We’re in the early stages of a significant shift in marketing, but already it’s having a profound effect on the profession. The number of ways we can now reach our audiences - whether to drive brand engagement or product purchase – is immense. Similarly brands are also demanding that marketers develop campaigns based on old-fashioned creativity and new insight into numbers.
Whilst marketing, and its component elements (advertising, PR etc.) will always be an art, the digital age means we’re able to combine the creativity with data to prove the value of campaigns with more confidence than ever before.
Below are five ways technology can help marketers meet their goals:
1. Big data
The data that digital metrics can provide, in real-time and huge quantities, means that we no longer have to wait to receive a monthly sales figure to see results– provided the right tools are used to collate the information and present it in a digestible format. Likewise data’s helping us to gain a deeper understanding of demographic micro-segments. America’s largest cable and broadband firm, Time Warner Cable, is a great example. By melding publicly available data such as voter and land registry records with local viewing habits, it helps brands using their channels to build custom campaigns tailored to specific user groups.
2. Wearable insight
New user-friendly wearable technologies allow marketers to prove effectiveness through the audience’s emotional response…. before campaigns are even launched. They combine wearable tech and automated data analysis to measure conscious and unconscious emotional responses to media with impressive accuracy. It’s already been the subject of several successful trials. A few years ago, Innerscope Research showed 40 film trailers to more than 1,000 people, measuring their heart rate, breathing, how much they sweat and motion responses. Using the results, they found they could accurately predict box office hits for the year.
3. Make it mobile
People with access to a smartphone or tablet now spend an average of 2 hours and 57 minutes on them each day, putting phones ahead of televisions in terms of where we direct our attention.
Recent research claims UK’s shoppers are set to spend £14.95 billion via mobile devices in 2015, an increase of 77.8% on £8.41 billion in 2014. What is certain is that mobile marketing needs to be more than just a line-item test on a media plan. Gartner estimates mobile advertising will hit $41.9 billion in 2017. Mobile is no longer an additional sales channel – for many, it is the channel.
4. Be social
Social networks mean that people are sharing their opinions more than ever. Never has it been easier for people to voice their love or loathing for a brand, product or campaign. The benefits for marketers are twofold. The first being that they can spot and respond to trends much faster, creating more targeted campaigns which ride the wave of that moment’s zeitgeist. Oreo’s award winning ‘You Can Still Dunk in the Dark’ campaign of 2013 is a perfect example of when things go well. Marketers must now accept social as a valuable channel in their own right. According to a recent report, marketing spend on mobile devices will surpass what marketers spend on the desktop Web late by early year. For many marketers, this is a good thing. Unlike more traditional channels, the link between a campaign and revenues on social is simple to see.
5. Programmatic revolution
Programmatic marketing (or media buying) offers a number of benefits to the marketing mix. These automated techniques allow the use of audience insights and technology to tailor messages to a particular individual, at a particular moment, in a specific context. Ultimately this increases efficiency, delivering greater bottom line growth than traditional buying.
Programmatic methods provide immediate access to global audiences, the ability to finely target and optimise amongst those audiences centrally, and to measure results quickly and efficiently. Changes in spending patterns which traditionally took weeks to respond, can now be taken advantage of in hours, or even minutes. This is why experts predict it will support 80 per cent-plus of spend in the next two years and big brands are investing heavily. For example, American Express announced earlier this month it planned to shift 100% of its online ad budget to programmatic channels.
By Gawain Morrison, Co-Founder of Sensum.
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus