In a recent report entitled ‘IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Chief Marketing Officer 2024 Predictions — Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) Implications’, IDC predicted that by 2027, GenAI would assume 30% of traditional marketing’s mundane tasks such as SEO, content and website optimisation, customer data analysis, segmentation, lead scoring and hyper-personalisation.
The survey noted 37.8% of CMOs indicated they have already begun implementing GenAI technologies, while 51% said that their top business objective in the next 12 months was to improve lead generation through improved quality of content marketing.
The marketing landscape is becoming more data-driven. With factors such as Generative AI, marketing content fatigue, phasing out of cookies, and a shift towards an open advertising ecosystem, it’s becoming increasingly important for CMOs and CIOs to stay updated on all these evolving trends and how these will impact the marketing and IT functions.
The report predicted that AI would drive greater level of automation across marketing tasks which will ultimately transform the marketer’s role to leverage greater skillsets, and cross-functional collaboration across teams. Below are AI-driven predictions for the region:
- Dynamic-Journey Orchestration: By 2028, the A2000 will utilise data & AI to automate 30% of actions in the buyer journey across marketing and sales, shifting to sensing, dynamically delivering to the “adventure” the buyer chooses.
- GenAI Eats Marketing: By 2027, GenAI will assume 30% of traditional marketing’s mundane tasks such as SEO, content and website optimisation, customer data analysis, segmentation, lead scoring and hyper-personalisation.
- Bidirectional AI Marketing Takeover: To reduce content ingestion, by 2026 more than 50% of consumers will employ AI through mobile devices to discover, evaluate, and purchase most of the products and services they want.
- Conversational Marketing Goes Mainstream: Pervasive sentiment and intent AI will propel 50% of A500 firms to conduct all marketing journeys as real-time, two-way conversations by 2026, improving leads to purchase conversions by 40%.
In the near-term (2024-2026), the focus will be on consumer-controlled AI, value creation from zero and first-party data, more open advertising environment, intelligent journey orchestration driven by contextualized conversations. In the longer-term (2027-2029), there will be a shift to automation of traditional marketing tasks, employ hosted communities, quantum sensing and intent AI, expansion of marketers’ skillsets, and greater collaboration.
The other trends that marketing leaders must pay attention to are:
- Create Fans for Brands: By 2027, 60% of A1000 companies will seek to create fans, not just customers, by using hosted communities to drive loyalty, engagement, ideation, and first-party data that becomes an annuity.
- Trust-based Marketing: By 2026, 55% of A1000 companies will adopt trust-based marketing programs, harness greater value from zero- and first-party data and improve marketing profitability by 40%.
- Quantum-Sensing Marketing: By 2029, 10% of the A1000 will employ quantum-sensing in their marketing efforts and building contextual experiences to better understand the feelings, perceptions, and intentions of customers.
- Walled-Gardens Open Up: By 2026, 20% of walled-garden vendor revenue will come from indirect sources as pressure from consumers, marketers, and governments encourages more open tactics and greater interoperability.
- The Creative Scientist: By 2027, 30% of marketers in A1000 firms will possess a blend of data analysis, experience design, storytelling, and creativity skillsets, fulfilling emerging roles for marketing’s experience era.
CMO Orchestrates Customer Value: By 2027, 50% of CMOs in A1000 organisations will be primarily measured for their ability to deliver customer value outcomes, forcing 30% to evolve into becoming orchestrators of customer value.