Which digital transformation trends will be big for advertisers this year? See what’s seriously trending for 2019 in this list.
Marketers competing in the digital age have a lot of technologies to choose from. The most important digital transformation trends have found their place among industry leaders. Which among them are you prepared to adopt for your business?
Businesses must do more to understand their customers. In the past, that included analyzing key customer data. Marketers leveraged demographics and behavioral data to take a targeted approach.
Now, customers expect more–and your competitors are giving it to them. They want more personalized experiences. And they want you to engage them at the right times, with the right content.
That’s why companies are transforming their digital assets for engaging customers. This digital transformation is driving more insightful and meaningful customer experiences. The digital transformation trends of 2019 call for a sophisticated approach.
10 Digital Techniques for Transforming Your Marketing Strategy
Digital technologies may be transforming marketing. But the application of these technologies is centered on an inbound marketing approach. This is a successful framework for engaging modern consumers and clients today.
The following technologies and tactics will help you get started. Consider how these fit into to your greater marketing strategy.
1. ‘Right Time’ Engagement
Marketers can no longer take a broad approach to marketing. In the past, much of targeting was simply guesswork. Now, technologies can remove the guesswork and even predict customer behaviors.
Digital transformation trends like Big Data analytics are evolving. These tools process reams of data to produce actionable insights for marketers. Marketers need only act on these otherwise unachievable results.
That means more effective targeting. It allows marketers to predict customer behavior and engage them at the ‘right time.’
Additional technologies are changing the way marketers engage customers. Automation relieves marketers of carrying out dozens of distributions to their audience. Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes its own decisions, allowing teams to focus on innovation instead.
2. Value-Added Content
Both B2B and B2C companies prioritize acquisitions over most other forms of engagement. Once customers are acquired, companies can begin driving lifetime value. But they can only do this with the proper tools of engagement.
Companies can use behavioral analytics to segment their audience. They then use automation to distributed targeted, value-added content. This content is designed to captivate prospects, not sell to them.
Examples include white papers and blog posts with content that matters to audiences. Infographics, instructional videos, and templates are useful as well.
These assets will have a clear call to action for prospects. Marketers can then use different engagement tools as they move down the inbound funnel.
3. Personalization
Marketers then convert these targets into leads. They do this by personalizing engagements with them.
Real personalization calls for technologies that make each customer’s experience unique. Automation and AI help companies create targeted experiences on a wide scale.
4. Storytelling
Storytelling is the process of creating a narrative around your brand. This drives interest towards the content while framing the brand’s involvement. Companies may provide honest documentaries or profiles where the brand is featured.
This adds an authenticity that traditional marketing cannot achieve. Many companies ask their users to submit their stories as well. User-generated content is a growing and effective strategy in this area.
5. Delighting Existing Customers
Delighting existing customers drives loyalty and retention. Customers who haven’t bought anything in a while might benefit from a personalized offer. Customers’ habits may suggest they’re interested in certain products or subjects as well.
This needn’t involve only marketing or discounts. Personalized messaging and curated content help with retention as well. Tying a personalized message with a genuine call to action drive additional sales.
It’s impossible to manage this manually and be effective. Companies use automation to send key content at the right moments. They can leverage AI to do this for them automatically as well.
6. Predictive Analytics
Marketers’ biggest challenge is meeting the demand for personalization in a cost-effective way. Personalizing engagements for all of their customers is impossible to do manually. Predictive analytics makes this possible.
A form of AI, predictive analytics can segment leads in your CRM by type and priority. Marketers can use micro-marketing campaigns to personalize content for each of them. The analytics tool helps marketers understand what types of content will be right, and when.
7. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is somewhat of a holy grail in marketing. AI can take analytics and act upon them directly. That means segmenting data, testing micro-campaigns, and even testing keywords and messages that drive higher sales.
The analytical power of AI is secondary only to its ability to act upon its findings. AI can even optimize based on campaign results. AI has high-speed processing power humans could never achieve.
The result is a superior and evolving personal experience for customers. As AI anticipates their needs, customers perceive a stronger relationship with marketers’ brands. These drive sales as well as lifetime value.
8. Marketing Automation
Marketers must manage a lot of channels to engage with their customers. That’s because consumers have adopted a wide range of digital touchpoints. They now expect to see new material from their favorite brands on all of them.
Managing dynamic content for so many channels is a challenge. They must segment audience on each of these challenges. They must develop unified messaging that is nonetheless unique to each channel and segment.
Automation helps you target leads and engage them automatically. Marketers need only track the progress of the automated system. This allows them to drive leads with minimal human involvement.
9. Next-Gen Customer Service
Customer service is nothing new. But customers’ expectations for service have evolved a lot. Winning companies are using sophisticated tools to meet those expectations.
The majority of companies now expect web chat. They expect to wait no longer than 30 seconds to reach someone this way. Do you have a customer service rep available on web chat during peak hours?
Many companies are adopting chatbots to meet this demand. This form of AI is almost indistinguishable from a real sales rep. And chatbots have all the capabilities they need to service customers.
Companies are also investing in more sophisticated warranty programs. This can include third- party integrations to CRM systems. They simplify the return and exchange processes without their systems slowing them down.
10. Innovating the Customer Experience
It’s great to invest in efficiency and targeting tools. Automation, analytics, and AI save your team from a lot of work as well. But marketers must keep their sights on innovative customer experiences.
Videos, dynamic content, and augmented reality are transforming the industry. You must leverage what’s in demand to add value to customers’ experiences. It’s an old adage, but the most important piece of success.
