Technical solutions to your marketing woes

Posted on Jul 2 2018 - 1:39pm by Editor

Are you exhausted by having to do all your marketing manually? Do you spend hours going over the same tedious tasks, feeling sure that this is really a job for a machine? The good news is that machines are getting better and better at this kind of work. There’s now software available to help with most areas of marketing – you just need to know what you’re doing and establish the right balance between human input and software tools. 

marketing woes

More than human

For a long time, marketing has been thought of as one of the last bastions of human endeavor, an area where intuitive understanding is as important as any metric. The arrival of big data, however, has changed all that, and though human work is still needed in some areas, computers are becoming increasingly adept even when it comes to designing campaigns, able to identify patterns in consumer behavior without the biases that can lead humans astray. Artificial intelligences are still limited in their language skills and prone to taking problematic shortcuts, but when put to work within the right structures, they can be very effective. 

Market research

Improvements in analysis software mean that you can now break down your existing sales records and research feedback to get a lot more out of them, and you don’t have to be a stats wizard to do it. You can also design market research campaigns around the fact that you can handle large volumes of information more easily and at a lower cost, and you can make use of data sets collected by social media platforms when you use them to direct advertising at particular sets of users. Predictive analytics utilizing machine learning can even identify the way that sales trends are shifting, so you can tell the difference between a good target group today and the group of people most likely to buy from you in three months’ time. 

Targeted advertising

Many platforms now allow you to customize the advertising consumers see based on complex profiles that take into account things such as the websites they visit and the products they buy as well as traditional demographic data. By using the right software at your end, you can take fuller advantage of this. As a rule, the way that targeted advertising works is that you pay more money for each layer of filtering you use, so it’s important to strike the right balance, and computer analysis can identify the level at which you get the best results proportionate to spend. In addition to this, artificial intelligences can identify individuals who are an optimum match for the existing customers who respond most eagerly to your existing marketing, enabling you to focus on targets that you may have previously overlooked. 

Customizing visitor experiences

For the majority of companies today, the website is the most important sales platform. The way that customers feel about it significantly affects their willingness to buy. The chances are that you’re already using responsive design to tailor what they see to the devices they access it with, so why not take it a step further and customize the experience based on individual profiles? This can affect everything from the colors of the site to the images they see and the pieces of text or the videos selected for them. Iconic Industry can help you adapt your website so that every visitor enjoys a more personal experience (see Iconic Industry on Vimeo). 

Building customer relationships

When you use technology to build better profiles of your customers, you can use software to maintain communications optimized for them. This begins with finding out how they prefer to be contacted and how often, so that automated marketing messages – again tailored to fit their profiles – can be sent in a way they find useful and not annoying. Software can also filter responses so that they’re directed to the right people and are easier to deal with. It can coordinate practices such as sending out discount offers to customers who haven’t made a purchase for a set period of time, making them feel that your business is paying attention to them as individuals, even when, at a human level, you simply don’t have the resources to do that.

Incorporating tech solutions into your marketing means that you can free yourself from the grueling side of marketing work and spend more time on the creative side. With technology to inform your work and apply what you develop, you can explore more imaginative campaign designs and receive quick, thoroughly analyzed feedback on how they work, making your job more enjoyable and more likely to achieve success.