Lounges, networking, speakers and yes, a DJ. Martech Nordic 2021 had every element of a physical event and made it work well online. The event was moderated by well-known Finnish host and journalist Peter Nyman. This year’s theme for the event was Re-think, Re-build, Re-generate, where we were able to hear the insights from a range of professionals about rapid change in consumer behavior and digital technology, and ways companies should be acting now to stay ahead of the curve.
The agenda covered multiple areas, including what should be taken into consideration in order to learn more about your customers, their behavior and the opportunities presented by developments in marketing technology. The event was packed with valuable information so here are our highlights from this year's Martech Nordic 2021.
1) Marketplace as an element
“Rise of the marketplace is an element to watch”, highlighted Nabil Malouli, VP, Global eCommerce Lead at DHL Supply Chain in the Fireside chat. Even though the eCommerce is bigger than ever, there is room for everyone, with right strategy. Companies shouldn’t focus solely single key players but the key groups in the marketplace. You can see the big picture on the field and bring your strategy to the next level.
Consumer expectations are evolving all the time and you need to stay one or two steps ahead in order to catch the attention. It takes a lot of effort, knowledge and data to be able to satisfy the consumer’s needs and wants. Malouli gave great examples of these needs, which affects the consumer’s decision of the webstore. Convenience in making purchases online is one of the most important needs to fill. The customer journey needs to be well planned out and fix the voids that might appear. When consumers order a product or service online, they want it fast. Meaning speed of the service is another factor that could affect to consumer’s decision.
According to Posti's recent study by eCom Next eCommerce (Oct 7 2021), 36% of consumers would buy more online, if delivery times would be faster. It is not that rare nowadays to get the packages delivered on the next day and better yet. If there are options for example on different types of deliveries, it gives the consumer the option to choose the best one for him.
With that said, we come to the third factor: Control. The customer needs to have the control in their purchases.
When you combine these, you are giving the consumer more power and that is what the consumer wants. What customers want, is more power with the features to choose from. See the whole study about the consumer behavior on eCommerce here: Posti - Suuri verkkokauppatutkimus 2021.
But where are your customers? Social media plays a big part in this. Social media used to be a meeting place for people, but companies should consider social media more as a conversion platform. With the right digital marketing strategy, you can link your offerings to places exactly where your consumers are. And remember, technology and psychology go hand in hand which embraces the importance of data and the ways on how to analyze it.
The development of the artificial intelligence - and sub-disciplines of machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing - in the past ten years has been huge. From recognizing the dog between a picture of a dog and a cat to the point where AI can analyze content with a quick scan and predict, where a person's attention will go. With this technology, you are able to create marketing content, which is going to really captivate the attention of your consumer. But it doesn’t happen automatically. Different forms of AI need to be trained well and continue its training with solid and continuous new data. Like Markku Mäntymaa, founder and CEO from Viomba said in his session that “AI can be as good as the humans that have trained it.” This doesn’t happen overnight, instead, models and algorithms need tons of usable data to analyze and to be continuously updated and re-trained.
With well-trained models, you can use AI-based solutions in your marketing planning in a way to create much more effective content. With the analysis, you can track consumers usage of your website or marketing pictures (or even videos!) and see, if the attention goes right where you want it to be or if there are some obstacles that needs to be removed so that the website is the easiest as possible to use. You are also able to analyze the consumer behavior and from that, assign the AI to predict the product suggestions to consumers. Just to mention few examples there, because the opportunities seem to be limitless with AI!
3) Gamification in Marketing
Games included in your campaign? Yes! As consumers spend more time on the internet and offerings online are growing so much that there are almost too many options to choose from. It's time to get creative with interacting with consumers. Adding gamification in your marketing campaigns can do the trick to engage those casual browsers and turn them into active customers. A great example of successful gamification was given by Veera Korvenkari, Digital Strategist from SOK. The focus in 2020 for SOK to improve the Sokos.fi-webstore to be more customer centric, since the previous version wasn't engaging customers as much as was hoped.
By implementing gamification into the marketing strategy and consumer experience with LeadFamly, Sokos.fi was able to meet their objectives to raise engagement; more newsletter subscribers, and increased number of purchases when gamified mechanics were activated. Max Söderholm from Leadfamly gave great insights about gamification and more information can be found here: Brief Guide to Gamification.
To conclude, Martech 2021 Nordic offered a great palette of speakers with their insights from different industries. It is exciting to see the opportunities that technology is giving us because it really does seem that only sky is the limit. Even with the opportunities and number of offerings out there, you need to remember that consumers don’t want everything. You need to understand what they want, when they want it and where they're looking for it. You’ll get the best results with piloting and rapid testing, collecting data and most importantly, analyzing the concrete business outcomes and impacts. In a constantly evolving industry, such as eCommerce, it is important to stay few steps ahead of your target market with constantly following the trends, but you also need to have a plan, a well-defined strategy with goals to measure.
More information about the MarTech Nordic 2021 and other BIG events: BIG Nordic: Events
And remember: with the right partner guiding you through the technology jungle, you are able to take your business to the next level. Here you can find our cases: Luxus projects and Contact us for the solutions we would have for you!