A crystal ball would surely be a useful tool for marketers planning for the year ahead, but we’ve checked carefully, and it appears we don’t have one. What we do have, though, is over 15 years’ experience in technology sector marketing.
We walk the walk with some of the biggest names in the industry, and many less widely-known businesses. We are well-placed, then, to make some predictions as to what’s going to be hot in technology marketing over the next twelve months.
Some of these trends will come as no surprise. One may appear to be back from the dead. All are closely interlinked. What could you achieve with all five working effectively together? Let’s dive in.
1. Customer experience
Already a hot topic, CX isn’t going away any time soon. Consistently superlative experiences are no longer merely beneficial – they are now essential to strong customer loyalty, advocacy, acquisition and retention.
What drives outstanding CX varies from company to company, market to market and more. As a rule, though, most customers value efficiency, convenience, and knowledgeable and friendly service, while effective personalisation will drive deeper, more committed connections.
2. Employee engagement
There’s more to head-turning CX than just technology. Your staff need to be at the top of their game, committed to delivering great service and getting your message out. Every member of your team needs to be happy, knowledgeable and enthusiastically engaged, with an unstoppable go-ahead, can-do attitude.
Only if your staff are productive and energised, working in a positive environment, will they be able to deliver the results you need.
Staff incentive campaigns will have a significant role to play in this area in 2020. Take a look at this recent example, built for Trend Micro around an interactive portal with a campaign running over several months, to see how effective they can be.
3. AI
AI will continue to play a vital role in technology marketing in 2020. It’s a foundational technology, driving a wide variety of solutions in diverse application areas.
AI can help with automation, cost savings, process improvement, error reduction, insight discovery, personalisation, scaling your content creation and delivery, and much, much more. It can also help enhance CX and employee engagement.
4. Social interaction
Live streaming has seen explosive growth across multiple sectors, in all types of organisation, from the smallest to the largest. Its uses are diverse, going way beyond advertising. For example, support services and training can be delivered on-demand, highly effectively and efficiently. Live video can also encourage viral sharing, extending reach and multiplying response rates.
It’s never been easier to distribute dynamic, engaging, interactive communications – Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat all have well-established live streaming Stories features, and LinkedIn will join them shortly. Viewers engage enthusiastically, live video giving them the feeling that they’re getting an exclusive, and, unlike traditional advertising, allowing them to interact, influencing and contributing to the content presented.
More generally, social media can be a powerful tool for relationship building, positioning, and communicating discrete, bite-size pieces of content.
5. Direct mail
Hold on. Direct mail (DM) is dead, isn’t it? Outmoded and outpaced by digital communications? No?
Far from it. Get it right and, with the drop-off in DM’s presence in recent years, your campaign can really stand out. DM still typically drives higher response rates than email, as well as higher brand recall rates.
DM remains key to many aspects of technology marketing. Account-based Marketing, for example, is foundational to many enterprise marketing strategies, but cannot work without effective creative work. Innovative DM can really help you make your mark and get noticed.
Every DM campaign is unique, bespoke to the specific needs and objectives at hand.
Let’s get started
As you plan for the coming year, email us or call us on 0118 380 0333 for a chat about what we could achieve together. If you’d like to know a bit more about us first, take a look at our website for an overview of who we are, what we do, and some of our recent customer projects.
