In the Martech world, the key driver today is improving the customer experience. Today’s demanding customer expects convenience, relevance, and responsive engagement across every interaction. They perceive brands based on the interactions they have. They want to receive personalized messaging at every intersection.
With this unprecedented choice and access to information, businesses need to offer an experience that meets customer expectations. Personalized marketing content is no longer nice to have; it has become a top priority!
According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer study, 76 percent of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, while 53 percent expect the offers they receive to always be personalized. With that in mind, here are 5 technologies that are changing MarTech and enabling marketers to offer personalized experiences:
Artificial Intelligence:
With the modern customer expecting all marketing communication to be customized, AI makes a great use case for marketers to crunch the massive amounts of customer data available to them to create that experience. Marketers can discover insights about customer preferences, and design push advertisements to easily target the right segment with personalized communication. Such advanced targeting and transparency will help marketers understand what data is in use, how it’s being leveraged and how it’s working. What’s more, AI-driven chatbots can promote features and offers, take customer requests, and offer data-related answers to customer queries, thereby improving the customer experience. For instance, AI can allow marketers to analyze the kind of products a particular customer buys at a store and offer personalized content about similar or complementary products before the next visit.Data science:
Data is central to most of the biggest innovations in MarTech today. The successful campaigns rely on data and results. Data science is fast enabling marketers to analyze and process data efficiently, quickly and accurately. Unearthing insights into customer preferences of their favourite services, their favourite products, and their choice of styles and options will help marketers to design campaigns accordingly. Everything boils down to personalized Marketing in the end. Such analysis helps in delivering curated content and unique experiences at every phase of the customer journey. Using data science, marketers can learn everything about their customers and offer them the experiences that are most likely to appeal to them.Voice:
Advances in the fields of speech capture and processing, natural language processing, and deep learning have made virtual assistants increasingly intelligent and useful. Do you know? Thee Design reported that nearly one in three of the 3.5 billion Google searches each day are driven by voice commands. Voice is truly disrupting the marketing industry. Considering that customers might search for product information by talking, rather than typing, voice recognition will form the core of MarTech in the coming years. This will impact customer experience in a big way. Conversational engagement and voice search will enable marketing teams to evolve along with their customers; in fact, marketers who can offer a conversational tone will get a head start in this race.Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality(AR/VR):
As AR and VR continue to make headlines across industries, they provide marketers with many inventive ways to drive an enhanced experience for customers. Offering an immersive and personalized experience is a great way to connect with customers through a range of senses and emotions. This drives increased customer engagement. Marketers can embrace AR/VR to create brand experiences, as well as to sell individual products more efficiently. Such experiences can fuel engagement and create a relationship that is more interactive and personal. AR/VR can not only bring the product alive but also deliver a stellar product experience for multiple customers simultaneously. For instance, marketers can allow customers to try out different products, from the comfort of their homes – before actually buying them.5th Generation (5G):
The launch of the next-gen 5G wireless technology is set to dramatically change the MarTech landscape, and alter the kind of messaging marketers have been resorting to. Offering a dramatic decrease in latency and with data speeds ranging from 1 to 10 gigabits/second, such super-fast wireless connectivity means marketers get more opportunities to showcase their product offerings in creative ways. When combined with other technologies like AI and AR, it could herald a new era for marketers. They will be able to overlay high-quality interactive and intelligent imagery through 5G-enabled mobile devices anywhere, at any time. Clearly, this could completely transform the customer experience. Customers or prospects can receive marketing communication through their 5G-enabled mobile devices in their house, on their dashboards, and on the way to work. They can connect with the brand with their own layers of reality – without having to wear bulky AR-glasses. For instance, using 5G, marketers can overlay marketing imagery in an apparel store, as the customer walks through the aisle of products.
(Have we said it earlier?) Personalization is the way forward
As competition becomes endemic, customers are spoilt for choice. The only way to stand out in their consideration set if to offer personalized marketing content. Technology offers a great means to drive that personalization. The onus is on marketers today to quickly adapt to the latest trends. Using technologies such as AI, data science, voice, AR/VR, and 5G, marketers can not only build their brands but also drive better customer experiences. And that’s a trend that never goes out of style