Optimizing your marketing strategy for the most impact will typically involve some kind of technology, whether it’s an email list building tool or a customer usage data aggregator. To make the most of your advertising budget, it’s important to stay updated with the latest techniques that can improve your workflow and overall effectiveness.
In this article, we’ll discuss some of the most important marketing technologies to know and dive deeply into what they can bring to the table for your brand. Let’s go!
Understanding Marketing Technologies (and Why You Need Them)
Everything is going digital and marketing is no different. It’s no longer enough to be a strong communicator. An advertiser also needs to be able to understand and fully utilize digital tools to increase their effectiveness.
In general, any technology used in marketing can be termed ’martech’ (a portmanteau of the terms ‘marketing’ and ‘technology’). For instance, social media marketing is a common example.
Marketers will typically have a stack of technologies they rely on to optimize their processes throughout the customer lifecycle. Some examples of how you might apply them include:
- Planning and executing campaigns. There are many tools available to help you plan, design, and schedule various types of campaigns, including email, social media, and pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
- Collecting and analyzing results. Gathering data on the effectiveness of your campaigns through the use of various analytics monitoring platforms can help you optimize ongoing and future marketing efforts.
- Customer Relationship Management. Staying in touch with customers to build their loyalty to your brand and encourage repeat sales is key for maximizing your Return on Investment (ROI). There are many online platforms that can help with this.
In summary, the applications of technology in marketing are just about endless.
4 Marketing Technologies Every Marketer Should Know
There are so many digital tools and skills available, and it’s likely impossible to master them all. The ones you choose to focus on will depend on your brand’s needs and audience. That said, here are some examples that can be helpful regardless of your goals.
1. Analytics Reports
Research shows that 40% of marketers regularly need to analyze data and consider analytical skills to be one of the most important to their craft. Of course, in order to apply those skills, you need to gather information to assess.
Almost anything can be tracked these days. Personal data is used to implement targeted ads across websites, ecommerce sales are monitored, and even the performance of your email campaigns can be boiled down to a set of numbers.
As a marketer, tracking and analyzing data from your campaigns is key to iterating on your strategies and refining them. Depending on what you’re trying to monitor, there are several tools that can help.
- Google Analytics: Monitors website visitor behavior and shows you traffic levels, session length, popular content, and more.
- Email sender analytics: Many popular email marketing platforms, including Mailchimp, collect data for metrics such as open rate, delivery rate, click-through rate (CTR), and more to help measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
- Social media: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have dedicated analytics tools that track engagement, reach, and other key factors related to marketing on these channels.
Other platforms you might already be using as part of your marketing strategy may include analytics reports as well. Keep an eye out for this feature and take advantage of it when you can.
2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a common component of many tools today, enabling marketers to streamline processes, analyze data, and optimize campaigns. This has spawned the term ‘AI marketing.’
Sixty percent of marketers say AI has been useful in data strategies, and 59% of B2B marketers expect it to come in handy for identifying prospects. Predictive marketing, in particular, provides businesses with more opportunities to appeal to their target audiences.
Predictive marketing makes use of AI algorithms to process huge amounts of data from customer profiles and glean insights for enriching leads. This is frequently implemented on ecommerce sites as a means of making highly relevant product recommendations.
Another implementation of AI is in the use of chatbots for holding intelligent and personalized conversations with existing and potential customers. It’s also being implemented in areas such as search engine marketing (SEM), voice and visual search, image recognition, information analysis, and more.
3. Conversion Optimization Tools
Conversion optimization refers to the practice of encouraging visitors to your website to engage as much as possible with your content, products, and services. At the very least, you might want them to fill out a form so you can collect their email addresses for future campaigns.
Conversion optimization tools enable you to dig deeply into visitors’ data and refine all aspects of your business. For this, you’ll need adequate analytical skills to ensure you’re testing exactly what you need to and so you don’t form incorrect conclusions from your tests.
Some popular tools used for this include:
- Optimizely, which enables you to create A/B tests for your landing pages and other areas of your website.
- Unbounce, which helps you create and optimize landing pages that focus your visitor’s attention on a particular goal.
You generally want to ensure you’re testing all your optimizations, as this reduces the risk of wasted advertising expenses.
4. ‘Low Code’ Technologies
Low code is a practice that encourages marketers to learn just enough about coding systems that they can fully maximize use of their tools. This relies on applications or platforms that provide for the use of visual modelling rather than written code. Drag-and-drop page builders fall under this category.
Using low code tools, you can put together websites or apps for events without needing to liaise with your software engineering department. This encourages fast application development and reduces costs as well.
Some low code development platforms include:
- Zoho Creator. This tool lets you build multi-platform applications. You can get started with pre-built templates and work up from there.
- Appian. Using this tool, you can automate tasks, design and execute complex processes, and integrate AI systems from Google, AWS, and Azure.
Low code platforms can be used to improve company functions such as Human Resources (HR) and financial reporting. However, keep in mind that they typically target specific audiences such as small businesses or large enterprises. Therefore, you’ll need to be clear on your goals and choose the solution most relevant to your needs.
Conclusion
Applying technology to your work as a marketer and staying updated with current and emerging technologies can improve your overall effectiveness. It can also lead to a higher ROI. Some technologies to be aware of include analytics, AI, conversion optimization tools, and low code.
What technologies do you consider the most important to your marketing workflow? Share them with us in the comments section below!
Image credit: Pixabay
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