Gone are the days when marketing was limited to a few grandiose ideas thrown together by the top management after which pushed to junior marketers to execute on sheer grit and long hours of extensive work done without the help of technology.
Cut into the current day and age and you can see technology making a formidable inroad into marketing and changing the way marketers think. Technology has also increased the number of media touch points with the customers. Here are a few glances of how technology has changed marketing.
More juice from online marketing
With the advent of information superhighway, marketers get access to a considerable amount of resources considering they also have to cope with servicing customers on this platform as well. Public relations have gone online and twitter is the new CNN and Facebook is the new search engine. With such sweeping changes in user behavior, marketers can only make it easy for themselves by harnessing all these technological changes rather than shunning it.
Creative is as creative does
Consumers are more exposed to technologically modified creative solutions combined with the increasing advancement made in design technology. 3D is no longer a subject of fantasy flicks or a difficult practice but becoming major part of main stream design. As a result, simplistic graphics and overall design might backfire unless you have a specific strategy behind it. The positive point of recent enhancements in design culture is that it has changed the way in which creative folks ideate…the tough part is that advancements in virtual reality environments such as Second Life makes business marketing a bit more complicated than it is.
Change in the lingo
Technical advancements of recent years have had a direct impact on marketing lingo as well. Online marketing has added terms like Performance Marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC), Cost Per Thousand (CPM), Click Through Rate (CTR), DSP, SSP, SEO and so on which forces the traditional marketers to catch up or be left out. These new areas have also brought in a significant change in how business marketers are perceived by clients and colleagues.
The change in the marketing mix is slow but important
Marketing plans now include online channels almost by default. Few and far between plans are likely to have no mention of the online marketing and social media. In fact business marketing on social media and digital marketing are now being handled by specialized digital agencies that might be catering to specific niches for example digital marketing for consumer good, digital marketing for food & beverage and so on. With the current rate of technological advancements, one might predict that in the near future, most of the marketing budgets will be focus on online activities than any other channels of media.
Availability
Availability of more user data has been made possible with the rise of technology implementation for business marketing. Years ago, most of the marketing intelligence was based on guess work and experience of marketing directors or following strategies of larger companies that spend some of their budget on basic methods of market intelligence gathering. With the advancements of online analytics and many other methods of online user behavior monitoring, today marketers can actually provide accurate user data that help influence business marketing decisions and allocate precise budget for each channel they use.
Technology for business marketing thrives on innovation
In the past, marketing was an activity used only by larger companies that were able to provide the budget for such activities. Today, smaller businesses have been able to crack the marketing code with innovative technology and that is what makes use of technology an essential factor in all marketing activities for small businesses. As a result of technological integration, we see smaller start up companies are achieving sales goal of unrealistic dollar amounts that they had never dreamed of.
In today’s business environment, marketers are working hand in hand with technology and their involvement is likely to grow in the near future. Technology in business marketing is here to stay and the sooner marketers get on with new and exciting ideas the faster they will achieve their goals of providing quality service to their clients.