Martech is moving fast - pulling in other segments of technology as it pushes forward into 2016. We are well on the way to 2020 - where WalkerInfo predicts that customer experience will be the primary differentiator for consumers over the traditional four P's of marketing (product, place, price and promotion). In addition, a Salesforce survey of 5000 B2B and B2C marketers shows that keeping up with trends is one of the biggest problems marketers face today. While technology and consumer behavior are involving in unpredictable ways, so are the ways marketers are reacting to these new developments. Here are a few things that I see coming in marketing’s future, and I think they will be here before we know it.

Future trend 1: Nonhuman marketing

Today, businesses have more data than ever before, including network and device data, collecting from proliferating channels. Our televisions, phones, Fitbits and Apple Watches are becoming connected, rapidly changing consumer behavior. For example, the multiscreen trend in which people watch television while also using other digital devices presents a great opportunity for marketers. Combining this data with traditional demographic and geographic consumer data can greatly improve marketing efforts.

All of this connected technology will become platforms for my life, creating a myriad of consumer data and better experiences. With this trend, marketing will need to direct its attention to all devices, and not just to individuals. SAS is combining streaming analytics off all of these device types with traditional data like demographic, social, and transactional data to help brands inform marketing efforts and send marketing messages and offers to channel touch points.

Future trend 2: Consolidation

Businesses strive to achieve a single customer view because they understand the value to their bottom line, including making marketing more effective and gaining better insight into customers to create brand value and greater loyalty. Brands are starting to understand that customer experience makes the sale, not product or price. By removing intermediaries, supply chains are shorter and technology becomes more user-enabling.

Today, some businesses serve the sole purpose of aggregating and sourcing products and services for consumers. At amazon.com, I can buy anything from a TV to a pair of socks in a single click – without ever interacting with Samsung or Woolrich as brands. So who do these brands market to? Not me the consumer – but Amazon as the aggregator – and the message to that aggregator will obviously be much different than the marketing messages of today. SAS is working in a B2B context with many brands to understand how and who to market to in order to break through the noise and deliver offers to businesses and intermediaries as we see business models change as we move into 2016.

Future trend 3: Applied analytics and inherent intelligence

I talk to people about marketing software technology every day. Never once have I heard someone say – “I really love my marketing technology software – I wish I could spend more time in it, you know,just clicking around and hanging out.”

Instead, marketing analysts want to quickly enter the software, perform an action, complete a task and exit the application so that they can get on to more strategic parts of their job. Marketing technology vendors are answering marketers’ desire for faster and more intuitive software.

The ability to embed and apply analytical techniques – things like automatically derived segmentation, applied marketing activity optimization, embedded forecasting, and other techniques – all in an effort to infuse machine learning style techniques and behaviors into marketing interfaces. SAS is working to infuse these cognitive analytical behavior techniques into marketing technology software. After all, every marketer (including myself) wants to simplify and optimize workloads! If a machine can tell a marketer the best time to execute a campaign, to whom, which content to use, and when to send it out – why wouldn’t a marketer oblige? I know I would.