New Technologies that are set to Revolutionize Digital Marketing

Innovations being a prime influencer behind Digital Marketing, these new technologies are set to make a digi-marketer’s life easier.

[Image courtesy: Google Images]

• Artificial Intelligence: While not exactly a “fresh” concept—think Ash in Alien and Bishop in Aliens—AI stands to revolutionize digi-marketing by reinventing ‘search engine marketing’, especially as “personal, voice-based assistants” like Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri…and don’t forget Iron Man’s Jarvis either! AI can transform digi-marketing from one-way communication to two-way dialogue covering both device-stored and available-on-Web content.
• Customer Experience Optimization: Providing the customer with relevant, timely and ready-to-use content can optimize Customer Experience.
• Multichannel Marketing: A shift in communication style from channel-centric to audience-centric, heralded by the social media boom, is enabling digi-marketers to reach out to different audiences through different channels simultaneously.
• Social Media Analytics: More than catchy designs, audiences are looking for quality and long-term value/relevance, making digi-marketers design campaigns focussed on tracking how many leads or purchases a post actually generated.
• Augmented Reality: Its newfound popularity—thanks to Pokémon Go’s success—has led to digi-marketers rushing to explore its marketing potential through more app-based games. However, some experts are doubtful about its efficacy in non-app/game areas.
• Virtual Reality: VR creates a deeply immersive and more ‘personal’ digital space for users. Both Google Cardboard and Oculus Rift have taken off to fantastic sales figures, with scaling of greater heights predicted in the upcoming years. VR can significantly boost online shopping and advertising, though its high cost remains a prohibitive factor.
• Account-based Marketing: ABM deals with improving pipeline metrics and allocating one’s resources better by bringing the Sales and Marketing departments on the same page.
• Data-driven Marketing and Advertising: Data Management Platforms (DMPs) are gaining prominence as globally, many digi-marketers are trying to enhance their customer understanding experience—and thereby improve performance—by using their own data, collected from customer communication.
• Data Visualization: Data Visualization helps to assimilate, analyse and interpret the massive amounts of customer data—a significant customer behaviour index—that can be used to design improved marketing campaigns and customer outreach programmes.
• Machine Learning Algorithms: This is the ability to learn from and make data-driven predictions and decisions—without being explicitly programmed, or evolving into a Skynet or an Ultron!—based on patter recognition techniques, for example, search suggestion prompts. RankBrain, an algorithm that works with Google’s Hummingbird update to better understand how user searches work, is highly beneficial for digi-marketing.
• Marketing Automation: There are many tools which allow us to create fresh content or publish on social media. While this makes a digi-marketer’s work easier, it can kill creativity—and ultimately, novelty of content—resulting in non-engaging campaigns. Ergo, audience alienation. Human involvement is necessary to keep the audience connect alive.
• Internet of Things: People are increasingly introducing into their households smart devices which can be integrated into one central Web-based system and controlled from anywhere. If handled more efficiently—i.e. made more user-friendly—this can be a great marketer-consumer communication platform.