What is a marketing technology platform? In simple words marketing technology is the technology used by marketers to facilitate customer online journeys and make the task of marketer easy.
Many industries have changed because of the internet, but only few have changed as drastically as Marketing. If you’d told marketers back in 1995 that, 20 years later, they’d be able to tweak campaigns based on their results in real time, they’d have laughed
Evolution in Marketing over years-
While many businesses still use the traditional form of marketing to attract customers which include print ads, newsletters, billboards, newspaper ads, TV commercials etc. But those who are smart enough have already realized that traditional form ain’t effective anymore. Modern marketers now use all the fresh methods which revolve around internet. Now companies use campaigns and social media platform to reach out to the customers and expand their audience and are successful in making brand awareness. Moreover companies which have online presence can also advertise on other websites by using new digital marketing tools.
The Top Trends Driving Marketing In 2017
According to Forbes these are the emerging trends for effective marketing – Good Content Marketing, ChatBots, Email Campaigns and Analytics.
Talking about content marketing, Video Marketing turns out to be most effective way to distribute content, as viewers does not have to put in any effort for reading and scrolling down the content and can just get the communication by watching a short video.
What the data says about significance of video marketing:
- According to Syndacast, “74 percent of all Internet traffic in 2017 will be video.”
- According to Martech Advisor, “In Facebook’s Q3 2017 earnings call, the company reported that 3 million businesses uploaded at least one video to their Facebook Business page per month.”
- According to The Guardian, “With online video quickly becoming a key means for people to satisfy their information and entertainment needs, small businesses that fail to include it in their internet marketing strategies will do so at their peril.”
- According to Cisco, by the end of 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic.
- Nielsen claims 64% of marketers expect video to dominate their strategies in the near future. It’s not difficult to see why.
Coming to the importance of ChatBots in Marketing:
ChatBots is more customer-centric and aims to respond to a query artificially.
What can it do for your business? Bots are ushering in one-to-one marketing at scale. What this means is that millions of people can talk to your brand without there being a human on the other end. The biggest bot platform is Facebook Messenger, which now boasts more than 900 million monthly active users, and is expected to cross a billion mark; which means that your bot can reach over a billion users through just Facebook. Kik is also one of the famous platforms to use bot which has around 200 million active users.
Businesses are now using social media as a customer service method using Bots, meaning they can quickly address and resolve issues without the customer having to send an email or make a phone call. It will make the company look responsible towards their customers.
Next is importance of Email marketing campaigns
While email was certainly there in existence since the internet was born but because of advance email marketing tools those same emails can now be converted into campaigns for email marketing. Email marketing is one of the effective ways to convert leads into prospective customers.
Email marketing has evolved to allow businesses to do a lot, such as:
- Letting customers know about special offers
- Introducing new products and services
- Making personalised recommendations based on previous purchases or searches
- Share tips to get more out of a product and service
- Encourage customers to leave reviews and refer others
- Invite people to events
and more..
And the last is customer analytics-
Analytics is needed to evaluate the potency of any campaign. Analytics is the crux and without which the right decisions can’t be taken.
Perks of using the internet for marketing is that you can exactly track the effectiveness of the marketing done from various mediums such as Email, SMS, Social Media etc and segment the customers easily. This means businesses can easily identify what activities are working well, which ones aren’t, which helps them to learn more about their audience and market to them better.
The advance marketing tools has changed the way marketing is done, the way businesses sell, and the way people buy with comparison and satisfaction. Successful businesses will be ones who keep up with the way that consumers are buying.
It’s interesting to think how marketing and internet will evolve in the coming years. That’s when the advance marketing tools like FirstHive comes into the picture. Tools like these make cross-channel marketing effective and helps in capturing the customer interaction with the brand.
So to improve the marketing process, the marketers need to put their hands on marketing automation. It is important to realize that this is the future of how marketers are going to communicate with the customers and pitch in their brands. Also, there is a lot of scope in this space for innovation which we all are going to experience in the near future.
