Living in an era where technology is fast evolving and consumer preferences and behavior are becoming more challenging to product, chief marketing officers and general marketers can no longer afford to rely on their conventional marketing methods to reap benefits. However, despite the tightened marketing budgets and cuts this year, tech trends are ever-growing, giving the marketing industry a chance to grow.
Here are the top tech trends that can help any marketing campaign thrive and the industry in itself grow.
Data Analytics
Many businesses make data analytics a priority, and in marketing, it’s slowly making its way in as access to data for companies goes beyond basic demographics. Nowadays, companies can now access consumers’ online and offline media behaviors, demands, locations, and preferences throughout the day alongside purchase history and promotion sensitivity.
When you combine this tech trend with market segmentation and targeting approaches, the method where you aggregate prospective buyers into segments with similar needs and responses to a marketing action—this allows you to customize your brand’s message, image, and offer across different channels. It will enable marketers to make their campaigns more efficient and favorable to most people, grabbing more potential paying customers.
However, for now, marketers need to do more than gather data—they will need to be meaningful to help them enhance their campaigns, especially when intent data. It’s information specifically about an individual or organization’s activity, where you can gather it through a company website by looking at what pages customers visited, how long they stayed, and which links they clicked.
5G
As if we couldn’t get more connected to the web, tech trends have yet made us think again. Fifth-generation wireless network, famously known as 5G, offers better loading speeds and connectivity, allowing customers to consume more online content than ever before. Among the many benefits of this tech trend to marketing is that it ensures people will spend more time on the internet, allowing business owners to expand their reach more—forcing businesses to develop a better online presence.
The advent of 5G will benefit your marketing campaign if you explore video advertising as AR and VR technologies will become more accessible and realistic.
Increase Demand for Chatbots
More than 69% of American consumers prefer using chatbots when engaging with businesses since it usually provides a fast response. However, many small businesses still don’t use the technology despite the increasing demands, leaving them to miss out on many opportunities. Having a chatbot run on your website can help customers receive quick responses to their queries at all hours of the day and night.
You can use AI-powered chatbots in your customer support service, expanding your company reach. In most cases, your website visitors wouldn’t know they were talking to chatbots since they’ve recently become so lifelike. Plus, they offer the benefits of allowing users to gather, analyze, and provide actionable data to improve the overall customer experience.
Voice Search
With more people using their smartphones for almost anything, including shopping, more are becoming accustomed to using voice services. These include Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, and their increasing popularity makes voice search one of the most popular trends in 2021, helping brands stand out among their competitors. If you’re running online business operations, customers may find your site through content marketing through voice search in the new decade—and beyond.
A few years back, people had to adapt to the growing use of smartphones and similar gadgets, and now, according to Google, mobile searches account for up to 50% of its total searches. Marketers are forced to begin adopting voice searches, which experts expect to continue to grow. Plus, you’ll need to adjust your marketing content strategy by being more “conversational” with the audience—and remember to always be detailed and conversational with your answers through thorough FAQ sections.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) alongside machine learning (ML) are becoming more accessible, causing disruptions in most domains, including the marketing sector. For instance, machine learning-inspired marketing models are set to change the marketing industry with improved pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, better-targeted email campaigns, and more “humanized” chatbot-generated marketing content. Meanwhile, AI-inspired marketing is set to use detailed information regarding the buying pattern of consumers.
You can begin by identifying opportunities to leverage AI and machine learning into your initiative, finding the best ways to use these technologies in advancing your marketing efforts.
The year 2020 accelerated digital transformation for many businesses, spurring them to adopt new technologies to adapt to the ever-changing economy and market. The surge allowed companies to continue operations while equipping themselves with new technologies, keeping the business thriving—and the trends mentioned only prove that marketing as an industry will continue to grow beyond 2021.
