Is it Marketing or Is it Technology? Well, it’s both

Technology moves at the speed of light; making huge inroads and changing the game across various disciplines. Its influence is not only limited to the traditional spheres of medicine and the automobile industry. More and more of the world’s tech advances are being applied to marketing and selling goods and services. If it’s not social media platforms making it easier to track customers and generate sales, newsletters are being automated to bridge the gap between the marketing and sales teams.

A great number of marketing activities have turned so tech-dependent that one begins to wonder if these business functions are marketing or technical functions. Lead generation is an example of a typical marketing activity that has become so tech-dependent, it can hardly be done effectively without the involvement of integrated web tools and CRM systems.

For the past decade, tremendous strides in technology have made marketers more efficient. Data is readily available and businesses are able to tailor their solutions to each customer. The potential results are huge for the business bottom line, but only when technology is applied judiciously rather than randomly.

Marketing is the Idea

Marketing is the management process that helps businesses identify customer challenges and solve them in the most profitable manner. To that end, marketers need to identify their potential customers and the needs that need fulfilling. They also have to find the best ways to solve those customer problems in a manner that satisfies the consumer. More importantly, the marketer needs to do it at a profit to keep the company in business. Marketing, therefore, uses research, product testing and customer feedback, to create a business model that will keep the customer satisfied and the company above water. For businesses, the intent for sales and marketing is to win and grow more business. That is the whole idea. The mechanism used however, sounds more techie and less ‘markety‘.

Technology is the Medium

Technology helps businesses achieve their marketing goals at every stage in the sales cycle. From client prospecting all the way to securing referrals for products, tech tools for marketing give businesses more control and flexibility in reaching the consumer at lower costs.

In modern times, tech tools for managing marketing and sales have grown by leaps and bounds.With these tech tools come increased efficiency and reach. However, knowing which tool to use, at which point in time, to reach which audience category, in which manner, is the big puzzle one needs to figure out to be successful. Different tech tools for marketing have different functions and advantages. Read on to find out more.

Websites Are Bases

More than just a spot on the internet to showcase business information, websites are digital real estate. A website is a business’ base on the internet. It’s where stakeholders can expect to find and interact with the organisation and have needs met, or at least initiate the process of meeting needs. Websites have grown to encompass more than just articles or pieces of information to become a set of tools useful for engagement, customer acquisition, customer support and e-commerce.

The web as we know it today, has become pretty dynamic and intuitive. Web pesonalisations now leverage artificial intelligence to offer more personalised content to drive conversion. Websites these days are set up to trigger specific messages and contents depending on the actions of the visitor. For example, a popup may be displayed when a visitor scrolls down or clicks the exit button.

Online shopping brings the sales cycle to a fitting climax. With integrated e-commerce, a business can transform its website into the most sophisticated platform to close deals. Fintech solutions like eWallets and mobile money tools mean it is even easier for customers to make payment up to the very last cent, all online without moving a foot.

Chatbots are another example of website integrations used to interact with customers. They are snippets of codes integrated into websites to offer automatic responses once a visitor asks certain questions. Chatbots allow marketers to interact with customers and provide pre-configured information in real time. They make it easy to predict customer needs and proffer solutions even before they are voiced. When data on interactions are combined with other relevant customer information, sales teams can more accurately project sales numbers.

Getting the best from your website requires a tremendous collaboration between web engineering and the marketing department. With business objectives in mind, marketers will be able to leverage business websites to offer more value to customers while collecting important information for future digital marketing campaigns.

Web integrations are now turning websites into multi-purpose marketing tools needed along every step of the sales cycle. Pixels and applications can help businesses generate leads. They can nurture them along the journey with business blogging, and suggest products based on their actions on Facebook tracked using pixels and other retargeting apps. And just as it ended, websites retrace your steps back again, helping you find prospects, initiate contact, and close successful deals.

Emails Help Open and Close The Deal

Every sale is premised on a sound prospecting foundation, and many digital tools are smoothing the process in marketing. Facebook audience insights, for example, helps you narrow the population to a more targeted audience that has a higher chance of accepting your product. After prospecting, the same tech tools help digital marketers make the second stage: connect.

You can collect leads on your website or right on Facebook or LinkedIn with lead generation forms. For informational purposes, email marketing has become a very effective method of securing business deals. With a high degree of personalisation, newsletters, for example, allow digital marketers to curate content based on user preferences.

Email marketing has also made sharing information cheaper than traditional media like radio or television. More importantly, it is easy to target the right customers at just the right position in the buyer’s journey. Using responsive designs and relevant call-to-action triggers, digital marketers are able to derive specific results with email marketing in ways that other media will not allow. People who opt into an email are already interested in your product or service. This gives marketers a shallow but rich pool of prospects to serve content to.

Mobile: The World On The Go

Mobile marketing is helping businesses reach more clients than before by bringing products to the customer’s fingertips. To ensure customers are pressing the right buttons, websites have become more mobile-responsive in order to improve user experience. Even better, websites can now be condensed and reconfigured into mobile apps, providing branded content just where customers can reach it.

For other purposes, online conferencing tools now allow businesses to connect with prospects from around the globe even on mobile devices. For business prospecting, click-to-dial and scan-to-dial features make it easy to make first contact with businesses and clients. Bulk SMS also serve the dual roles of sourcing out clients as well as giving promotional content.

Better Customer Service

The perfect sales cycle ends with a satisfied customer recommending your product and service to other customers. All efforts in your digital marketing campaign is aimed at creating so many “ooh” experiences that your clients can’t get enough of. They must be so excited that they can’t wait to spread the good news to others. Word-of-mouth like this is the biggest sales pitch for any business, and digital marketers are deploying tech tools to help create that experience for their clients.

Generally, tech makes it easy to hack into the customer life cycle. Right from a customer visiting a link from an SERP or a social media page, both marketing and sales teams know exactly what to do at what time. Subscribing to an email list may be just the first step. Businesses can now tell who opened which email. And when the customer clicks on a link inside that email, the sales team can easily take over the process and nurture the customer until a deal is closed.

Lastly, it is now easy to gauge customer experiences using review platforms. Remarks on social media pages offer a general overview on what clients think of your brand. So far, technology seems to have brought marketers closer to their customers.

Marketing Automation Saves Time

Many marketing operations are routine and repetitive. Morning emails are followed by sharing posts on social media. Then there is a blog post that has to be created and images curated to fit the right width and height. Such repetitive operations consume a lot of time, and may lead to errors; one missed task could have a snowball effect where future campaigns have to be shifted to accommodate the error. Thanks to tech, these tasks can now be done automatically.

Automation helps marketers in three main ways. One is that technology has widened the reach of marketing departments. Digital marketers are now able to reach more people through in-site ad campaigns as well as via advertisement on search engine results pages.

Secondly, technology makes it easy to create the right content for the right audience with a smaller degree of error. Ad campaigns targeting can be done accurately on digital channels than on traditional media. Also, responsiveness in lead nurturing is more fluid with digital marketing collateral than with hard copy materials. A pop-up on your website can attract the exact reaction from the demography of clients that fit your user personas. This then feeds into your client relationship management software.

And then instantly, you can proceed to nurture leads and convert them into paying customers. Automated processes send the right content based on the right filters inside the same application that collected those leads. And, when they have enjoyed the service, it is easier for the clients to post their reviews on social or on-site. They become brand ambassadors doing this. Adopting the right technology means marketers are now able to collate these reviews and feed them back into the marketing process, starting it all again within moments of its end.

Getting the right CRM platform can help revolutionize the sales funnel and narrow the product cycle. Whether it is a newsletter or a WhatsApp message, CRM systems now make it easier to not only create customers, but develop brand ambassadors at the same time.

So Much Data, So Little Time

More than making it easy to showcase your best products to clients, tech has made it easy to tease out important data, analyse them, and then apply your strategy on any given platform. Insights from big data give marketers a better understanding of customer needs. Businesses are able to gather information about their products more accurately than before. Google notifications, for instance, make it possible to monitor your brand on the world’s biggest search engine. The same applies to social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. Not only is big data giving marketers insight into customer activities, it is helping digital marketers better shape their own brand strategies. 

One way tech makes this possible is through the Internet-of-Things. By collecting data from different sources about the same customer, marketing departments craft solutions more suited to their clients. All of these fragmented information are now easily accessible via the cloud. This means marketing materials can be created on the go, and huge amounts of data can be stored at a fraction of what it cost a decade ago.

Both in terms of storage (cloud) and application, big data bridges the distance between businesses and their fans. It makes marketers flexible in applying strategy while arming them with all the tools to satisfy each individual consumer.

As data becomes the new currency, tech has given marketers a rich trove of resources, cutting down the costs it takes to collect information and amplifying the effects of data-driven campaigns into millions in profits.

Implementation: The Right Peg in the Right Hole

Digital marketing is efficient because despite the available automation tools, it is still possible to segment tasks into individual projects. By identifying each step in the digital marketing journey, businesses can and should employ personnel with unique skills to fulfill those responsibilities. While businesses may be tempted to employ the DIY approach to digital marketing, it is unrealistic to have a marketing department filled with only core marketers.

For example, a business will need a trained marketer to set the company’s digital marketing strategy. The marketer will determine what the goals of the company are and which digital marketing channels and collateral to use. Then it would be up to the web engineering team to cover the technical solutions that would be used in the back-end. From website design to full-scale integration, the engineering team will create the platform on which to pursue your business goals.

When the platform has been set up, copywriters and visual storytellers will help produce content that will fit into the overall digital marketing strategy. And, while the e-community manager ensures online content is shared according to schedule and is gaining the right traction, the analytics team will translate the resulting data to feed it into the marketing department’s future plans and campaigns.

Each of the skill sets described above, are career paths on their own. One individual hardly posses them all. The best implementation methods for organisations is to either hire people to fill all the various roles described above, or outsource all or part of their digital marketing needs.

Is It Worth It?

Not every bit of technology will fit well with every business. The idea is to have technology work for you, not against you. And so even within social media platforms, not all channels will provide the same value for your digital marketing. What marketers need to focus on is which technology helps solve which individual problem. For example, IoT might be an exciting buzzword. However, is your business poised to provide any value to your customers by deploying a device that reads heartbeats? How exactly does that fit into your objectives if you are providing pasture for livestock farmers?

It is therefore important for businesses to understand the technical expertise involved in utilising marketing technology at the workplace.  After figuring out your business needs, find out if it would be better to outsource some of the services to specialty companies. This helps you save time and money while freeing up resources for other activities.