As published by MarTech Advisor

It is truly an exciting time to be in marketing. Forward-looking martech is creating smarter, data-driven marketers. By merging human intelligence and artificial intelligence, marketers will continue to gain influence and authority in their organizations, writes, Jaime Romero, Vice President of Customer Success at MRP.

The future of martech is transforming us, bringing smarter, data-driven marketers, and we can see a new breed developing and creating new ideas with more impactful results within the space. Through merging the creative and analytical aspects of human intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI), we will continue to see an unprecedented wave in marketing that will foster a revolution faster than any era before it.

Marketers will only continue to gain more influence working towards promoting the future of martech and revenue-driven marketing.

Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence Working Together

AI will eventually have more of an influence in marketing than it does today. However, if AI is ever able to replace a marketing team, we’re still a long way off, as the two have proven to work better together to execute long-lasting, positive results. Shifts in marketing departments will enact change in terms of the type of people who are implementing AI-driven tactics and strategies.

AI is going to help drive better tactical execution at the ends of the buyer journey, but in the middle, where interpretation of results is crucial to moving prospects through the buyer journey, machines just can’t do that. The infrastructure of marketing departments isn’t ready to support that. From a financial perspective, implementing AI-driven marketing technology is costly and difficult to assign clear ROI. Moreover, it requires dedicated resources.

It is important to understand the idea that tactical marketing is made up of two joining minds; AI and human thinking equally support greater outcomes when effectively used together. The human brain is creative and understanding and cannot be replaced by AI. AI will continue to supplement human decisions at a strategic level. Although AI is successful in uncovering and determining a defined set of activities, it still needs the human brain to understand patterns, extract ideas and provide insights.

Convergence of Online and Offline Marketing

Online marketing has consumed every inch of digital space it can. However, offline tactics still have a tremendous ability to cut through the clutter. The opportunity for modern marketers is the ability to coordinate and combine online and offline tactics. Phone calls and direct mail driving to digital interactions and online channels will drive the conversations around a story. Successful ABM strategies need to coordinate tactics deployed for an account with the appropriate messaging. So, not only do target accounts receive an email with strong messaging, but they also receive direct mail and a phone call that reinforces that same message.

In recent programs, we found that marketers are bridging the gap between direct mail and online mail, increasingly becoming easier to measure and assign ROI. At MRP, our data found that campaigns running both display advertising and email marketing to a specific account saw an 87% increase of people clicking on the digital ad when that account also received direct mail pieces and phone calls that reinforced the messaging from the digital marketing.

Martech is making it easier to measure the impact of a combination of online and offline tactics together.

Wow Moments

Storytelling has been at the core of marketing since the big bang. We remember how things make us feel. We create affinities to brands that touch us emotionally. As marketers, we aim to create memorable, stickier interactions with prospects. However, wow moments can become more challenging for B2B. For many B2B marketers, it is difficult to uncover and tap into a passion or excitement for many products or industries.

Nonetheless, martech allows us to measure and scale wow moments. With the insight into an account provided by martech, marketers can have a better idea of what the wow moments were for their customers. For instance, MRP Prelytix subscribers who consume insight on an account might think to themselves, “wow, that information helped me close this deal.” Or, a sales team wows prospects because the email they sent was spot on in talking to their pain points right at the moment they needed it. All of these micro-moments boost engagement, convert leads and most importantly, drive revenue for the organization.

The Future of MarTech

It is an exciting time to inject AI into our marketing stacks and learn how to integrate human intelligence with it. With the help of each of these components, these systems make more educated decisions and greatly impact the future of martech.

The future of martech is growing and pushing marketers to be smarter and ultimately developing a new breed along the way. A strong partnership will continue to develop through AI and human intelligence. The gap between online and offline marketing tactics is shrinking and integration is becoming easier. Distinctive moments are scalable and can be pinpointed to a specific event thanks to martech. Our future is at the hands of growing trends and marketers who have become the decision makers of our time and our future.