I have constantly been asked what’s the impact of disruptive technologies on marketers. This has been and will be an ongoing topic. Here are some of my experience and thoughts:
Source: Redpoint.net
Market research
I started my marketing career as a market research analyst. At that time, my roles included creating and designing survey questionnaires, interviewing people in-person or on the telephone to collect survey data, running various focus group meetings, and spending hours to analyze the results using SPSS. My boss and other decision makers usually had to wait for weeks/months for the expensive research reports, depending on the size of the survey. The results, unfortunately, might be biased because people would give false information as impacted by factors such as social proof while answering survey questions.
Social listening
The wide use of social media is a good supplement for surveys and allows decision makers to receive real-time unfiltered information directly on how customers are thinking towards the products, customer services, as well as those from the competitors.
Search trends
Cassandra Clare said that “You will know what kind of man he is not by the things he says, but by the things he does.”
In Marketing, I see more and more companies rely more on search data to understand what people really think in order to strategize better and realign marketing tactics. Google Trends is one of the tools to help marketers discover the hottest topics in a given region and time period.
Virtual Reality
Compared to surveys and panels, virtual reality gives marketers more valuable and accurate insights into customers’ thoughts about products like colour schemes and packaging.
Besides market research, virtual reality will be widely used in other aspects of marketing such as content marketing.
For example, Unicef ran a virtual reality fundraising campaign to allow people to be put in the shoes of a 12-year-old girl and experience the real situation in a refugee crisis, rather than reading a story or seeing pictures. As a result, 1 in 6 people donated, twice the normal rate.
Account-Based Marketing
Account-Based marketing has been a proven effective strategy. It is the application of the Pareto principle in Marketing - 20% of customers generate 80% of businesses. Instead of targeting a mass market, account-based marketing identifies the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) by using marketing technology and data analytics tools. Then we engage with customers via their desired channels, whether it’s email, social media, events or webinars, etc. Once the best practice is in place, we learn from the results and start the process again to identify other potential customers/partners.
Source: MarketingProfs.com
To sum up, the impact of technology on marketing has been and will be immense. However, the major principles of marketing are timeless. Each company faces unique challenges and opportunities and therefore has its own way to make the marriage of marketing and technology successful.
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