Marketing technology (Martech) refers to the technology marketing teams use to strategize and implement marketing campaigns for innovation, products, and services. Most often, Martech informs digital marketing strategies for optimizing online and offline marketing channels and sales funnels.
Marketing technology helps businesses grow and scale, create customer and vendor relationships, and increase the overall strength of an organization. It has given companies the ability to collect customer data and effectively dive into market research, as well as organize that data.
Developing successful marketing strategies for your organization requires not only understanding marketing strategies and trends but learning about the technologies that inform those strategies and trends. Below we provide five key trends in marketing technology to help you market your new products in today's business environment.
Not all marketers have jumped on the video content bandwagon, in part because they feel anxious or intimidated about tackling video production. New marketing technology has made full video production crews obsolete. Instead, marketers can create short, engaging and informal videos to post on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
When marketing your innovation, product, or service, you can display video ads on YouTube to deliver quality content to customers in a subtle way to promote your brand. Amazon also allows you to place brand content videos on product detail pages.
As customers consume more video content each year, you can also expect marketing technology related to video production to grow. One recent trend is using deepfake video technology. Deepfake technology doctors videos through the use of artificial intelligence. Each application works differently, but many transfer facial movements or voices to a new target video.
Researchers worry about the dangers of deepfake technology for use in the political realm and for scam artists, but some companies are taking this powerful tool and using it for good. For example, Synthesia created a deepfake video of David Beckham and made it look as if he was speaking nine different languages to bring awareness to the public in a "Malaria No More" campaign.
Setting yourself apart from your competition and building customer loyalty requires seamless customer engagement. Omnichannel marketing strategies allow you to use a multi-channel approach for sales, service, and marketing that creates a seamless customer experience regardless of the channel which your customer engages. Many companies have invested the resources to create successful omnichannel experiences for their customers. Some examples include Disney, Bank of America, REI, and Starbucks.
Many marketing experts point to Starbucks as one of the top omnichannel experiences for consumers. The Starbucks app allows customers to engage with the company in several ways. The Starbucks app is also home to the company's loyalty program: you receive a certain number of stars for each purchase you make but the app does more than track purchases. You can also order ahead of time and pick up your beverage inside or in the drive-thru, pay through the app, and reload your balance. You can do this all from your phone or your computer, from the app or the Starbucks website. Any changes you make instantly updates your profile across all channels.
Customer engagement remains a part of creating a seamless and exciting customer experience, and relying on augmented reality (AR)is one way companies have applied marketing technology to their campaigns. Marketers can use augmented reality to let customers try on products like clothing or makeup before they purchase, and they can also use AR to build a brand and create buzz around a brand.
In 2014, Pepsi combined the power of video content and AR to create one of YouTube's highest viewed marketing campaigns. The company installed AR technology in a London bus shelter, which made it appear like a lion, UFOs, and other items were chasing people on the street. The video eventually received more than six million views, creating buzz around Pepsi when they told their family and friends about their experience or the video.
Artificial intelligence has been around for decades, but recent trends in marketing technology reveal how companies are using it to learn more about their target customers. Historically, market research has consisted of several different snapshots that offer insights into marketing departments.
New marketing technology allows companies to not only use artificial intelligence to gather data but also combine all of those snapshots into a bigger picture, making it easier for marketing teams to target their innovation, products, and services.
Walmart digitized its entire online catalog a couple of years ago, so it could create an omnichannel experience for customers and compete with Amazon.
This includes sharing information across their supply chain, which is where big data and artificial intelligence work together. Walmart invested in Data Cafe, one of the world's largest private clouds to analyze data and generate customer insights. They went a step further and provided the service to all suppliers and invested in content service providers to aggregate data from their suppliers to more quickly respond to customer demand.
Currently, few businesses are ready for voice search, but the trend is here and you can expect to see more and more organizations create voice search capabilities for the products and services. Whether a customer is talking to Google Voice or Siri on their smartphone or using a program on their desktop or laptop, voice searching is on the rise, which means so is voice search optimization (VSO).
It might take a year or two, but it's likely VSO will eventually replace SEO as the most effective and crucial way to optimize your website. In fact, experts expect voice-based shopping to jump to $40 billion by 2022. Home devices such as Google Home and Amazon's Alexa allow consumers to perform all types of voice searches.
Burger King pulled a stunt television ad in 2017 to engage Google Home devices. The actor in the 15-second spot told viewers he did not have time to list all of the ingredients in a Whopper, so he addressed viewers' Google Home Devices and said, "OK, Google, what is the Whopper burger?" The prank ad worked like a charm and Google eventually locked the response, but Burger King still gained $135 million in earned media.
Explore the latest Marketing Technology trends at Asia's largest experiential conference, Corporate Innovation Summit 2020. Visit our website: cis.riseaccel.com for more information on dates and tickets.