With the world constantly changing, it’s so important to make sure that your business is prepared to adapt quickly. In this digital era, falling behind the pace of technological advances can mean falling behind your competitors and risking your business’s success.
Modern technology has proven its benefits by improving efficiency, productivity, and creativity within an organization. Making it vital to a modern business’s success.
In marketing, in particular, there are a number of systems and tools that work to streamline marketing efforts and produce a better outcome for the entire organization.
Automation
Automation is becoming increasingly popular in recent years because of its benefits for both startups and enterprise-level companies. By definition, the technology works to complete processes with little or no assistance from humans. Instead, it optimizes your human workforce and allows their skill sets to be used in more complex marketing projects and assignments.
Digital and social media marketing departments can find an immense amount of benefits from automation when it comes to posting. The Hopper HQ Instagram marketing tool, for example, integrates all of your Instagram accounts into one automation system. In doing so, you are able to draft, schedule, and post social media campaigns for your company. You can also collaborate with other team members to edit and configure your posts on each account. Then use Instagram to your advantage and track any campaign’s growth through Instagram Insights.
This type of automation technology can be extremely beneficial to eCommerce businesses, bloggers, and startups because you can automate your social media campaigns with ease and from wherever your jobs take you.
Outside of social media, marketing is still filled with an abundance of repetitive and time-consuming tasks that contribute to the lack of efficiency. A tool like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) offers a user-friendly interface designed for organizations of all sizes to complete a number of business-essential tasks with minimal effort.
For marketing needs, the technology collects data across multiple areas of your business to allow you to make more informed and strategic decisions. This includes the ability to speed up tedious data processes and quickly execute web searches on competitors to be utilized in analyses that drive your marketing decisions.
Augmented Reality
The term “augmented reality” has traditionally been associated with its use in entertainment or video gaming systems to increase the gaming experience. More recently, however, it is being used in a number of different areas of businesses to improve our social media marketing and user experience.
Augmented reality, the overlay of images on our current reality, provides us with a brand new experience of products and services and works to showcase it in our own environments. To give you a better understanding of how you may have seen augmented reality yourself, think of apps like Snapchat’s facial filters and the popular game Pokémon Go. Both use augmented reality to immerse pictures and figures into the consumer’s world.
Similarly, this same idea can be used to support and grow marketing efforts. Many companies are combining their marketing campaigns with the augmented reality filters of Snapchat and Instagram. Not only does this increase the visibility of your brand to a younger market but the augmented reality creates an elevated, and memorable experience as well.
For companies within the furniture or interior design industry, augmented reality can be especially important to utilize within the company’s content and product presentation. For example, companies like IKEA and Target use augmented reality to help customers view products in their own homes. By opening your camera or taking a photo of the space, you can virtually insert the product into your desired area. In this particular example, you may even notice its power in improving the sales and retention of your products given that customers aren’t guessing if the product will look right or fit properly in the space.
Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is arguably one of the most powerful and complex technological tools in the digital age. Simply put, it is the vast connectivity between the internet and devices like sensors and smartphones. The technology can connect a number of devices from private networks to gather data, analyze it, and help to drive out business decisions. This data in return can be used to strategize for marketing campaigns as well.
In a range of industries from retail to insurance, IoT technology can help to develop a deeper understanding of your customer and in return market to them. Retail in particular has used iBeacons to allow the IoT to work its magic. With iBeacons set up, stores can track the movement of any customer throughout the store who has location services turned on. If that customer has opted to receive marketing messages, the iBeacons can also gather data in regard to the customer’s demographics, purchase history, etc. With the data collected, it can be used to market customer-specific campaigns in and outside of the store to increase the engagement and possibility of a customer completing a purchase.
A simpler and slightly more affordable option may be IoT implementation through QR codes. It is super easy to generate these codes using a QR code generator. Instead of the IoT collecting data through and around iBeacon towers, it can only collect information when and where the QR code is scanned. With one scan, you can offer product-based marketing campaigns to your customers and derive customer information from the device that scanned the code. Retailers have offered deals and promotions, fun videos and games, and ways to customize your products. All while collecting useful and informative data.
You may have noticed that the common trends among all of these technologies is that they collect or organize data about customers and the entire company. Each one works to make the data collection process simpler and more efficient which is why they are such powerful tools in marketing. As they are becoming increasingly popular throughout the world in a range of industries, it becomes more and more important for you to adopt them in your own business and keep up with the competition in such a fast-paced digital age.