and respond to the ever-changing forces in the marketplace.