As modern marketers, we have entered a world where the number of choices we have in terms of how we do our job is almost endless. The days of the simple media buy are gone, and now we have to deal with digital marketing, SEO, SEM, paid, owned, earned, social media, and so much more. Social and PR are integrated, and so are search and content--we can’t and shouldn’t think of one without the other. We’ve reached a point where the marketing space is constantly being re-shaped by new ideas, concepts, trends, strategies, and best practices, at times even outpacing our ability to grasp the changes. This new age of marketing can be exceedingly overwhelming and confusing if marketers cling to the old rules of marketing. This is where technology steps in to push us forward. While the 4Ps (Product, Place, Price, Promotion) may still be relevant, we can’t really do much about them without knowledge to guide us about the right product, the right place, the right price and the right way to promote, which is basically why we marketers need technology.
Technology Gets Us Closer to Our Customers
Marketers have forever been trying to pin down what goes on in the mind of the customer. Thanks to technology, now we have endless ways of knowing. Technology allows us to interact with our customers, talk to them, and engage them more than ever. We can have one to one conversations through social media channels, and give our customers a more personalized experience in multiple way and with many devices. In fact, the basic role of technology in marketing boils down to helping marketers get a better grasp on customer preferences, their behavior and purchase trends, and to design the most effective marketing strategy based on this intelligence. In the future, marketers will be sought for their knowledge of the tech space, as much as they are sought for their knowledge of PR and promotion. Marketing success will depend on how well we can leverage mobile as the customer’s most preferred method of consumption; how we can make sense of Big Data and pull out from it everything that relates to our business; how we use social to listen, learn, and have better conversations that lead to happier more satisfied customers; and of course, how we utilize the cloud which is becoming the center of marketing automation, and the connective tissue between an organization’s automation platform and their communication to the world.
Marketing Without Technology Is Not Marketing at All
If marketing is really about designing and delivering customer experiences, which it is, software is the building block for customer-centric marketing strategies. Software, tools, and new technologies help marketers devise new ways to engage customers. With billions of interconnected devices, user-generated content, and social interactions happening over computers, smartphones, and tablets, the Internet is quickly turning into a living entity: giving people directions, suggesting dinner ideas, solving life problems, and doing a whole lot of other things that humans do. The internet is mighty powerful, and marketers have to ride on its power if they wish to build lasting relationships with their customers. All of this technology, the Internet, and software might be fairly new concepts to many old school marketers, who may have little professional intuition in terms of how to harness and manage it all. However, we certainly can’t downplay these new streams of marketing. If effective marketing is what we truly aim to achieve, we must quickly realize that technology doesn’t have a little bit to do with marketing. From today forward….it is marketing.
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