In a world that’s changing quickly due to shifts in technology and consumer behavior, it can be overwhelming for marketers to keep up. Gartner’s new report titled, ‘Predicts 2019: Marketing Seeks a New Equilibrium’ tries to understand and anticipate future trends affecting chief marketing officers and marketing teams.

The firm’s analysts predict six major changes in the next three to four years. By 2022, CMOs will reduce their investment in CX by at least 25 percent and re-route that money towards profitability.

Content creators, like influencers, will gain even more power. It is believed they’ll produce over 30 percent of their digital content with the help of AI content-generation tools.

In 2022, Gartner says, brands that incorporate user-level control of marketing data will reduce customer turnover by 40 percent. The emergence of CDPs is an example of that; the system enables better use of first-party data to drive content and individual-level ad targeting. Additionally, this will increase the brand’s lifetime value by 25 percent in 2023.

“These are exciting, but uncertain times for CMOs and marketing leaders. From the promise of data and analytics to the lure of CX and everything in between, marketers have vast opportunities to set themselves apart from the competition, but equal challenges to overcome in order to do so,” said Charles Golvin, senior director and analyst at Gartner in a press release. “Finding the right balance to successfully leverage marketing technology and emerging trends will be critical to marketing’s success over the course of the next couple of years.”

By 2023, the prediction isn’t promising for anyone in a marketing analytics team. The analysts believe around 60 percent of CMOs will cut the size of the department in half because of “failure to realize promised improvements.” That year there will be a 25 percent increase in response rates because of autonomous marketing systems. It’s predicted those systems will deliver 55 percent of multichannel marketing messages “based on marketer criteria and real-time consumer behavior.” Consumers already have short attention spans and in four years it’s expected they will watch 20 percent fewer minutes of video ads per day. To curb the loss, brands will have to create short-form video ads.

Gartner’s prophecies come from four key “forces”:

  • Behavioral Change Gartner found 44 percent of consumers would be more inclined to use a virtual personal assistant app if they knew their private information remained in the device.
  • Regulatory Pressures Regulations like GDPR are changing how companies can use customer data.
  • Organizational Shifts Internally, marketing leaders are hiring more data experts and investing more in CX, making expectations higher in these areas.
  • Disruptive Automation Brands want to be efficient and as marketers implement automation in new areas, the innovation will have a “disruptive impact” in the industry.