Welcome to 2024!
We expect this year to be a transformative year for the martech industry.of Martech in 2024 In the report (video presentation) we published last month, we highlighted some of the key trends underway, including aggregation and composability in the stack, particularly at the data layer, including cloud data warehouses, lakehouses, and lakes. I did.
A common theme across these trends is the breaking down of boundaries between different martech apps and platforms. The lifespan of the silo is running out. (Can I have it Hallelujah?)
That’s a big change. But more profound changes are afoot.
20 Years of Constant Growth in Complexity
I’ve been covering martech on this blog for 16 years. Martech is becoming increasingly complex. Before you blame the explosion in marketing technology, there are over 13,000 products. — Realize that all of these martech tools were built in response to the increasing complexity of marketing itself.
Once customers adopted search, marketers had to adopt SEO to persuade both people and search algorithms. As customers adopted mobile, marketers had to embrace apps, responsive web design, SMS, push notifications, WhatsApp, geofencing, and more. As customers adopted social media (Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok), marketers had to embrace social content. , social advertising, social customer service, social reputation management, influencer marketing, and more. As customers embraced online video, marketers had to embrace video content and video ads, YouTube channels, Instagram Reels, and more.
And that’s just the customer side of martech. New marketing approaches such as account-based marketing (ABM) and product-led growth (PLG), intent-based digital behavioral marketing, customer journey mapping, integrated RevOps at the intersection of sales, marketing, and customer success, ecosystem marketing, and more. .
All these inventions and innovations have contributed immensely to the field of marketing. But at the same time, the diversity and scope of marketing has also increased significantly. And the interaction of all these new and different moving parts has increased the complexity of marketing exponentially.
Martech systems (all the different software within a martech stack) have grown in complexity to match the complexity inherent in modern marketing. And even if you choose a bundled suite of apps rather than a best-of-breed set of tools, you’re not immune to the constant flood of new features to keep up with your ever-expanding requirements and responsibilities.
It may seem obvious, but As martech systems become more complex, so do the user interfaces to those systems.. Whether you’re switching between endless browser tabs for different martech apps or looking for a specific option within the mega marketing cloud, how to do one thing in particular out of all the things you can now do. Just understanding it takes cognitive load. — It was a significant mental burden.
This is a major factor causing the martech usage rate to plummet.
As marketing has become more complex, martech systems have become more complex, and the UX of those systems has also become more complex. It was effectively a tautology.
Marketing complexity = system complexity = UX complexity
True, there were differences at the breaking point. Martech products are increasingly investing in improving his UX as a competitive advantage. But even the best were swimming against the current.
However, new innovations may occur. go backwards Complexity of UX?
Generative AI user interfaces change the game
Generative AI is the first major innovation in marketing technology history with the power to fundamentally reduce UX complexity.
One of the first examples early last year was the release of ChatSpot, a generative AI “chat UX” interface for HubSpot built by Dharmesh Shah. (Disclosure: I work at HubSpot as VP of Platform Ecosystems.) Through a simple ChatGPT-like text prompt, you can ask ChatSpot to do something in HubSpot, such as creating a contact, writing a personalized email, or running a report. Completionit just does it for you.
No need to navigate menus or screen-filled buttons, dropdowns, or checkboxes. Dharmesh eloquently summed up this new mode of interaction with software as a shift from the traditional. point and click to Explain and complete.
Over the past nine months, ChatSpot has rapidly expanded its capabilities to support sales prospecting, SEO consulting, rich content creation, business analysis, deal optimization, and more. Even with all these powerful features enabled, ChatSpot’s user interface remained a simple text prompt.
Hundreds of other martech companies have followed suit and added natural language “chat UX” interfaces to their products. Many of his new AI-powered UIs are still in their early stages, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what will be possible over the next year.However, making existing product features more accessible and adding new features through this UI actually reduce UX complexity.
It’s almost counterintuitive. The more features you add, the simpler the UX?
The fundamental complexity of what their products can do remains. In fact, as we’ll see in a moment, the complexity of these martech systems can actually increase even further. However, the martech UX on these systems has become much simpler. And it promises to get even simpler.
How can it be simpler than a natural language UI? By allowing that UI to deliver results rather than tasks.
The first generation of chat UX interfaces required you to be very specific about each task you wanted to perform. For example, “Can you give me a sales report by country?” New generations are rapidly iterating on it and can understand more sophisticated demands such as “Which countries are lagging in forecasting performance and how can we increase the closing rate of our most important deals?” It will be like this.
This next generation of martech UX will be legit AI agent, you can pursue higher-level goals. They can plan multiple steps, adjust their plans based on feedback from actions taken, leverage data and API functionality to which they have access, and contact “stakeholders” for clarification or questions. You will also be able to know when to seek advice. confirmation.
The AI agent will: uber aggregator Within your martech stack, deliver a unified user experience through chat UX, while consolidating process capabilities and leveraging a converged data warehouse behind the scenes to achieve your goals. Governance is built into or layered on top of these agents.
For marketers, the distinctions between process, control, and experience will be fused behind the interface to these agents.
Remove major constraints on system complexity
Ironically, while AI agents reduce martech UX complexity, they almost certainly increase The complexity of the underlying martech system.
In many ways, the limits to how much complexity humans can handle in MarTech UX have been a significant constraint on how effectively MarTech system complexity can be implemented. There was a chain of data, functionality, and numerous combinations of these elements that even marketing operations experts could wrap their heads around.
Humans have many wonderful qualities. Understanding exponential complexity is not among them. However, AI agents excel at processing combinations and sequences of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of data and features.
By untying what martech systems can do from the martech UX used to manage them, the complexity of the underlying systems is free to grow at a faster pace. It will look more like the graph above than the one at the top of this article.
Is this exponential increase in the complexity of martech systems a good thing?
Honestly, it’s hard to predict. As mentioned earlier, humans are not very good at understanding exponential complexity.But I think the answer is this yes. why? Because customers and markets are complex. If our martech systems can adapt to that complexity with much greater fluidity than we dreamed of in the past, we have the potential to dramatically improve marketing effectiveness and efficiency.
Customers are complex.
Therefore, the market is complex.
Marketing is therefore complex.
Martech systems are therefore complex.
But martech UX doesn’t have to be that complicated anymore.
Once again, this will be a major turning point in martech.