Evolving Technology Influencing Digital Marketing – Things to Know

Over the years, development in technology has allowed not only allowed the emergence of digital marketing, but today they are, in fact, inseparable from each other. From emails in 1971 to the Internet of Things gaining popularity by 2010, digital marketing over the years has grown in leaps and bounds.

Today we are living in an interconnected world where smart computing devices have entered into our private and professional circles. Marketers all over the world are bent on cashing in on how dependent we have become on technology.

According to a recent study by HubSpot, 94% of internet searches happen on a Google property as of June 2019. Furthermore, it’s estimated that nearly $40 billion in the US and over $5 billion in the UK will be spent through voice commerce by 2022.

Moreover, 87% of internet users in the US use more than one device to connect online, while 39% shop online using a company or brand’s mobile application because it makes purchasing faster and easier.

In light of this information, let’s take a quick look at how technology is impacting digital marketing in the current era.

Customized and Personalized Experiences

Customers nowadays are looking for customized and personalized experiences from brands and businesses that can provide them with products and services that are curated to meet their needs.

This has given rise for businesses to study their audiences and find out about their preferences, inclinations, behavior, buying patterns, demographics, lifestyles, and sociographic data.

Ventures around the world are creating personalized and customized offers for their clients by developing customer personas and using the customer journey mapping method to identify and study prospects. Many are also using it to augment their search engine optimization.

Some technologies helping to deliver customization and personalization experiences by brands include:

• 3D scanners and modeling software that is being used to offer products to customers that matches their size and fits their body shape perfectly.
• Blockchain technology to assimilate data and protect private information which can be used to target niche market audiences.
• Intelligent algorithms are used to deliver dynamic pricing for offered products and services.
• Recommendation engines are helping customers to find suggestions and popular user choices.
• WCM (Web Content Management) platforms to deliver engaging media for customer consumption.

Data Analytics for Greater Insights

Without question, marketable data has become immensely important for corporations and establishments to develop strategies that can assist them in sustaining the profitability of their ventures. With the passage of time improved and much more advanced software and tools are being introduced. Some prominent examples include:

• Apache Spark is a cluster computing framework used for real-time processing.
• KNIME is an open-source data analytics and reporting platform with a GUI-based workflow.
• Microsoft Excel for Business and Enterprises to assimilate data and gather insights.
• R and Python, which are top programming languages used for data analytics.
• RapidMiner is a platform for building Machine Learning models, data processing, and deployment.
• Tableau is a leading Business Intelligence tool for analyzing and visualizing data.

Facilitating Access

Customers and users around the globe are looking for means to acquire services and products in a way that facilitates their lifestyle and offer them maximum conveniences.

At present, we have several technologies that are offering customers ease of access and accommodating for their needs and requirements, such as:

• Chatbots are software applications used to conduct online chat conversations through text or speech recognition. Many chatbots are empowered through NLP (Natural Language Processing) and even AI or Machine Learning at times to improve their functions and ability to generate relevant responses.
• The Internet of Things is not only offering users increasingly variant ways of connecting to the World Wide Web but is also offering them tons of facilitations throughout the day. This can be most prominently observed in the form of personal assistants like Alexa, Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Home.

Human Behavior Tracking

Marketing, in its very essence, is the approach to gain business profitability by studying human behavior. Hence at its core, it deploys a lot of psychological and human sciences to get the message across and deliver results.

Therefore it comes to no surprise that digital marketing with the help of technology is progressively deploying methods to track and study human actions and interactions. In short digital technology has paved the way to study people based on their location, usage of time, and preferences. Some of the major tools used today include:

• Artificial Intelligence and deep learning models are constantly being deployed to study human actions and behavioral patterns.
• Biometric devices take data and store information in their databases.
• Big data offers a large volume of consumers data that is both structured and unstructured, which can then be analyzed by data scientists to draw out insights and understandings
• Eye-tracking and gesture recognition technologies are able to capture movements of your body parts.
• Facial recognition has improved to the point where it is able to identify people in large groups or crowd setting.
• GPS (Global Positioning Systems) and Personal Trackers can locate people.
• RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags and tracking enable companies to trace products.

Innovative Solutions

For marketing to capture and attract people’s attention, marketers have to deploy innovative technology and deliver larger than life solutions.

One way to go about this is to provide them with terrific user experiences that are immersive in nature and can be considered next-gen. Over here, we have examples of AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality).

Many companies nowadays are also combining AR and VR to create MR (mixed reality) applications. Both AR and VR can play a tremendous role in how consumers could interact with brands as well as their offered products and services.

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Media Production & Broadcast

Way back in 1996, Bill Gates stated in the essay that “Content is King” which holds true and stands true against the test of time. For marketers, media creation and its broadcast are penultimate to their success. Over the years, we have seen technologies emerge that can help advertisers develop and mass-produce content at a rapid pace.

Major tools and software include:

• CDNs (content delivery networks) such as StackPath and Cloudflare.
• CMS (content management systems) such as WordPress and Drupal.
• Content marketing tools, including Ahrefs, BuzzSumo, HubSpot, and SEMRush, to name a few.

Social Media Marketing

The Millennials and Generation Z are soon to take over the world, and without question, marketers around the world have recognized social media platforms as a force to be reckoned with. Popular social media include Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube, to name a few. We also have user-generated content websites likes Quora, Reddit, Pinterest, etc.

Conclusion

Technology has shape the current ecosystem of the world, and marketers around the world have come to adapt digital tactics accordingly to get the most bang for their buck. Today we are living in a world more content is produced than that which can be consumed by the masses.

Furthermore, with 5G wireless technology, our globe will again see a tremendous rise in data traveling through the airwaves. There is no doubt that technology greatly influences digital marketing and that the two of them go hand in hand when it comes to creating the allure for customers and capturing their attention.