Marketing itself is nothing new, as techniques aimed at winning new customers and increasing sales have existed since pre-literate civilizations.
What makes the difference in this methodology today is the suffix “digital”, merged with Marketing after the popularization of personal computers, cell phones and tablets connected to the Internet — mainly through social networks!
As one of the keys to making a profit in the virtual world involves getting closer to customers from a distance, Digital Marketing uses technology to have a constant presence in the lives of potential customers (called leads) through highly relevant content!
By “content” I mean everything that is published on the Internet with the intention of communicating something to a susceptible audience, until they are convinced by the message.
From the captions on social media photos to the choice of words in an exchange of messages with leads — whether by your sales team or by your chatbots, which are artificial intelligence tools capable of responding to questions like humans — content is essential for:
- Nurture the trust that captures leads in the sales funnel;
- Educate such leads about the unique value your company’s authority has to contribute to their lives above all alternatives;
- Subtly guide them to see your offerings as the best solutions;
- Make them chase your brand to close a deal;
- And buy again with each launch, new product or need!
Furthermore, the addition of technology in Digital Marketing makes it possible for the best persuasion strategies (those that have survived the tests of time and that help companies sell to this day) to now:
- Be monitored with surgical precision;
- Collect data on consumer behavior;
- Use this information to further sharpen approach strategies;
- And create increasingly relevant, impactful and irresistible content, based on such data!
Since nothing in life is free (apart from the content I publish for free here on the Enjoy Minder blog, of course), Marketing technologies never stop evolving with new tools and techniques to facilitate the connection with (and collection of data about) the ideal audience, but staying up to date with the latest news takes time!
But this time needs to be invested sooner or later, since the only way to defend your company’s positioning on the Internet — and conquer the positions dominated by your competitors — is by exploring new technologies before they become the new standard!
To clear up your doubts and keep you up to date with the latest developments that increase conversions and generate sales, I created this guide to bring together all the advances in Digital Marketing in one place!
The starting gun has been fired — and you’re starting in first position!
How Technology is Shaping Today’s Marketing
What started as a basic collection of demographic profiles of leads (such as gender, age and city of residence) has now become a billion-dollar market with potential growth of over 19% per year due to the popularization of artificial intelligence!
In 2020 alone, more than 70 billion gigabytes of content were created for the Internet — a volume of information never seen at any point in human history!
A company that measures lead behavior manually or with basic tools (without the help of the latest technology in Digital Marketing) falls behind competitors who are ahead using these innovations:
- Automated;
- Intelligent;
- And extremely fast!
By using a Marketing tool that explores the potential of artificial intelligence, for example, it becomes possible to collect and study in parallel the hundreds of thousands of points of contact that a lead makes with your brand!
While strategic decisions are still made by you and your teams, the automated amount of data you accumulate about people who have interacted with your company — categorized by how close they are to doing business with you — will help you:
- Attract new customers (through the development of more relevant and easier to consume content);
- Predict sales volume (based on the standard behavior of your audience in similar periods or on projections for the future);
- And develop lifetime sales funnels (capable of automatically qualifying leads, directing them to your company’s sales department when they are ready to buy).
As I said, collecting and analyzing this information without the help of a Marketing tool is still possible, but it slows down the company’s growth — especially compared to competitors in the market!
Even if the competition around your brand is low, knowing absolutely everything about the engagement and purchase cycles of your leads gives your Marketing strategies a superpower: segmentation!
The act of separating potential customers into groups based on similar behaviors ensures that each person receives the right amount of communication through relevant content that brings them closer to converting from a lead to a customer!
This is another thing that can be done manually, but it doesn’t mean it’s ideal, since all this filtering and communication can be automated with Marketing tools!
After all, you could walk from Brazil to Canada, right? But just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s the safest, quickest, or most guaranteed way to reach your goal.
The same happens with technology in Marketing: either you ride the crest of the wave, or you resign yourself to watching your rivals having fun in the water from the sand!
The next parts of this text work like a buoy: use it to enter the sea and balance on the board!
The influence of technology on Marketing tools
It is to be expected that such a large participation of technology in Digital Marketing, aiming to capture tons of data about people’s behavior, would give rise to strategies:
- Highly personalized, in sync with the company’s objectives and consumer expectations;
- With an “incalculable” potential reach based on the search for audiences with behaviors similar to the segments of your audience that buys the most;
- And 100% controllable, both in terms of budget and in terms of the target audience to be impacted.
This means that, to put your company on par with those that are already using Marketing technologies to get ahead, you need to pay extra attention to collecting data on your consumers’ behavior — and use it as the basis for all your decisions!
Information about your audience will combine with the priorities and challenges faced by your business, and will result in possible strategies to achieve your brand’s specific goals.
Knowing who the right audience is (the one that buys), how to categorize them (and qualify them) and how to communicate with them (through relevant content), you will see that simply copying the strategies that worked for other businesses will never work for you!
The abundance of data (and increasingly faster marketing tools to organize it) gives you the raw material to develop accurate plans — or, if not accurate, at least full of new information about your audience’s behavior!
So the evolution of technology in Digital Marketing gives companies like yours a historic opportunity — to profit more and in a predictable way from the ingredients that make up the originality of your brand:
- Her practical expertise in the market;
- The content that expresses this authority;
- And her Branding strategy!
Luckily for you, emerging marketing tools can help you achieve all of this!
What stands out in the Marketing technology market?
Technologies in Digital Marketing
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
As I said before, the biggest highlight among the new technologies in Digital Marketing is AI: artificial intelligence!
By working like hundreds of thousands of scientists thinking at the same time, AI can process all the data collected by your business in the blink of an eye — especially when it comes to your audience profiles!
Comparing person-by-person in your database — and automatically segmenting them based on advanced connections (calculated in seconds) — powers:
- Predictive analytics, which attempts to predict audience actions;
- Personalization of content , not only in the real-time reconstruction of the material itself, but also in the selection of which material to display on an individual level;
- Chatbots, which will be able to act in a more humanized and independent way based on previous information collected about their audience;
- And any other task that requires interpreting large volumes of data or doing something clever (and creative) with it!
Marketing Automation
As much as artificial intelligence stands out among the Marketing technologies that you need to keep an eye on, its ability to understand massive amounts of data ends up being especially useful for the Marketing automation sector as a whole!
Decades before AI became increasingly common, marketing automation platforms have been revolutionizing the way teams like yours :
- Reach new audiences;
- Manage Marketing campaigns ;
- Nurture leads automatically;
- And collect detailed metrics on how they act.
Preventing your team from wasting time on repetitive — or impossible — tasks, such as segmenting leads one by one — and calculating the perfect time to send content that converts (based on indexes such as lead scoring, for example) is what makes automation so effective!
With it, you can increase the scale of contact of your business with the best audience and let the leads themselves explore the stages of your funnel, since all paths lead to the same destination: chasing your brand!
Instead of spending resources chasing your next customers, with Digital Marketing, you create the best baits to bring them to your funnels and let the algorithms discover the right moment to close the deal!
Innovations in Inbound Marketing
Video Marketing
Video publishing continues to be a strong trend in Inbound Marketing because moving images really do say more than a thousand words! They are:
- Surroundings;
- Easy to understand;
- Simple to share;
- And absurdly effective at conveying messages!
This is why live video platforms, or interactive videos, are gaining so much popularity — and Instagram, Discord, YouTube and TikTok are just the beginning of this craze!
Interactive Chatbots
Instead of wasting time answering questions from indecisive customers on social media messengers or on your business website, you can put interactive chatbots on this mission to:
- Free up productivity, time and attention for your sales team to focus on leads that are closest to closing a purchase;
- Overcome most of your leads’ objections regarding your brand and the offers, products or services it provides;
- Facilitate access for the segmented public to the right team — the one capable of eliminating doubts and opening wallets;
- And improve the interaction of visitors to your website, or other communication channels, in general — with responses available 24 hours a day, every day!
Advances in SEO
Search by voice
The rise in the use of voice assistants, such as Alexa or Google itself (both capable of performing simple tasks based on commands spoken out loud by the user), has made SEO more indispensable than ever!
The acronym SEO comes from the English “Search Engine Optimization” and means the same thing as “Search Engine Optimization” in Portuguese.
This optimization focused on increasing the chances of content appearing in the top positions on search engines (and being found by those who matter, above competitors) is what defines maximum success in a strategy that aims for predictable growth in profitability!
After all, one of the main ways a company like yours can be found on the Internet is through search engines — whether the results are articles to be read, images to be consulted or transcripts to be dictated by virtual assistants!
SEO strategies tailored to spoken queries are becoming increasingly relevant — and you shouldn’t ignore this trend!
Evergreen content
I never tire of saying that another huge advantage of applying technology in Digital Marketing is the possibility of generating predictable and lifelong traffic from content creation:
- Relevant;
- Strategic;
- Sustainable;
- And timeless.
In practice, using the observations made by advanced SEO, it is only a matter of identifying which topics would be of constant interest to the audience, and then creating new content covering them.
To measure interest between topics or receive suggestions on which subjects to observe for the production of evergreen content, capable of bringing organic (free) traffic to your business in the medium and long term, you can use Marketing tools such as:
- Google Trends;
- Google Analytics;
- Semrush.
Emerging Marketing Technologies
Augmented Reality (AR)
Now that all the tech giants have invested heavily in augmented reality glasses, it means you’ll be seeing this technology much more frequently in the coming years!
Augmented reality, also called AR, is a projection of virtual elements onto the physical world through the lenses of special glasses, or an application for tablets and cell phones that support this technology (such as the lucrative game Pokémon Go).
AR glasses (which seem to be the flagship of this innovation) are still too expensive and experimental for the entertainment and productivity of consumers on a global level.
On the other hand, if you keep an eye on this technology from now on, you can secure your virtual piece of land and prevent competitors from taking your space in augmented reality!
This promises to be one of the most dynamic marketing technologies to bring your brand closer to the customer who buys in the near future, so don’t swallow flies!
Blockchain no Marketing
Blockchain technology, which is a “chain of blocks” when literally translated from English, creates an inviolable database capable of proving the originality of a single digital file among several copies!
Mastering the means to prove the integrity of an image, a document or any other type of digital media through blockchain will make the advertising campaigns of the future:
- Be more transparent;
- Create a safer and more reliable virtual environment for negotiations;
- And fight fraud.
The potential of blockchain goes far beyond cryptocurrencies, but professionals, such as CMOs, are only now discovering what these potentials are — and this is your chance to learn alongside them!
Dynamic content personalization
Earlier in this text, I commented on content distributed depending on the lead’s preferences and behaviors when faced with such materials — this is what is called “dynamic content personalization”!
An algorithm of this type can both predict which are the best CTAs (calls to action) to show to each person, and can display specific content for each browsing device!
This technology invariably leads to personalized recommendations of content on the website (making it easier to coordinate a lead through your sales funnel) and a significant improvement in the user experience (which raises the position of your company’s website on Google)!
Dynamic content personalization promises to be a huge Digital Marketing tool — and all you need to do now is keep an eye on it!
Internet of Things (IoT) in Marketing
With all this ease of connection and data analysis, even common objects will undergo the “Internet of Things” revolution.
Also known as IoT, this is the technology that makes coffee machines, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners smart!
Even lights controlled by apps or voice assistants fall into this category — and can be explored!
You can use IoT telemetry to collect real-time data about the use of your products or services, and offer immediate and proactive support with the intention of delighting your customers or encouraging new purchases, for example.
From rings that measure blood oxygen levels to self-driving cars, you can certainly find (or create) a niche by leveraging IoT to make the solutions your company already offers even more fantastic — and measurable!
How to keep up with and adapt to technology in Marketing
Even though it’s hard to stay up to date with the latest developments in Digital Marketing technology, here on the Enjoy Minder blog, I do my best to keep you and your team up to date with everything that matters in the world of sales!
The technologies with the greatest prominence today can be summarized as follows:
- To artificial intelligence (or AI);
- To Marketing automation;
- The use of video marketing for communication;
- The use of interactive chatbots;
- SEO specialization for voice searches;
- And the creation of lifelong content ( evergreen content ).
The most emerging and fresh news are:
- Blockchain against fraud;
- Augmented reality (or AR);
- The Internet of Things (or IoT);
- And dynamic personalization of live content!
When it comes to marketing tools or specific platforms, there’s no way around it: you’ll need to invest time and resources to ensure that your teams know how to use the new features and don’t make decisions based on outdated knowledge!
That’s why, when considering partnering with a sales professional or a Digital Marketing agency, the first thing you need to check is the latest training of leaders and managers in using the latest versions of the tools used to plan and execute a winning sales strategy!
The future is already here and it requires that, sooner or later, your company invests in its own education to keep up with the evolution of technology in Marketing.
This is no longer a question of “if” — it’s just a question of “when”!
Don’t be left behind!
If you can’t start evolving now by investing in Digital Marketing technologies, browse the Enjoy Minder blog here and check out other content: we publish new materials for each tool we master!
Not to mention the dozens of free materials with recommendations accumulated over my 16+ years as the CEO of the largest Inbound Marketing agency in Enjoy Minder!
Richer than the kingdom of Atlantis, here on our blog, you will find everything you need to surf the colossal waves of technology and master the dangers of the sea!
It’s time to surf with the giants — come take a dip with us!
