Insights · January 30th, 2012
I am in Milan for a day-long marketing technology conference where I will be presenting to the event, which is sponsored by Ambrosetti. So I’ve been surveying various material on technology and marketing. According to an online survey, CMOs say tech-savviness is the area of greatest need and opportunity in marketing. It’s becoming more and more valuable to know how to effectively and efficiently use technology in marketing. Here are a few ideas.
1. Content Network Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is great–search marketing reaches more people than Yellow Pages, and allows you to generate targeted leads, but what about optimizing for content? One company, Scienceops, uses their patent-pending algorithms to optimize for content. Contextual marketing is designed to produce data concerned with what the consumer is doing online when they change from a person shopping to a consumer buying. By optimizing for content the marketer gains deeper, extremely relevant, and highly marketable insights into the how, when, and what is needed to make a sale.
2. Approach the new world of technology and marketing with a lot of flexibility and agility in terms of project creation and project management. New applications are coming with lightening speed and today’s hot thing is tomorrow’s big bore, so a rapid pace of change is the norm. It’s frustrating but real to have to keep on such a learning curve.
3. Mobile Advertising. Search Engine Watch notes that “6.8 percent of all U.S. Web traffic occurred from mobile devices.”
4. Plan for the democratization of your brand. That is, the company has less and less control, while those formerly known as consumers (and now known as individual publishers of text and video to the web) have more and more control. So, you have to engage people in a more comprehensive way.
5. Interaction comes before transaction. Each day, the ability of people to interact with each other, with other customers, and with you increases. And each day this interaction takes on greater importance as the precursor to any transaction decision.
For more thoughts on marketing and the future see The future of marketing 2012 and beyond.
