Marketing and Technology
Technology has grown at an astounding rate in recent years and has impacted the world in ways that were once unfathomable.
My daily routine totally revolves around it. From waking up in the morning, communicating with peers and professors, gathering news, shopping, entertainment, working - literally almost every waking moment of my day involves some form of technology. And the majority of my activity is done on my cell phone. The ‘mobile factor’ is huge. I feel like many of you can relate to this.
With that in mind, we can not ignore that this massive growth in technology has affected several aspects of marketing.
For one thing, marketers now have access to an incredible amount of data. And not just the basic demographic information; we can access enough information/insight to construct various buyer personas and target specific audiences.
For now, let’s use Facebook as an example. In 2013, Facebook released a statement saying that they “would be working with select third-party partners to build targeting features for marketers to reach their customers with relevant ads.” Marketing companies are now able to analyze a massive audience and detect trends in various behaviors. Obviously this is incredibly beneficial to marketers for multiple reasons. However, I believe that the two most important factors are the reach that marketers and companies have on social media platforms and the personalization that is possible. In most cases the sponsored content/advertisements that I see on my Facebook or Instagram is pretty spot on. I know I have purchased an item or started following a company’s page because of a well-placed advertisement.
Technology has not just changed the way services and products are marketed, it has also impacted the way events can be promoted. At no cost, companies can post about upcoming events, sales, causes that they support, and basically anything else that they want to promote and their followers will see it on their feed. And they can set notifications to be sent out periodically so that whatever is being promoted is not “out of sight, out of mind”. This can be done across multiple platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat are the most note-worthy in my opinion. Then there are the paid-for advertisements and promotions as well, but we’ve already covered that.
Most social media platforms allow a company to provide a direct link to their website and in some cases the website will even provide a link to the company’s app. This allows customers to learn more about the company and what they have to offer, or maybe even buy something.
Another great thing that companies can take advantage of is the opportunity to improve their customer service. By providing a way to (almost) instantly connect to somebody within the company, technology allows consumers to solve problems or answer questions without having to totally disrupt their day. Social media vigilance is also a key to customer service now. For example, apparently Chick-fil-A changed their BBQ sauce recipe over the summer and their customers quickly took to Twitter to let them know how they felt. Spoiler alert, a lot of people were pretty unhappy about it. Chick-fil-A paid attention to this, listened to their customers, and changed the recipe back to the original one. They even made a funny video with employees reading out some of the tweets and worked that into their apology campaign.
Technology growth has not hit its cap yet though. An article published by Venture Beat said that 323 marketing tech startups fetched over $11B from VCs (Venture Capitals) in 2015.
A couple of start-ups that I find interesting are Dataminr and Button.
Dataminr is a tool that trawls social media for pertinent information about whatever you want. News companies use it to uncover breaking stories on the fly, while its tweet-tracking abilities were utilized by Boston officials to bolster security during the last Boston Marathon.
Button builds “contextual commerce” technology that creates connections between mobile apps. To name one recent example, you can look up a restaurant on Foursquare, then book a table within Foursquare using information from OpenTable. The startup has also partnered with Uber, providing similar Foursquare synch-ups.
The Venture Beat article goes on to say, “VCs are still stepping on the gas for early and seed stage companies, particularly in marketing tech. We’ve tracked every one of those investments, and they’re starting to paint a clear picture of what it means for marketers, CMOs, CIOs, and even sales teams. Namely, you better step up your data analytics game, stat.”
“Queue the seemingly limitless ascent of data analytics platforms. By some accounts, even specialized areas of analytics like predictive marketing will be a $30 billion (or $100+ billion, depending who you’re asking) industry in five years. We’re hard pressed to disagree.”
“That’s nearly $1.5 billion funneled into pure play analytics startups — these are dashboard companies, journey-mappers, audience-measurers — nearly all with super sophisticated data-mining pulling from proprietary databases. It’s a dart throw for who’s going to win right now, since the use-cases for big data for marketers are still coming to life and the models are still being created (i.e., tell Teradata you invented predictive analytics, and you’ll get laughed out of the room).”
The only way to have a competitive advantage in this field is to do the research. Research your audience, analyze the data and trends. Look for patterns. Observe your surroundings and people’s actions and reactions. Stay informed of current events and upcoming technology and always try to calculate if it can help or hurt you. You have to be in tune with what people want and need and find a way to sell it to them. I know that may seem like a simple statement to make, but it’s impossible to market/sell to people if you don’t know your audience.