Marketing and technology are as intertwined as they have ever been. High Reason brings them together for insight and real-time execution, because our clients need to be as productive and efficient with their resources as possible.
While we are well grounded with technology and use it as a strategic tool to drive performance and ROI today, we also regularly look to the future and see what trends will impact us so we are prepared to adapt. Here are five of the sea changes we are preparing clients for:
A world without cookies
Marketers have become dependent on cookies to personalize experiences and learn more about their visitors, but that is all coming to an end as security becomes a dominant part of the conversation.
A recent HubSpot survey noted that 44% of marketers said that this change will result in a need to significantly increase spending in order to achieve the same results moving forward. This places more pressure on first-party data and how you optimize both its collection and use to reach your customers.
Artificially intelligent
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to get closer and closer to our day-to-day and will increasingly be used to create a comprehensive view of customers. There will still be a good amount of “trust but verify” for those early adopters but the potential for leveraging AI is vast.
Today, it’s primarily handling tasks like digital ad placement and automating customer service experiences. However, the power of it will truly manifest when AI and CRM are more closely aligned to create a comprehensive customer journey that is predictive in its application.
The next reality
A true digital reality might seem far off but it is actually approaching us quickly. Whether virtual, augmented or mixed reality, marketers need to work on ways to offer this as a solution to today’s communication challenges. Virtual reality is at the head of the pack because of the advancement of headset tech, but augmented reality will start to accelerate as it creates more immersive experiences.
Given the pandemic and its lasting behavioral effect, there is a strong possibility that traditional in-person events such as trade shows move to a blended/hybrid approach and make virtual attendees feel like they are there.
Automation & analytics
Marketing automation has generally only been leveraged for larger brands with big technology budgets and a team of marketing experts. That functionality continues to become simpler and more available so that even teams without much automation experience can work their way through programmatic marketing.
Integrating that with simpler, more actionable analytics, like you’re seeing from email platforms such as MailChimp and Constant Contact, will add sophistication to more and more marketing efforts and allow performance marketing to be effective for all marketers.
Speaking to search
Voice search continues to be on the rise as the devices we use every day are more and more driven by the spoken word instead of what we type. Search has already started to adjust for this, which means marketers will have to adapt.
How you create content will take a turn for the conversational and natural language, which impacts keyword selection as the phrasing of questions and queries. Steering into these trends will help your digital properties pull higher and faster for organic content.
Marketers can’t overlook the integration of emerging technologies. Staying on top of and applying these trends will put you ahead of the curve. High Reason was born in the digital age and, over the past 25 years, has built a wealth of experience across the digital marketing spectrum.
We are at the ready to help you navigate these marketing technology trends and arm your strategies and tactics for today and tomorrow. Let’s get started.
