Few months back, I wrote an article on Digital Transformation, but with this one, I believe it is just the right time to bring insights into an area where consumer matters the most. Digital media and technology are no longer new, yet over the years we have seen a huge change in digital media and marketing technologies to provide new ways to businesses to communicate with both the consumers and other businesses.

According to a survey, 76% of marketers believe marketing has changed more in past 2 years than in the last 20 years, while the basic tenets of marketing like drafting concise yet impactful messages to attract consumers remains.

Digital marketing in today’s world is more about different types of consumer interactions but businesses will still need to assess the consumer adoption and experience. This becomes more pertinent when the consumers themselves have become more and more digitized, both in terms of technology and access to information. Hence, even before we foray into the current trends, let’s look at the means of digital consumer interactions –

“Marketing technologies help achieve the marketing goals by decreasing time to market, increasing personalization and eliminating waste by reaching out to those who matter”

1. Digital Devices – consumers use multiple devices to interact – smart phones, tablets, laptops, desktops and most recently the virtual assistants (like Amazon Echo or Google Home) and other connected devices forming the Internet of Things (IoT).

2. Different Technology Platforms – Interactions through Digital devices are through websites, mobile applications and/or social media platforms.

3. Open Campaigns – Most marketers reach out to customers through Advertisements, Campaigns, emails, messages, social media, search engines etc.

4. Targeted Campaigns – Information captured by businesses are profiled and segmented further for Targeted Customer campaigns.

5. Interaction Technology – Marketers use multiple technologies to make the customer interactions more interactive.

With these clearly defined as part of marketing goals, another survey clearly outlines that about 30% of marketing budgets gets wasted, since they don’t follow the rules. They don’t really use the information available to them and follow that with a targeted marketing campaign – i.e. whom to establish a connect with, which cities should be focused on, which one’s auto-generate business, which age group is your real customer and finally what product to pitch in to whom.

Yet another survey claims, that starting 2018, it will be CMOs who will spend more on technology compared to CIOs.

Some technology trends to pay attention to-

1. Artificial Intelligence- most businesses today use AI for different needs, catering to enhanced customer experience, introduce new business models, products and services, provide new revenue streams, or improve their Net Promoter score. AI has the limitless potential to be used in multiple ways be it customer expansion, segmentation, product recommendations and/or campaign optimization. It is now for the marketers to decide on how to use this.

2. Progressive Web Pages (PWA), Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) or Mobile Apps – these are the technologies used for dissemination of information. 60% of search traffic on google comes from mobile devices, hence it is apparent that businesses want to maintain or improve their rankings. Hence, most businesses these days are looking at hybrid models, where beyond the conventional mobile app, they are now investing in accelerating their website response time and page loads and make them mobile ready.

3. Marketing Automation – this technology is fast catching up with marketers who are now breaking away from the shackles of conventional marketing and focusing not only on automation but also personalized content creation and dissemination. Minimizing time wastage, reducing or eliminating errors and increasing collaboration between sales & marketing teams is what matters the most now.

4. Smart Bots – I am sure most marketers would have had either worked with or seen a working Chat Bot. By bringing in a combination of technologies together like- Machine Learning, Artificial intelligence and Voice search, the new concept on the block is Smart Bots. These bots live up to the conventional saying that most humans still prefer interacting most, but with blend of technologies, help decrease the acquisition time, enhance customer experience, and eases out the communication, also helps in reduction of costs related to Customer Care.

5. Tap the Influencers – With more and more marketers reaching out to social media platforms for not only campaigns but also their product launch or video advertisements on social websites or platforms, there is an increasing trend to tap the influencers. These are highly active on social media and have huge follower base. There is a conventional saying in marketing Word of mouth spreads like a wild fire, so imagine bottling the conventional marketing method by tapping these influencers who will speak for you.

Concluding, Marketing technologies help achieve the marketing goals by decreasing time to market, increasing personalization and eliminating waste by reaching out to those who matter.