In future years, it is expected that marketers will take complete control of the overall customer experience. If you’re looking for marketing manager jobs, here are some trends you need to know.

The Economist Intelligence Unit surveyed 499 (their aim must have been 500) Senior Marketing Executives and Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) about how they view marketing as evolving in the future. They also conducted some one-on-one in-depth interviews with CMOs from such leading brands as JP Morgan Chase and Unilever. They were seeking to discover what key trends and technologies will be driving change over the upcoming four years within the marketing industry. The results that have compiled make for very intriguing reading.

You can sign up and download the full report. However, below we have summarised some of the most critical findings for marketers.

Hottest Technology Trends for Marketers

The following chart is not very surprising in many ways. Mobile has been a huge marketing trend for several years and is responsible for more than half of all web traffic these days. The Internet of Things (IoT) is somewhat more exciting and newer. However, it isn’t clear precisely how marketers will be affected by it. There are numerous predictions and opportunities, but anybody who claims they know precisely how IoT will affect your 2020 marketing is either very misguided or lying.

Personalisation technologies all have been around for quite some time. However, with the large amounts of data that is available now, CMOs are beginning to realise the opportunities that are available and personalisation has started to come into its own. We are still at the beginning when it comes to geo-targeting, and this should not be your entire objective. Advanced marketers need to build statistical models to determine what signals indicate that customers are interested in specific products and then serve them according to these findings.

A groundbreaking and fairly new marketing technology that appears in the chart is blockchain technologies. However, it also isn’t clear how it will evolve by the year 2020. Its implications for intellectual property, law, and banking are beginning to be realised, but it still isn’t clear how it will end up being useful for marketers.

One hot topic lately has been Artificial Intelligence, especially since the Alpha Go AI from Google was able to beat the Go world champion. Combining content personalisation with AI provides some amazing opportunities for marketers to take advantage of, and that is something that those who have the abilities can experiment with and look into.

Key Channels for 2020

Whenever I hear someone say 2020, I tend to think of it being a long way off. Won’t we all have mind-reading computers, flying cars, and robo-butlers by 2020? Or a moon base at the very least?

Of course, it’s actually not that far off. Remember 2012? It doesn’t seem like a long time ago, does it? It feels like only yesterday we were enjoying the London Olympics. The point is, more time has passed since then than the amount of time until it’s 2020. It can be far too easy thinking the future is always several years away and before you know it we will be living it in the present – and your marketing efforts have fallen behind without you even noticing it.

So keeping all of this in mind, consider the chart of what CMOs believe will be the most critical marketing channels in 2020 for their businesses. . Does that reflect what your present investment priorities are? Investing in future channels today instead of later is the only way you can ensure you don’t end up falling behind.

Measuring How Effective Your Marketing Efforts Are

Marketers frequently struggle to review how effective their campaigns are. In all fairness, it isn’t their entire fault. It can be very difficult to prove whether an increase in sales was due to a new ad campaign, a messaging change on the website or simply from a big push by the sales team.

However, digital technologies offer huge opportunities to measure key metrics more accurately and determine how sales are affected by marketing. Calculating that all-important ROI metric is only possible if you have accurate data regarding what is driving conversions and traffic.