Understanding the rapidly changing needs of today’s customers and keeping them engaged is keeping marketers on their toes. It’s clear that the need to leverage best-in-class technology will allow companies to thrive in the years to come, as volatile markets, such as the one we are in, can catalyze research and development.
Keeping abreast of emerging technologies can lead to better decision-making; tech awareness leads to curiosity and an open-mindedness to explore and dream the impossible. We can’t help but wonder: “What will marketing evolve into?”
M-IT solutions
There is much to be gained by investing in the techie side of the marketing function. CRM and Marketing Automations platforms provide the potential to increase tenfold the marketing scope; technology takes every marketing strategy and increases its analytical efficiency by automating data collating, comparison, and reporting capabilities.
Using a platform’s dashboard to monitor and track various datasets allows you to find out a lot about consumers and their behaviours. These behaviours are mostly represented by key performance indicators (KPIs) below:
- 1st party data (rich data);
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- 3rd party data (online data);
- Website behaviours
- Search behaviours
- Purchases history;
- Big data;
- CES (customer effort scores);
- NPS® (Net Promoter Scores);
- And so many more.
Alongside smart analytical tools to make sense of all that data, you can launch marketing attribution solutions, recommendations engines, and heightened product development to bring your business to the next level.
Knowing that current technologies, such as ad placement and recommendation engines, can deliver highly customized results, it’s only a matter of time before we see the next wave of automation and data-driven analytics. You’ve most likely been the target of these marketing strategies, and you’ve seen how accurate (and sometimes a little bit creepy) they can be. We can potentially anticipate that future consumers will expect highly customized targeting strategies.
Fusing marketing and sales to gain the upper hand
While many organizational experts would agree that sales and marketing work best when closely aligned, few businesses can brag about having achieved an efficient and cohesive sales and marketing ecosystem. It’s better not to underestimate the potential opportunities and dropped deals that fall in the sales and marketing gap.
Strategic marketing programs can deliver so much when done right: processes optimization, qualified leads, relevant marketing insights and positive brand recognition. Sales, on the other hand, nurture relationships, convert leads into active accounts, and close deals. In a perfect world, both functions work as one, with sales providing feedback and requesting new products, and marketing conducting research, developing new offerings, and leveraging data to wedge into new markets.
In a future world, business development data processing hubs might be able to deliver tender offers the minute they are published. Or better yet, we might even see machine learning product development, where behaviours, analytics, and granular information about individual client profiles are used to deliver uniquely customized business solutions.
Developing strategies way beyond the 3 to 5 personas
Marketing professionals are already leveraging data, tools, and trends to deliver high return content and campaigns to broad audiences. To get a head start on future practices and methodology, we believe exploring predictive analytics tools is in order to compete in tomorrow’s economy. Countless case studies and white papers underline how applied predictive analytics can elevate, for example, cross-sell initiatives.
The benefits of CRM and Marketing Automations
For many, it is now hard to imagine operating efficiently without using customer relationship management (CRM) technology; there is tremendous value in centralizing all available data to manage relationships and aligning key business functions.
Not only that, CRM and Marketing Automation platforms are designed for the integration of a wide array of functions and tools, such as voice recognition, machine learning, and AI modules to automate simple to complex tasks and workflows. There are low-code options, modular product offerings, intuitive user interfaces, and API connectors for a variety of systems. And they are easier to implement than most think, with the right partners.
It’s not that far-fetched to imagine voice-search enabled lead generation or customer experience KPI-based rankings executed by an AI bot. We do not yet know what technology will lead to in terms of ecosystems or functionalities, but we know that process and data automation keep evolving and that we can expect anything and everything.
Information technology has a lot to offer and is worth mining! Solutions Metrix is a leader in CRM and Marketing Automation platforms and solutions. Our teams of experts can help you extract and make sense of data. Give us a call today to find out how technology can elevate your business and revenue.