Being a digital marketer, I have been asked quite frequently about the “future of Digital marketing” by my clients and mentees. As we know that the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve at an accelerated pace and is continuously evolving and opening up new opportunities every day. Digital marketing is at a turning point where it must evolve to meet current challenges, new changes and also be quick to grab the existing opportunities. Let’s dive into my article to understand which technologies and strategies will have the most impact on digital marketing as I share my thoughts on the changes, challenges & the opportunity that are unfolding in the future for digital marketers.
Customers are shifting their buying behaviours and digital marketer’s challenge is to innovate & transform approaches on how brands can deliver value through customer experiences and communications for their customers.
Technology has been an enabler of digital marketing and will continue to be. Marketing technology has grown to an overwhelming proportion into an array of applications that has become difficult to manage and use. Marketers have to be strategic thinkers for choosing the right marketing technology stacks particularly the ones that will propel successful marketing to the future.
Digital marketers have to now constantly evaluate strategies, marketing campaigns, communication channels and the tools to be relevant into the future as conventional marketing technology stacks may no longer align well to provide engagement opportunities for marketers. On the other hand, the shifting customer behaviors can translate into new challenges and new opportunities for digital marketers
Digital marketers need to transform their marketing activities to stay relevant in the future as customers are shifting their buying behaviors and brands clearly need to deliver value to customers in their approach towards customer experiences and communications. Continuous technology change is another factor that is transforming the future direction of digital marketing.
Here are some approaches to transform the marketing activities in order to be ready for the future
Evaluate your current stacks:
Some MarTech technologies have grown into applications that are so difficult to manage and use. Many marketers probably don’t even use 50% of the overall features of the tool despite heavy price points. It would be necessary to do an internal audit on the existing technologies & then look for newer technologies that may offer leading-edge marketing and communications opportunities that are easy to use and produce the best results.
Cutting edge customer interactions:
Digital marketers now must better identify which interactions customers want to be digital and which they want as human communication. Various insights from the buyer’s journey map & customer analytics data intelligence can help us to achieve the next level of customer interactions.
Integrated approach on omni-channel:
Some organizations are yet to do well with omni-channel multi-device marketing. Omni-channel marketing provides an integrated customer experience, no matter how many different channels are used by the customer. The marketing automation tools can help to personalize & unify messaging and to collect valuable data on customer touchpoints in the organization
Advanced Marketing Analytics:
Through advanced marketing analytics, one can track changes in buyer behaviour to fine-tune all marketing activities, communications, and customer experiences. These improved tracking of customer interactions provides a better understanding of customer segments, powerful opportunities to engage prospects much earlier in the buying process. This leads to better modes of advanced personalization, targeted email marketing and a greater customer satisfaction
Factors that are driving the transformation of digital marketing to remain relevant?
Here are some of the technologies that are impacting digital marketing
Conversational marketing
It is the new chip on the block to move buyers through the marketing and sales funnels through the power of conversation. Conversational interfaces include online & voice chatbots, messaging and voice-enabled assistants like Siri and Alexa. These create authentic experiences with customers and the conversations can now happen in the platforms where consumers are already spending their time. Mobile is leading as a powerful channel for conversational interfaces.
Voice interfaces:
Voice-enabled technology for digital marketing activities is challenging and requires unique content development. Siri, Alexa, and other voice assistants are the main approach to marketing through voice interfaces to increase audience engagement and interactions with brands and products. Voice-enabled technology has the capability to take personalization to a new level as a customer-facing communication channel and also to add a new dimension to content marketing.
AI-based Chatbots
AI-based chatbots are already used extensively by marketing, e-commerce sites, messaging apps, and other digital platforms. Chatbots provide an interface to interact by asking a series of simple questions in real-time to understand if the user needs help with sales or support or looking to make a transaction. This is a good opportunity to inject some personalization and make the prospect feel great by having a meaningful conversation with the brand that is helpful, personal, and empathetic.
Conversational interfaces for marketing are in their infancy stage, so marketers should proceed with caution, taking time to learn how to use this channel while making sure customers aren’t alienated.
Marketing analytics
Analytics can track and analyze the results of marketing initiatives and provide us with the insight & intelligence for changes and improvements to our marketing efforts.
Marketing analytics uses artificial intelligence applications to provides more insights into customer intelligence by using historical data to predict important patterns and identify unexpected behavioural changes to update personalization & marketing efforts.
Tools like predictive analytics predict customer behaviors based on previously observed patterns of the buyer’s journey which helps to connect with the customer at various touchpoints. Through these advanced data analytics, digital marketers can accurately identify customer trends and measure outcomes in new ways
Machine intelligence – AI, ML & Augmented reality
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are having a profound impact on digital marketing activities along with augmented reality (AR) which is rapidly gaining ground in marketing and product promotion
Artificial Intelligence:
AI applications have been developed to re-create certain aspects of the human mind for use on a wide array of problems and tasks because of speed and efficiency. AI applications can now handle marketing tasks like developing dynamic landing pages for conversion optimization, purchasing ads, optimizing campaigns, and also for managing interactions during buyer journeys etc.
Marketing automation is one of the areas currently where AI is helping to identify users’ specific behaviours to send triggered messaging, like push notifications or emails, with the right content at the right time. AI is very effective in granular customer segmentation, retargeting, click tracking that can lead to improved customer engagement through advanced personalization & innovative experiences for customers that end in better results of the marketing efforts
AI can now utilize data from social media platforms & blog posts to analyze customer behavior and search patterns to understand more about how buyers find products and services that they are interested in. Prospects can test products before making any commitment through AI-informed experiences, combined with AR capabilities. Brands can use this approach to reduce the risk to prospects when they are deciding to buy a product for the first time.
Machine Learning:
ML is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) and focuses on applications that learn from experience and improve their decision-making or predictive accuracy over time. It finds new ways to solve problems and more efficiently AI and ML systems often work together.
ML has the ability to analyze extremely large sets of data, find hidden information in the data and present analytics to improve the understanding of the buyer’s persona.
This data will help to improve the results of the marketing activities and generate higher quality leads. Examples of ML in marketing would include
- Content mapping and identifying the right content to increase the engagement with your audience which helps in SEO performance & ranking
- Effective brand interactions for the buyer journey
- Predict quality leads that are more likely to convert into customers
- Optimizing ad purchases and campaigns
- More customer intelligence data
- Increase in open rates for Email engagement with better subject headlines
- Churn rate forecasting
- Lifetime value forecasting prediction
- Increased quality of traffic brought by advertising campaigns
- Automation in marketing processes and avoid routine work
- Predictive targeting, in which ads are shown to users based on the likelihood of they making a purchase
Augmented reality:
AR facilitates the insertion of objects into a real-life environment and is often presented as a kind of futuristic technology. The combination of AR and AI makes it more effective and can interact with physical environments on a multidimensional level by bringing in useful data like real-world object tagging, to add credibility to AR experiences
People before purchasing on e-commerce sites, still like to go to brick-and-mortar stores for hands-on interactions with products. AR is the game-changer for online product experiences as it can create experiences in a virtual reality that is highly personalized to each customer. AR adds another dimension for entertainment and fun.
Brands that make use of this cutting-edge technology in attracting and engaging their audiences can benefit from augmented reality in marketing and the scope is endless.
Here are some examples
It’s possible now to try a product before purchasing or customers can use a product without having to spend many hours reading instruction manuals.
IKEA promotes its augmented reality app called IKEA Place to let customers preview how furniture looks in their homes through the app before they decide to buy the furniture wherever they envision it in their homes. Similar applications are available from vendors for clothing, eyeglasses, cosmetics, hair colour products, cosmetics, beauty products and flooring.
Remember Burger King’s campaign ‘Burn that Ad’ – where mobile users were rewarded with a free meal at Burger King by pointing their smartphones at a McDonald’s outdoor ad and see them “burn” on their phone?
One of the most popular AR mobile game “Pokémon Go” became a sensation worldwide, with over 100 million estimated users at its peak ended up making $2 billion-plus and counting as per Forbes
Here are some examples of augmented reality brand experiences
Hyper personalized targeting & communication
Hyper personalized marketing is the new opportunity for marketers to meaningfully connect, engage with customers, deepen existing relationships and build new ones.
Hyper-personalization is the way forward for brands to tailor their marketing efforts to individual customers thus improving their experience and satisfaction which in turn drives their brand loyalty.
Companies through hyper-personalization can send highly contextualized communications to specific customers through the right channel at the right place and time by creating custom and targeted experiences through the use of data, analytics, AI, and automation.
As marketers become more customer-centric and data-driven, AI-powered hyper-personalization provides the appropriate solution and optimal results for companies to tailor their marketing efforts to the individual customer by using data gathered on that specific customer. For example, personalized product recommendations, key messages or offers can be shared using unique customer data such as psychographics or real-time engagement with your brand. This strategy not only drives brand loyalty, the increased spend which increases the overall marketing effectiveness.
Cadbury made use of customer information and photos to create a hyper-personalized video ad using customer data which includes age, location, and likes, provided via the customer’s Facebook page (after receiving consent), and it resulted in increased click-through rates of 65 percent and conversion rates of 33.6 percent. Organizations like Amazon continue to experiment with personalization seeking to increase sales conversion through the use of recommendation engines that serve customers with the exact product they’re looking for.
While this experience is so seamless that customers may not even realize personalization is occurring and companies have adopted personalization along the customer journey from serving exact products to having a say in product design to dynamic pricing. In the future customers will have a certain level of expectation for personalized interaction with them.
Even traditional businesses like McDonald’s are personalizing their drive-through experience by using external data such as weather, trending topics on social media, products, time of day and seasons combined with a customer’s order patterns to recommend additional products for that particular time and place
Gone are the days of general advertisements to successfully target & engage a wide variety of customers and hyper-personalization cuts through the noise and provides customers exactly what they are looking for. It assists customers with decision-making and fosters deeper relationships that will keep them from seeking out competitors.
The combination of data and technology is disrupting the traditional means through which organizations interacted with customers. Data and technology are now enabling organizations to reach customers through targeted media with content that is relevant and uniquely tailored to them.
Data collection has also been augmented through the advancements of analytics and AI technology. AI allows organizations to sift through vast amounts of information in real-time and make decisions on the types of interactions to have with customers. Companies are leading the charge into new markets through the use of their comprehensive customer databases. By understanding their customers, they can target very specific customer segments using the right media and content to send personalized offers, recommend products, pre-populate applications, inform chatbots, and empower employees with relevant information
Futuristic Technologies creating new customer touchpoints and content types
In today’s complex digital world having conversations with customers might sound easy but creating experiences on websites, retail kiosks, mobile apps, fitness trackers, I0T devices, VR & AR, POS system becomes at times challenging. It’s not enough to deliver content that has to be consistent, connected, and continuous experience that helps customer towards a clear outcome
The Evolution of Content Management: From WCMS, WEM to DX Platforms
The basic web content management (WCMS) systems provide an enterprise with a way to manage digital information on a website through creating and maintaining content, images, data and other collateral needed for their online presence.
As the social web expanded with user-generated content and the rise of mobile, the necessity for more personalized engagement and deeper business integration led to web experience management (WEM) solutions. Building out buyer’s personas and gathering engagement data, organizations were able to serve up more personalized experiences with WEM
Web experience management (WEM) solutions
As digital experience became an integral part of the customer journey, content needed to be accessible and consistent on new channels, thus providing relevant content to each customer. WEM systems gave companies the ability to collect data about user behaviour, define personas, create and provide unique content to targeted audiences. Having an exceptional user experience means sending personalized messages to the target audience and no longer sharing the same message to everyone.
The core difference between CMS and WEM is that WEM gave the ability to share entire personalized experiences across channels. The challenge with WEM systems, however, is that they were designed solely for marketing departments and built as stand-alone marketing tools and were difficult to connect and integrate with the rest of a company’s technology stack such as their CRM or ERP. This was the reason for the rise of open and headless CMS systems
Headless CMS
A headless CMS is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API (JSON, XML) for display on any device. According to Wikipedia, the term “headless” comes from the concept of chopping the “head” (the front end, i.e. the website) off the “body” (the back end, i.e. the content repository).
A headless CMS (eg. Storyblok, Contentful, Prismic) remains with an interface to add content and a RESTful API to deliver content wherever you need it. A headless CMS has only one purpose i.e. to store and deliver structured content. Headless CMSs utilizes content APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow publication anywhere, well beyond the traditional website paradigm like on an iOS app, Android app as well as any platform and technology you can think of.
According to 2020 Cisco AIR findings, the number of devices per person will continue to rise, from 2.4 networked devices per capita in 2018 to 3.6 devices by 2023. Most people will use multiple devices in their buying journey.
Organizations use content to speak and data to listen to foster meaningful relationships and other digital experiences with customers. Organizations use DXPs to build, deploy and continually improve websites, portals, mobile apps for speaking and listening to customers
Digital experience platforms DXPs
According to Gartner, a digital experience platform (DXP) “as an integrated set of technologies, based on a common platform that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints”.
DXPs play an integral part to integrate customer-related data, digital channels and business systems, so that pertinent and timely customer information can be shared across the organization. DXP platforms provide the technology that improves customer experiences and supports the organizational transformation. It plays a significant role in achieving and maintaining omni-channel marketing activities while managing ever-increasing modes for customer interactions and experiences
DXP connects not just web, mobile and social media, but also cuts across any digital touchpoints like billboards, in-store, kiosks, customer portals and e-commerce systems. It also tracks customers, maps their customer journey and identify crucial bottlenecks which enables to reengineer the business practices for a better customer experience. DXP enables customer data capturing, processing and profiling, which gives a unified view of the customer behavior. So when you have a disgruntled customer, you will know the customer history beforehand. Another scenario could be the sales department sees the interests and leads score of the potential customer before calling.
The future of digital is human. Can technology make marketers’ jobs easier?
Digital marketers should adopt the technology to augment, not replace, the creative aspects of digital marketing. Let the technologies take over certain tasks that don’t have to be done by humans. Marketers can spend more time figuring out new ways to better connect and engage with customers using the data intelligence for a better experience in customer interactions and engagement. Owing to the introduction of AI, some marketing positions would be eliminated. Although AI will enhance some jobs, it will also create new ones.
In future, marketing roles will change and new skills will be required to stay relevant and digital marketers must assess the role of technology and how to integrate it into future forms of marketing
One of the points to consider by marketers now, is how to remain relevant and effective in the future. AI systems can teach themselves to improve their own performance for a given task. Humans create goals and the AI system optimizes itself to achieve that goal by improving again and again as it performs the task based on data from its previous attempts. This gives AI the potential to improve exponentially in a short time and expect them to quickly surpass human counterparts in skill due to the constant learning & improvising themselves in this way. The ability to self-educate makes AI systems a potential threat to the marketer in future
Any job that consists largely of repetitive tasks will be automated by AI. Jobs that require humans to sift through large datasets may also be under threat because AI technologies excel at surfacing insights, recommendations, and predictions from large datasets and do better than humans.
As a future marketer, lead the charge for AI transformation within your organization. Find real use cases for these technologies and with the right AI implementations, it can improve marketing performance and productivity. Spearhead the change and reap the rewards as AI begins to transform marketing in your organization.
Now is the perfect time to learn about some of the foundational concepts of AI its terminologies. This understanding of the AI will better position you to identify AI for your organization, have a good grasp of AI’s potential and also how it would impact your job
Here are some of the beginner’s courses for AI
Change is constant in digital marketing as it’s a very dynamic and evolving field. Digital marketing is at the crossroads where it must evolve to meet the challenges, changes and opportunities. Finally, as automation scales up, one important aspect that will never be lost in future is the storytelling capability and humanizing of the brand by the marketers for the end consumer.
At Brand Energy Digital, we want you to succeed. Our goal is to expand your customer base and accelerate your earnings. By using proven digital marketing strategies we will increase your brand visibility and get you qualified leads and will guide you to make the best decisions so your business can grow.
Contact us today for more information.