Multi Channel Digital Merchant

Brought to my attention: 

Martech and Digital Experience Management: The New Frontier, by John Schneider

Martech is experiencing unprecedented growth. In just the last decade, it grew 5,233%. Over the next few years, global spending on digital transformation is expected to reach $2.8 trillion. What’s driving this surge in digital strategy investment?

The majority of C-suite leaders say an improved customer experience is a top factor driving their digital transformation. More specifically, marketers’ focus has shifted from basic content management to identifying, creating and publishing personalized content at scale.

The new marketing paradigm requires real-time, 1:1 personalization, changing the messaging, content and channel at any moment to serve any individual based on their needs, while predicting future outcomes. To offer this level of personalization, marketers are investing in connected digital experience platforms, with integrated solutions for deploying immersive content experiences at scale, representing the new digital frontier.

Rise of AI and the New Frontier of Experience Management

Today, you must develop a holistic, technology-enabled content strategy in order to succeed. Consumers expect you to anticipate their needs and offer relevant suggestions before their initial contact. Fortunately, the majority of marketers understand this, with 77% acknowledging that real-time personalization is crucial to their company’s success, according to Adobe. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that personalization delivers 5x to 8x the ROI on marketing spend.

To achieve the level of personalization consumers demand, it’s imperative that marketers stay ahead of the digital evolution. Powerful martech tools, such as customer data platforms, AI-based personalization and digital asset management (DAM), help you make “next best action” decisions that future-proof your customer experience strategy.

Before we dive into the new customer experiences and marketing capabilities these platforms provide, let’s take a quick trip back in time to discover how we got here.

1990s: Modern internet formed, websites grow

Websites are built in a painstaking manner by internal IT departments over a period of years. Updates are rare and sites offer limited information and experience, mostly brochureware.

2000s: Websites go from nice-to-have to essential marketing channel

Content Management Systems (CMS) like Interwoven, Vignette and WordPress emerge with WYSIWYG capabilities, enabling marketers to create and edit content without the help of IT. But changing the experience requires developer intervention

2010s: Basis for the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) emerges

The focus begins to shift from managing content to managing experiences. Platforms like Adobe and Sitecore emerge, enabling marketers to build webpages using composable libraries of marketing assets, thanks to integrated DAM and content systems. Still, scale is limited by the output of any single worker and their ability to manually create content and set personalization rules for combining different assets together, based on assumptions about different personas.

Also, commerce and content remain disconnected, managed through disparate experience management and commerce solutions. This leaves customers with a disjointed, clunky experience and hinders marketers from using content to support their entire funnel.

Today: Holistic martech solutions power connected customer experiences

The marriage of omnichannel content and commerce is realized through DXPs like Episerver (now Optimizely), Sitecore and Adobe that seamlessly integrate the content and commerce sides of the funnel. Moreover, AI-powered CDPs, and DAMs allow marketers to deliver individualized customer experiences at scale. Finally, marketing goals and technological capabilities work in lockstep to deliver the future of experience management.  .... '