WebEngage shares its top marketing tech innovations for 2022

In today’s constantly evolving marketing landscape, there’s a massive need for businesses to adapt to the new evolving technologies to stay ahead of their competitors. Even amidst the pandemic, the tech industries continued to make strides with the explosion of e-commerce and increased consumption of OTT media. In fact, the edtech evolution completely transformed the learning ecosystem in gulf countries. As even before Covid-19, education in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been dismal with no access to computers or the internet. But with the aid of technology, distance learning, and online learning combined turned out to be a breakthrough for these countries.

While all the buzz was about AI and ML technologies making waves last year, one question every marketer is curious about is the next big thing in MarTech? So let’s take a look at the top 3 martech trends that are going to dominate 2022 and beyond!

CDP will terminate the third-party data woes
With Google and Apple abandoning the use of third-party data, marketers have rising concerns relating to measuring campaign performances, capturing data, and using them to draw actionable insights. As data privacy and permission marketing reshape the marketing landscape, it is challenging to procure data-driven insights to drive stronger business outcomes. Leaning on to the first-party data seems to be a cluttered path with parts of data scattered across multiple disconnected platforms, not able to produce unified insights. This is where a Customer Data Platform (CDP) turns the table around.

CDP helps businesses bring together all the scattered data into one centralised platform in real-time. It allows marketers with a 360-degree view of customers’ activities, history, and behaviour. In addition, CDP offers the flexibility to collect, store, manage and distribute data without any complexities. These results improved segmentation and a better understanding of the customer experience and help deliver personalised content to drive deeper engagement.

Omnichannel marketing will take the front seat
While it might be an overused tool in the marketing arsenal, omnichannel marketing strategy is still relevant as ever. And 2022 will see accelerated growth in the use of this strategy to enhance customer experiences coupled with contextual communication that generates higher conversions. As a result, omnichannel marketing will be the driving force to deliver integrated and real-time customer experiences.

Here are some interesting stats that show that omnichannel strategies lead to 3X growth compared to a single-channel interaction:
● The omnichannel platform gives a 90 per cent higher customer retention rate than a single channel.
● The engagement rate on the omnichannel platform is 18.96 per cent vs 5.4 per cent on single-channel.
● Finally, the frequency of customer purchases is 250 per cent higher on omnichannel than on a single channel.
With many SaaS companies adding newer tools to manage multiple platform campaigns more efficiently, implementing an omnichannel strategy has become easier than ever.

No-code/zero-code will be the new code
No-code or zero-code is a platform that enables to build software applications without writing a single line of code or without knowing any programming language. With the tremendously increased demand for software applications, no-code has been a widely adopted concept across businesses that want to create applications faster without depending on a software developer. The primary reason what makes the no-code platform a raging phenomenon is the convenience it offers in terms of usage and cost-efficiency.

The no-code development platform is an effortless user interface building tool that equips you to create any application in minutes. All you need to do is drag and drop and assemble the already coded blocks to create the kind of application that your business needs. It’s that simple.

No code development platform is undoubtedly an emerging industry, and it would be safe to say that the future for businesses is going to be no code!

The rise of metaverse marketing
You must have heard about this for the first time from Mark Zuckerberg, who recently rebranded Facebook to ‘Meta’ with a vision to transform it into a Metaverse. The term ‘Metaverse’ denotes interactions that are more immersive, and connected, a digital environment populated by virtual avatars representing actual people. According to a report, in 2022 businesses will leverage metaverse marketing to create new opportunities to interact and engage with customers by delivering new and interesting customer experiences over virtual platforms and integrating them with virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR).

To sum it up, the metaverse is going to bring a big shift in the world of marketing, and those businesses who will adopt this change will scale new heights while those who don’t will have to catch up to it.

Aswin Ravi is the director at WebEngage MEA