It is now more important than ever for businesses to create frictionless experiences with the quality of customer experience now determining where consumers spend, is the message from the Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising (ADMA).

“Putting the customer at the centre of corporate strategy may require shifts in culture, values and mission statements, alongside new organisational structures, more agile optimisation processes and continued investment in technology,” the company said.

“Companies who fail to take this trend seriously will fall further behind their competition and recovery will become increasingly out of reach.”

As a result, the ADMA has shared four predictions for marketing in retail for the year ahead.

Personalisation

Businesses need to deliver relevant and timely messages which will be taken to a new level with the application of artificial intelligence. With customer insights and behaviours, marketing personnel will be able to tailor higher quality customer experiences.

Issues surrounding this personalisation will continue to be at the forefront of discussion between the Government and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

The ADMA will lobby to minimise the red tape on data-driven marketing and advertising, analytics, and business in general. It will also review its Code of Conduct to remain up to date and relevant.

Strategic marketing transformation

Integration of marketing and internal data in real time is becoming critical to optimisation and ROI. Marketing professionals will need to develop a strong grasp of the technology that will enable the next phase of their evolution and build stronger bridges with technology peers to be successful in this environment.

ADMA will be hosting a Global Forum for its members with topics including AI, blockchain and data, among other new applications of technology in the marketing space.

Voice search

ComScore estimates that over 50% of searches in 2020 will be from voice so marketers will need to focus on new methods of competing in this area.

Content developed to cater for this type of search behaviour will add complexity to the ever changing SEO landscape and elevate the importance of content strategies.

Data health, analytics and intelligence

Most organisations still struggle with the health and connectivity of their data and the true cost of this issue will become more obvious. The quality of data will become part of the overall health assessment of organisations, metrics developed akin to Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure how data cleansing efforts are progressing and executives will be held accountable for improving data quality.

The Consumer Data Right will be starting in February 2020 for the four major banks, followed by the telecommunications and energy sectors.