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.

How Marketing Automation Enhances Brand Value and Business Value

Marketing Automation attempts to streamline sales and marketing in an efficient way through engaging campaigns meant to automatically appeal to customer/prospective customer behaviour by replacing recurring manual processes with automated tasks and reducing human errors. The criteria, possible outcomes and processes are pre-defined; these are interpreted, stored internally and executed by the software.

Right channel + right message + right person + right time

= Greater likelihood of converting prospects into actual sales

Every customer is unique and so are his/her demands, preferences and choices. Consequently, automated campaigns run the risk of failing if there’s a disconnect between what they offer and what the customer is interested in; they stand to succeed more when the gap between their content and the customer’s unique needs is as minimal as possible.

Marketing Automation enables companies to handle lead flows better by optimizing marketing programmes. Improved response rates to campaigns help companies gain better ROI by creating a more productive revenue cycle, syncing results with approach and increasing profits through a better lead conversion rate. Since automation provides a platform for continuous accumulation, assimilation and analysis of data, predicting customer information and behavioural patterns acquires a new edge. Reviews on social sites are also a great way of garnering information in the form of feedback.

While Marketing Automation is an integral part of effective CRM, its scope goes beyond that. It can be used to create an automated-yet-personalized bridge between company and customer by taking the latter from “unaware and interested” to “engaged and loyal” in the Customer Engagement Continuum. It gives the customer what he/she wants, yet imparts a dash of novelty to each serving, thereby increasing profitability by being consistent, relevant and personalized.

Consider old TV ads like “Hamara Bajaj” and “Cadbury Kya Swaad Hai Zindagi Mein”. The Cadbury commercials harped on happiness, which is experienced [when the brain releases serotonin and dopamine] upon chocolate consumption. Similarly, the Bajaj ads focussed on the family-oriented existence of the middle class by playing up the loyalty theme. These ads generated a feeling of being personalized despite being mass-market vehicles for their respective products. This is the ultimate goal of Marketing Automation: creating personalized content despite automated, low-human-involvement processes.

Maximum ROI can be achieved through Marketing Automation by constantly looking out for new leads and striving to understand their needs to be able to provide an optimum solution, analysing customer behaviour minutely, engaging with them rigorously and consistently to be considered ‘renewable’, providing complimentary solutions based on their digital behaviour instead of aggressively pushing unwanted products and services and ensuring customer satisfaction through systematic and regular follow-up.

The whole point of deploying automated campaigns is not to merely cut down on human effort, but to create a design that attracts strangers, turns them into interested and regular visitors, further converts them into prospective leads, creates customers out of them through personalized and engaging communication and ultimately, gets them to act as willing promoters of your brand—without sacrificing creativity and human connect for automation.

[Image courtesy: Google Images]