LXA's 2023 Predictions for Martech, Salestech and Nexttech report is now live, a report which takes a look back at 2022, as well as the key trends for the coming year.
The report includes the views of the LXA team, as well as some notable marketing experts including Christine Bailey and Seth Godin.
We take a look at the martech industry, sales enablement, and the emerging technology that has the potential to make an impact in 2023.
While martech and salestech have grown during 2022, economic conditions are tougher than in previous years, and the overall strategies of tech companies, marketers and sales teams will need to adapt to this.
One key theme is the faith in technology to power marketing and sales strategies. For example, 63% of CMOs surveyed for our State of Martech 2023 report expect martech budgets to increase in the next 12 months.
Key themes from our predictions report include:
The need for marketers to move beyond spray and pay
Passfort CMO and Author Christine Bailey thinks that 2023 will be the year of 'learn and earn' marketing, whereby marketers need to make use of technology to gain insights from data and create better customer experiences:
"Tools for personalised experiences and customer journeys will be increasingly valuable as the economic situation means marketing budgets will be constrained, placing greater pressure on ROI. We’ll see more marketers adopt a long-term nurturing approach, supported by the right technology for lead scoring."
It's also important to remember some timeless marketing lessons. Seth Godin thinks one lesson we shouldn't forget is the need to gain permission from customers:
"My book Permission Marketing, which is more than 20 years old, just basically said, if you can show up for people wanting to hear from you, you can do fine. And marketers can forget because they’d rather hustle at your home or get distracted by augmented reality, virtual reality. NFTs or the next thing, because it is a safer place than being on the hook to say ‘well, but does anyone actually want to hear from me?’ That’s what we need to earn with each earned permission."
Meanwhile, Joe Pulizzi thinks marketers need to raise their game and use email marketing as a tool for deepening customer relationships with more engaging content:
"Email is still the best thing around. However, most marketers we deal with are still using email as a spamming mechanism to move the right people into their marketing automation platforms."
The growing importance of AI
The use of AI has been growing over the last few years, with many major martech and sales tools using AI. Marketers and sales teams alike will continue to invest in AI over the next 12 months.
As LXA CEO Carlos Doughty explains:
"There will be major investment in the AI space. 2023 will be the year of AI-driven innovation across marketing, sales and CX. AI has been baked into many powerful martech and salestech tools for some time but marketers need to be aware of the advances in capabilities of AI-specific platforms."
One key theme is likely to be the growing potential of generative AI in content creation. Scott Brinker sees this as the trend which 'has the most exponential disruptive possibility' in the year to come.
Generative AI brings this technology into a new area. It offers the potential to create new content from scratch, whether this is text, images or video content. Tools such as ChatGPT and Jasper are beginning to show what AI can do for content, and we'll see a lot of progress in the coming 12 months.
Our report contains many more insights into the themes here, as well as digital transformation, Web 3 and metaverse, whether Twitter will survive Elon Musk, and some timeless marketing lessons from our expert contributors.
Download the 2023 Predictions for Martech, Salestech and Nexttech.
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