2019 is the year of technology and progress. After all, it’s the year both Blade Runner and Akira are set in.
We’re not flying around in cars yet, but the state of technology allows us to improve digital marketing efforts and excel at customer service.
Here are the best tech trends in marketing that you have to implement to be ahead of the competition.
Cross Channel Interactions
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Customers today do not gather on one platform. Different age groups would prefer to get messages from your company via different channels. Different audiences would gather around different social media networks. You can’t have only one channel that you use to talk to your users anymore.
If you want to nurture relationships with your audiences on all levels, you have to be everywhere. Now, it’s not possible to manage accounts on all social media, as there are too many platforms these days. Some of them are of little use, so you can ignore them anyway.
You have to focus on the major social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Add website and email marketing, and you have the complete basic picture of cross channel interaction.
Some companies will find that adding an app works for them. If you have a store, it has to be in line with your website, and all the other channels.
After you’ve analyzed what type of customers prefer which media and you’ve learned which media leads to more sales, you have to focus on it. There is a lot of software out there that allows you to tie all your social media accounts, email marketing, and website to one master account and manage it from there.
Chatbots
If you’re looking for something to add to the list of channels you interact with your customers on, here’s an idea. Set up a Messenger chatbot to talk to your customers on Facebook.
Chatbots are not AI, the technology is much simpler. You have to pre-script the questions your website visitors can ask, and assign answers to them. A user can choose between these options, and get whatever information they need from the bot.
Why would they use it instead of talking to your employee or browsing the website? It’s not always easy to find the information you need on a website. The thing is, landings appeal to a wide audience and answer a lot of questions at once. If you’re looking for a specific answer, it’s easy to get lost. In fact, 31% of people can’t find the answer to their question on the website.
Chatbots will help a third of your clients. It’s easier for some people to get their answer in a few clicks than to browse the website to get one. Besides, few customers need to talk to your employees, because most questions are easy to answer. It’s finding the answers that makes it a problem.
Management Software
If you’re not using a CRM yet, it’s about time you started learning what this is. Customer relationships management systems allows you to gather all the data about your clients in one place.
Now, if a customer makes a call to inquire about the product they’ve bought, the operator can instantly see your history with the person they’re talking to and greet them by name. The system allows you to schedule phone calls, and analyze your interaction with the customers to improve them.
Now, the same type of software can be used inside of your company. If you get HR software, you will be able to manage your employees’ time, monitor their performance, and set up payments. With such a system, your company’s workflows will improve drastically.
Cloud Services
If you run a small company, it’s handy to store all the information you gather on the cloud, instead of buying a server and maintaining it. It’s pretty cheap, and most big companies offer up to 15 GB of free storage for your data.
The same goes for your website or app, you can host them on Amazon Web Services or another cloud system. The benefit of Amazon is that you don’t have to stick with one option only. You can have a mix of cloud services. This allows you to both store your data securely, and deploy an app.
Machine Learning
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If you are on AWS, you can get machine learning services that allow you to analyze the data you’ve gathered. Machine learning is a technology that became accessible to businesses just recently.
It is essentially a team of engineers teaching a program to find patterns in huge chunks of data that people can’t find. The AI that comes out of it is inferior to human understanding in some respects. For instance, it takes months to teach a program to recognize everyday objects.
When it comes to raw data, however, machine learning is unrivaled. A team of engineers can teach AI to spot trends in your sales, predict the number of sales in a particular month, or predict which items would a customer buy.
Each business will have a different set of things that need AI analysis, and with the scale, the price grows. However, you can buy machine learning services on a small scale for as little as a couple thousand dollars. Compared to the amount of money this saves you, this is a low price.
GDPR
If your business operates in Europe, following the General Data Protection Regulation is literally a must-have. Otherwise, your website can be blocked in the EU, or you will receive a heavy fine.
GDPR is a piece of regulation that ensures companies handle private information of their customers responsibly. It’s a hard process to go through on your own, but most data management companies will have a readily available option as of today.
It won’t take you more than a couple of clicks to follow GDPR, so this is probably the easiest but one of the most important steps in this list.
Technology Is Cheap
The bottom line is you can get most of these technologies for little to no money. The only one you will have to go out of your way to implement is machine learning. But implementing it well pays off.
Learn more about technology, and you will beat the competition.
