As a marketing professional, staying ahead of the curve in terms of technology and tools is crucial to your success. Deciding which marketing technology tools to invest in for your marketing stack can be challenging due to the ever-changing landscape.
In this blog post, we’ll give an overview of innovative tools to consider for your 2023 marketing strategy. Whether you’re a small business looking to streamline your marketing operations or a large enterprise seeking to optimise your marketing performance, this post will provide valuable insights to help guide your decision-making process. Our aim is to help you make informed decisions about the tools you add to your marketing technology stack and to ensure that you are equipped with the best possible technology to meet your marketing goals.
Advertising
Demand-Side Platform (DSP)
A demand-side platform (DSP) is a type of software that allows an advertiser to buy advertising with the help of automation. DSPs are a powerful automation tool because allow advertisers to buy high-quality traffic at scale with minimal friction.
DSP can be used for:
- Display ads
- Video ads
- Audio ads
Remarketing Tool
Have you ever visited a website and then seen that brand’s advertising displayed online? This is called remarketing. Remarketing can be a powerful tool to reinforce the offer presented on your website. It is particularly powerful when only the visitors who did not convert are targeted.
Remarketing works by recording everyone who visits your site. You can then set up segmentation rules to define audiences for targeting. The tool then displays your ad to the segmented audience across multiple platforms including display and social ads.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence or AI is a current buzzword in digital marketing. Put simply, artificial intelligence tools seek to analyse data to provide meaningful insights and actions. You may find that an artificial intelligence tool can be used to automate menial tasks or provide insights into your data.
Some examples of AI used in marketing include:
- AI Channel Recommendation – this function uses historical user data to pick the best channel to deliver your communications.
- AI Segmentation – leverage AI and machine learning to predict the best segmentation methods.
- Customer Lifetime Value - Predicts the potential revenue of a customer throughout the entire interaction with a business.
- Product Recommendation - Suggests sets of predictive product recommendations based on purchase behaviour and customers with similar purchase patterns.
- Subscription Churn - Predicts whether a customer is at risk for no longer using your company’s subscription products or services.
- TransactionalChurn - Predicts if an individual customer will no longer buy your products or services in a certain time frame.
- Sentiment Analysis - Analyses customer feedback and shows you what is often mentioned, including the sentiment and emotion.
- AI Email Subject Line Optimiser - Help senders to evaluate and tweak their current subject line and optimise for open rate. This can be particularly powerful when paired with an A/B test.
- AI Content Suggestions - Use AI to help write your copy for emails, blogs and webpages. The best use case is as a starting point for your writing. Use AI to suggest topics and a structure, then write the rest yourself.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a centralised location that combines data from multiple sources to provide the fullest picture of customers and their touchpoints with your business. A CDP collects data from social platforms, your website, emails, loyalty programs and other places a customer interacts with your business.
The CDP then combines all this information into a clear customer profile. This process leads to a better understanding of your customers both at an individual level and at a macro level where you can see trends common across customers. This process leads to more effective segmentation and therefore more effective marketing.
CDPs are particularly useful if you have multiple disconnected data sources and or using many different technologies which are collecting important customer data.
Intent data
Intent data tools promise to measure signals of buying intent for your products or solutions and notify you when to make contact. These tools are commonly used in B2B marketing where sales cycles are longer and in conjunction with an Account Based Marketing strategy can be amazingly effective. It is also common practice to integrate intent data into your CDP to provide a fuller picture of your customers and prospects.
Customer Voice
How well do you know your customers? How happy are they with your business, what should you focus on improving and what would motivate your customers to spend more? Use a customer survey tool to gain greater insights from your customer base. Customer voice tools show your customers that you are attentive to their needs. They also allow you to take preventative action before issues reach a climax.
Marketing Automation Solution
As the name suggests Marketing Automation (MA) solutions, automate marketing functions such as emails and SMS. The primary benefit of MA is scalability. Marketing teams can build a series of emails and deliver them to the right contacts at the right time. Another significant benefit of MA is the always-on nature of the solution. Once set up MA will automatically deliver messages with no need for human intervention. This means all messages are delivered promptly regardless of when the automation is triggered.
Some of the powerful functions of MA include:
Dynamic Content in Emails – Increase the applications where your marketing solution can be used by exploring dynamic content. Go beyond the simple personalisation of a contact’s first name. Ideas include event details and registration barcodes, product details and images, or country/region specific content.
Lead Scoring – Lead scoring monitors all interactions with your leads including email opens, web visits and form completions. This data is then condensed into an actionable lead score. Lead scoring assists in lead nurturing and surfacing leads that are ready for a conversation.
Omni-Channel Marketing – The goal of omnichannel marketing is to deliver a unified message across all touchpoints, including web, email, chat and offline. A MA solution can help you in delivering omnichannel marketing.
Real-Time Communication – In its simplest form, marketing can be described as delivering the right message at the right time to your leads or customers. Modern marketing automation solutions allow marketers to do just this by allowing marketers to configure triggers that deliver the right message at precisely the right time. This is achieved by your Marketing Automation solution constantly monitoring your lead and customer interactions with your organisation. There are many ways to track interactions, a few common examples can include online form completions, surveys, support request, emails interactions, website views and transaction or purchase data.
Channel optimisation – You may have the possibility of reaching a contact by email, post, SMS, or WhatsApp. How do you select the right channel when everyone has unique preferences? Marketing Automation can analyse previous communications with every contact and select the communication channel that is most likely to achieve your desired result. While an individual may be able to do this for a small number of contacts, MA can do this at scale and extremely quickly.
Website Tools
Chatbots and web chat – these tools give visitors the choice to request more information or talk with someone. Web chat tools are particularly helpful for lead generation.
Dark mode compatible – dark mode is one of the biggest trends in web design. Ensure that you are providing users with the best experience by designing your emails and web pages to be compatible with dark mode.
Dynamic Content on the website – users who visit your site have different interests and preferences. Consider implementing web solutions that can personalise web pages according to the visitor’s interests.
SEO Tools – most businesses want new potential customers to visit their website. One of the most effective ways to do this is through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). There are many tools available that can help in optimising your content to make it likely to appear on the first page of Google search results.
Progressive Web forms – marketers want to know lots of details about their leads. However, site visitors can find long forms off-putting and therefore choose not to complete them. A solution can be progressive web forms. The first web form has only bare minimum fields, when a user completes a subsequent form, they are asked for more information that was not provided in the initial form. This helps overcome the hesitancy to complete web forms, while also collecting more information on high-value leads.
Invest in the Right Tools for Your Marketing Stack
Investing in the right tools for your marketing technology stack can have a significant impact on the success of your marketing efforts. From digital advertising and artificial intelligence to customer data platforms, the options are vast. The use of customer voice and marketing automation solutions can also help streamline your marketing operations and improve the customer experience.
By incorporating these tools into your marketing technology stack, you’ll be well-equipped to meet the demands of the ever-changing marketing landscape in 2023 and beyond. You can then focus on delivering compelling and impactful marketing campaigns that drive results for your business.
Finally, remember to plan your annual marketing calendar with Retail Calendar that lists down key sales events and public holidays in Australia and New Zealand.
References
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365/it/2022/10/04/personalize-your-customer-lifetime-value-predictions-with-customer-profile-attributes/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-insights/predictions-overview?tabs=b2c
https://www.adjust.com/glossary/demand-side-platform/
