While the digital marketing industry has rapidly evolved into a mature and powerful route to market for many different types of businesses, its trajectory hasn’t slowed down. New marketing technologies are constantly emerging and fighting for dominance. Those of us working in the industry must keep up with the pace of change or risk falling by the wayside. But it also means we’ve got to be careful not to get too excited and bet the farm on an unproven strategy, or throw the baby out with the bathwater and abandon tried and tested strategies too soon.
Tried and Tested Marketing Strategies
As a business rooted in the email marketing industry, the marketing team at emfluence is well aware of the importance of tried and tested marketing strategies. Emerging technologies don’t always replace existing strategies. Sometimes, they actually enhance the “old school” technologies. We’ve seen this happen repeatedly in the email marketing and marketing automation industry, which just gets smarter with every new iteration.
Emerging Technologies
So what emerging technologies are we excited about at emfluence? We’ve compiled a list of the hottest trends to impact the MarTech industry, which we believe marketers should keep an eye on.
AI-Powered Marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) is stealing all the headlines at the moment. In some cases, it might actually be writing them. As creative marketing professionals, we believe that AI offers an incredible opportunity to do more. It can inspire and build the foundations of highly sophisticated marketing campaigns. For example:
- Need inspiration for a drip campaign or marketing automation workflow? AI can build a strategy that saves hours of planning.
- Need help writing compelling email subject lines or CTAs? AI can suggest text that dramatically improves your engagement rates.
- Want to make sense of your marketing analytics to understand what strategies are working best for you without pouring over countless spreadsheets? Put AI to work.
- Need help writing blog content? Let AI be your muse.
However, there is a caveat. We should always remember that AI isn’t perfect. While it can inspire and even contribute to the creation of marketing content and strategies, it shouldn’t be relied on to produce customer-facing campaigns.
SEO and UX
Artificial Intelligence is making significant inroads into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and User Experience (UX). With its capabilities to analyze large datasets, automate processes, and personalize content, AI tools can help with a lot of the heavy lifting with SEO and UX. For example:
- SEO: AI can enhance SEO by helping with keyword research and optimization, content creation, technical SEO, competitive analysis, and user behavior analysis.
- UX: AI can enhance UX through personalization, chatbots, design optimization, accessibility, and user feedback analysis.
Interactive Content
As the name suggests, interactive content is digital content that encourages users to actively engage with your marketing campaigns instead of passively consuming the information. While this sounds like it might be fairly complicated to deploy (and some of it is), you might be surprised how easily some interactive content can be incorporated into your campaign strategy. Common forms of interactive content include:
- Quizzes and Polls: These can be used for entertainment, education, or market research. They require users to answer questions and can provide personalized results or insights based on the responses.
- Interactive Infographics: Unlike static infographics, these allow users to click on various elements to reveal more information, manipulate data, or explore different aspects of the topic.
- Calculators: These tools let users input their own data to receive customized outputs, such as financial calculators, health and fitness calculators, or cost estimators.
- Interactive Videos: Videos that allow users to make choices that affect the outcome or provide additional information upon interaction.
- eBooks and Whitepapers: These can include interactive elements like clickable diagrams, embedded videos, or quizzes to enhance the reading experience.
- Interactive Maps: Users can explore different regions or datasets by clicking on various areas of the map to get more detailed information.
- Games and Simulations: These are designed to engage users through gameplay or simulated environments, often for educational or training purposes.
- Surveys: Similar to quizzes and polls, surveys collect user input but are often used for research and feedback purposes.
- Interactive Social Media Posts: Posts on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter that include polls, questions, or other elements to engage followers directly.
Advanced Personalization/Personalization at Scale
OK, we’re going way beyond the simple “mail merge” techniques to personalize email subject lines and body content. Advanced personalization refers to the use of sophisticated technologies and strategies to tailor marketing messages, offers, and experiences to individual customers based on their unique preferences, behaviors, and needs.
If you use a service like Amazon or Netflix and are amazed at how these companies can perfectly tailor their content and recommendations to your preferences, you’ll understand how advanced personalization at scale is deployed.
Key components of Advanced Personalization include:
- Data Collection and Analysis: Tracking behavioral, demographic, and transactional data.
- Machine Learning and AI: Utilizing algorithms to analyze vast amounts of data and predict customer behavior.
- Customer segmentation: Creating highly specific segments based on combined data attributes.
- Dynamic Content Delivery: Personalizing website content, emails, and advertisements based on individual user profiles.
- Omnichannel Integration: Ensuring consistent, personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints, including email, social media, in-store, and online interactions.
Don’t think that advanced personalization is only available to large-scale enterprises. Trickle-down technology is increasingly available to smaller and mid-sized businesses in affordable and accessible marketing automation platforms, including emfluence’s own emfluence Marketing Platform.
Short-Form Video
I’ll keep this short. TikTok didn’t invent short-form videos, but they certainly brought them to the mainstream’s attention. Thanks to TikTok Shop, the medium was then successfully monetized through eCommerce. The rest of the social media landscape is now desperately playing catch-up with Facebook, Instagram, and even YouTube (the OG in online video), trying to emulate TikTok’s success.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
Augmented and virtual reality are changing the way marketers can present their products and services to potential customers. Although often mentioned in the same breath, augmented and virtual reality are very different technologies.
- Augmented reality is a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world (typically via a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet), providing a composite view. Social media filters that change the appearance of an individual’s image or video are great examples of how augmented reality is reshaping the world as we see it. More sophisticated tools might enable a user to visualize a product before buying it. For example, they might be able to try on a virtual item of clothing or place a virtual piece of furniture in their home.
- Virtual reality creates a simulated 3D environment for users to explore (typically using an enclosed VR headset). It is prevalent in the gaming industry, but it also has more serious applications, including education and training. VR can enable individuals to practice specific tasks where access to real-life scenarios might be limited or potentially dangerous. Virtual reality also creates opportunities for marketers to showcase virtual and real situations without the need to visit a physical location.
Are your digital marketing strategies evolving?
As a busy marketing professional working at the “coalface” of your industry, it can be difficult to stay abreast of the latest marketing technologies and strategies. When you work with a dedicated digital marketing agency team like emfluence, you can be assured that your existing impactful digital marketing strategies are supported and enhanced with the latest techniques. To learn more about how you can stay ahead of the curve and embrace emerging digital marketing technologies, contact us today at expert@emfluence.com.
