Five Tech Trends Marketers Need to Pay Attention To

For a lot of marketers, technology is like a cold sore: all of a sudden, there it is. Like dachshunds, cold sores are a bit startling, but shame on us if we are startled by tech trends in Marketing Land.

Here are a few trends I’m thinking about very, very hard just now.

The End of Apps

Apps seem like such a fantastic idea, which is why 90% of online interactions these days are through apps. Some brands have cracked the code and delivered incredibly useful apps that simplify the customer experience, generate bags of data and keep things running on the back end, all in a lovely, branded environment We recently looked at Marriott’s app in the Twaddle round up, and I’m a fairly frothy fan of Starbucks, CBC, certain banks and things that predict the weather.

But let’s face it, most apps are just pretty sad and offer little advantage over doing whatever it was the old fashioned way. Plus, they take a lot more tech support inside than most marketers bargain for, and they keep breaking, and people have the damn nerve to expect someone to respond to every comment they toss in there.

I think we are going to see those babies exit the field in the next few years as the bots figure things out. Why have a separate app for airlines, hotels, coffee, football scores and traffic, when you can just ask Siri or whomever to book the flight, order the coffee and turn down the thermostat? Slack, for example, has a Lyft bot in the app that lets you add /lyft to request a ride without ever opening its app. If you have an app, you need to be thinking about what your customer experience looks like when your bot has to talk to my bot. If you don’t have an app, I’d suggest you go straight to AI.

Scarcer screens

Speaking of speaking to machines, where is it written that our interactions need to involve anything more visual than a button? Alexa and Google Home are just the beginning of voice-driven machines doing stuff for us. Remember that Internet-of-Things? That’s a thing. This year 30% of online interactions will not involve screens. I know it kind of sucks now that you finally got your website looking all spiffy and optimized, but it’s time to start imagining how you’ll be selling stuff when nobody can necessarily see it, and the one accessing it, is Siri or some other assistant bot. On which, pay attention to what Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook are doing with those personal assistants. I’m pretty sure it has less to do with being useful than it does with understanding and mapping intent. Some interesting big data coming our way on that, I think.

If your website still looks like crap, you probably should tidy it up a bit. Eventually, someone will want to take a look.

Lots of Smart

Let’s face it, if you could do predictive analytics really well and really quickly, you’d have tossed off the 5-year forecast at lunch. But you can’t, and people who can are expensive. AI, on the other hand, is relatively cheap, doesn’t want to sit near the window and can back up your vague hunches about propensity to buy, likelihood to churn, stability of sector and so much more with actual data that comes from actual data. Especially in B2B, we need to get all that data sorted out and doing something helpful. I’d say this is the year to skip that conference about content or getting along with sales and go hit some marketing tech events. Think how fun you’ll be at cocktail parties.

Automated Tedium

Monitoring the social feeds, pulling together the monthly forecasts, analyzing your Net Promoter data and figuring out where the leads all went is boring, and summer students are generally pretty bad at these sorts of things. So here is another place you should be looking at for AI help. I would hope you already have some bots taking care of the routine front line stuff (and if you don’t, why the heck not?), so let’s start planning how we are going to automate some of those other tedious jobs.

Passé Personas

I know, I know, you paid someone a boatload of money to do your personas, and that’s a good thing. Understanding qualitative information about your customers is important. But personas don’t solve our customization issue when it comes to content and transactions. They are sort of like a golf caddy: they can suggest which club to use, but they don’t really help us put the ball in the hole.

Machine learning is going to make personas look like cave art by watching, recording and anticipating what individual customers do when they interact with your brand. This means we’ll be able to rewrite content on the fly to solve a particular issue for a particular customer, and then monitor how valuable they found it so we can do better next time. We’ll know they prefer spoken information versus video, technical stuff versus benefits, and we’ll be able to predict when it’s time to send in a real sales person for the close.  Personas should focus, then, on how to help the last-mile close.

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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com