In the past marketers had to go through IT for the marketing tools they need. Today marketing technology is widespread, easy to adopt and use. It's been taken out of the hands of IT, and placed into the hands of marketers practically everywhere.
According to the fathering voice behind the MarTech term and VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot Scott Brinker, the developments within marketing technology is creating a new type of professional, the marketing technologist, as well as transforming the way marketers work.
I called Scott for a conversation on what possibilities and challenges new MarTech - with the introduction of artificial intelligence - is giving marketers.
I did a survey together with Walker Sanders, where we asked marketers how they expected their technology-budgets to develop in 2018. 65 % answered that it would increase, and 17 % of those that it would increase greatly. Only 5 % said that it would decrease.
One is the implementation of AI into marketing technology.
The other, and still the more important one, has everything to do with marketing technology becoming increasingly accessible and easy to use, empowering marketing professionals to quickly adopt them. A democratization of marketing technology that means more people in the organizations will have the skill sets to use them; free from the tyranny of IT.
Websites are one example. Coding skills are here already more of a nice to have than a need to have. And it's now happening with e-commerce and mobile apps, giving marketers the opportunity to fairly easily develop their own applications. Just to name a couple of examples. The takeaway? It's happening across the board, which means that marketers are now able to take charge of every aspect of the organization's marketing, easily working across sales, customer experience, design and content.
With marketers being able to quickly adopt new tools, there is an obvious risk of losing control. Something that the previous centralization in IT was highly competent at keeping.
It's not about one tool, but how we combine them. We are in uncharted territory, so we have to take charge of the development. Continuous evaluation is necessary, and will only become more so with the widespread adoption of AI.
Scotts point about AI seems to be just in time. Studies show that top performing companies are already twice as likely to be using AI in their marketing automation as their competitors. And one would think that AI will only accentuate the need for a well thought through implementation?
If Scott has left you wondering about your own Martech choices and implementation, Scott's annually updated Martech Landscape provides a great overview.