Keeping up to date with marketing technology trends helps to prioritize and define the initiatives of future marketing directions for every business in order for it to constantly stay ahead of the competition.
The rapid evolvement of technology can affect modern marketing but tech helps businesses to grow, create relationships, strengthen their efficiency and allows them to communicate with prospective customers. Technology has become an important tool for every marketer.
The shift from traditional marketing toward reliance on data analytics, virtual platforms and machine learning is booming and marketing departments will have to continue to integrate IT functions into their marketing systems. The focus remains on customer retention and customer conversion.
These are the top 5 trends to watch out for this year.
- AI and Chatbots
Chatbots are the fastest way to give data-related answers or take requests from customers and can help any brand to improve their customer service. They offer personalized service to any customer, at any time of the day, keeping overhead costs low.
Chatbots can be integrated into any of the communication media within a company including a website, application or social media platform. As they do their work they also gather useful information that can be used when planning future marketing strategies.
It is believed that the chatbot market has reached the $1.2 billion dollar mark and has an annual growth rate of 24%. Over the next five years it is expected that nearly 80% of business communications with customers will be through bot messengers.
Integrating chatbot technology into a business is a wise move for any business right now. Either used as a customer service assistant or as a way of promoting aspects of the company and offers, now is the time to place the chatbot technology into place.
Chatbots have humor and personalities and it is no wonder that 45% of end users prefer to communicate with chatbots when reaching out to the customer service department of a company. According to Avi Ben Ezra, a leading Chatbot researcher, even more exciting things are happening given Chatbot and IOT integration.
- Voice Searches
Virtual assistants, like Siri and Alexa, are becoming increasingly intelligent. This is due to advances in natural learning processing, automation, conversation interfaces, machine learning and deep learning processes
There are 3.5 billion searches performed daily on Google and almost one third of these are voice searches. With a typed search on a desktop or mobile, the search results are often hundreds of pages long.
When a question is posed to a voice search, the results are only a few and most of the time it will only be one. If a business website is one of these results then the click through rate has the potential to be much higher. Therefore, it is important that a business ensures that it will be there in the first place by tailoring an SEO strategy for voice search.
This is done by ensuring that search phrase is more conversational, in the same way that people actually speak, which is totally different to written searches that consist of keyword bundles. Content on websites should also be written in a more conversational tone. This will allow them to be found by a voice search.
- Video stays aloft
Since the average attention span of customers is short, most people prefer to watch a video rather than read a blog. Video continues to be the most successful marketing medium for2019 and beyond.
The best place to attract consumer attention is on social media platforms and live video directly connects engaged customers to services and products. Marketers must take advantage of live media platforms like Facebook Live to capture and excite their target market.
Consumers don’t want to see the same things over and over, so originality and the use interactive and imaginative video marketing remain important to ensure consumer engagement.
The statistics speak for themselves: emails with an added video increase their click through rating by almost 300% and one on a landing page increases conversion by 80%. Video outperforms all other marketing mediums so it is important that it is incorporated into any successful marketing strategy.
- AR or VR: The choice is yours
Augmented reality (AR) is imagery or video layered on top of reality, whereas virtual reality (VR) is a completely generated reality and this is achieved through the use of a head-mounted device.
By appealing to the senses and emotions of the consumer it creates an immersive experience which allows the consumer to connect. The consumer can take charge of the experience and tailor it to his needs.
Businesses have already grabbed at the new technology and are using it to drive brand awareness. This way the customer can try out various items before buying them. A good example of this is IKEA, it has been using VR gaming technology since 2016 on its shopping app. Other companies that have tried AR include Nivea, Volkswagen and Starbucks.
- Personalize your customer experience with AI and machine learning
Efficient data analysis is currently been driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence. This is making it easier for marketers to deliver personalized content and unique experiences to their customers through hyper-personalization.
AI allows marketers to gather all types of information about the interests of a customer and the marketer can then set-up predictive lead scoring, deploy complex trigger-based campaigns and invest in dynamic content to present to customers along the way.
The technology takes away the need for manual effort since the machine-learning algorithms provide a scalable path to creating the unique customer experiences.
The computer no longer gets given a set of rules to follow, but is programmed to learn everything it can about a person and to then select the experience that will most likely satisfy the consumer. The most effective machine-learning personalization is built by the marketers themselves who have to program the computer about the types of information to consider whet it establishes the digital experience of a customer.
The pre-programmed algorithms can be one or several and can be simple or advanced. Simple ones will display trending items or those recently published, while advance ones can undertake collaborative filtering or decision trees.
Machine learning and chatbots can assist with data analysis that help marketers better understand client consumption and can then offer a more personalized customer experience and better customer satisfaction.
These trends cannot all be implemented at once but every business needs to be aware of what the competition and other similar industries are doing.
Prioritizing and planning is important when a decision has to be made. Video may be expensive, but AR or VR cost even more, the choice will depend on what will appeal to the customer base and what will bring in more CTR and engagement.
Picking up on one of these trends that makes the most sense will ensure that it will give the company the best ROI and will resonate with the target market. Marketing will always be about visibility and since many bigger companies have a large customer base, they need data to make it easier to target customers. In this massive undertaking it is essential that they can discern which information is more valuable in order to stay focused, create conversations and increase conversions.
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