5 Trends in MarTech Shaping the Landscape in 2024

MarTech is a crucial element of digital marketing campaigns, with an estimated value of nearly $670 billion last year. Effective marketing technology solutions help companies communicate with their prospects and customers while keeping up with the competition. The biggest problem for brands that want to keep up with the latest trends is that the best practices are constantly changing.

Having been in the MarTech space for over 15 years, I’ve seen the marketing landscape go through significant transformations. Below are my picks that I recommend incorporating into your campaigns and solutions in 2024 to ensure you don’t miss out on anything.

1. Ads for Marketplaces

Over the last two years, almost half of all digitally native brands sold on marketplaces. However, if these brands are to continue driving sales, they need to change their approach. It’s no longer enough just to publish a store — to attract customers, you need to engage with them. Compared to an average customer, a fully-engaged customer represents an average 23% premium (whereas an actively-disengaged customer represents an average 13% discount) in wallet share, profitability, relationship growth, and revenue.

We’ve been seeing the largest marketplaces, such as Amazon, Allegro, eBay, and other major players around the world developing advertising cabinets. These cabinets allow sellers to purchase ads from marketplaces and to track conversions of external traffic. In addition to gaining more sales for the seller, this brings new users to the marketplace. For this reason, more companies are emerging to help sellers purchase ads on other platforms through various integrations. 

For example, affiliate partner networks are also actively working with clients in this direction, and the mechanics of affiliates allow them to effectively attract customers to their brand pages in the marketplace as well as to the main sites. According to Admitad’s estimate, which is part of Mitgo Group, there was a 17% increase in sales through affiliate stores last year

2. Buy Now, Pay Later

The announcement from Klarna in early March that the company is actively preparing for a public offering has brought the buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) trend to the forefront of marketing. This is important because BNPL services keep the transaction histories of their users for a long time. Plus, they’re in a better position to use this information than are banks — financial institutions are known for being quite inflexible. As a result, BNPL services leverage user transaction histories to develop recommendations for purchases.

I see the BNPL trend almost as a more effective reboot of the cash-back trend. The difference is BNPL leads to sales opportunities that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. On the other hand, showing that they’re able to encourage purchases that wouldn’t otherwise have happened increases their value in the eyes of their partners.

3. Artificial Intelligence

AI remains a hot topic in 2024. Although a large amount has happened in AI recently, there’s one trend in particular with regard to GenAI that relates to MarTech: the opening of the long-awaited ChatGPT Store.

This is offering the first generation of MarTech advertising materials — solutions that could potentially replace designers on some teams. Currently, though, the solutions are too basic for complex designs and, of course, lack the creativity that graphic designers bring to make ads unique.

4. Tools for Retention

With many brands now focusing their efforts on retention rather than acquisition, another trend in martech is greater adoption of tools to help with these strategies.

One such tool is chat assistants — some stats show that adding live chat can increase conversion rates by 12%. Brands feed them their own data to ensure they provide customers with relevant assistance.

There has been a great deal of discussion around using cookies for analytics — something else that’s key for retention. Tracking with cookies has become more difficult since GDPR in Europe. It’s now almost universal that a popup window will appear when you visit a website, asking you to approve cookies. The problem is this popup will include a warning for functional cookies, which are a necessity and not for tracking. There’s a discussion in the European Parliament about excluding the need to ask users to accept functional cookies, something that would improve usability of websites. We might see the same change in the U.S. market in the near future.

5. Anti-Fraud Solutions for Mobile Traffic

The above trends cover attraction and retention. What remains is brand protection — namely, anti-fraud. Although anti-fraud capabilities have existed for the web for a long time, and we at Mitgo Group have actively invested in enhancing these protections. However, the challenge shifts when we look at mobile platforms, where data access and rights impose limitations

Now, many anti-fraud solutions for mobile traffic are hitting the market including Scaleo, TrafficGuard, and Impact. This is important because there is no built-in protection against brand bidding on mobile — we only have what trackers offer. Even then, these don’t offer actual protection: they only provide detection to alert brands that something is wrong. Furthermore, only the tracking platforms themselves can provide this protection because the SDK must be embedded in the application. Plus, each app only installs a single SDK to avoid becoming too heavy. As a result, only one solution is installed — if any at all.

The Takeaway

Martech is constantly changing, and it is important to stay aware of current trends. This will ensure you’re investing in the right solutions to tackle challenges associated with attraction, retention, and brand protection. As a starting point, I recommend bearing the above five trends in mind, as they are relevant for every company that is doing marketing this year.