Thank you to Tim Butler, founder and CEO of Innovation Visual, for letting us share his article.

Digital marketing never stays static. So, what do you need to know to stay ahead of your competition? How do you separate the facts from the fads?

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence, or Al, is a significant force in marketing now. Al works by learning and responding and this power is being used in a number of marketing areas. Machine learning – the ability for Al to learn and improve itself without explicitly being programmed has seen the functional scope of what is possible expand rapidly in recent years. Marketing is at the forefront of Al use. Google’s AdWords and Facebook both use Al to refine who is shown what adverts. Al goes even further beyond this in marketing.

Voice Search & Digital Assistants

The most commonplace use of Al is in the digital assistants like Amazon Echo’s Alexa, Google Home’s Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. The rise of voice search is something you need to be aware of due to the pace at which it is growing. A conservative estimate of searches per month, activated by voice, is 150-200 billion.

The searches are on both Voice First devices (those that do not have a screen, meaning all interaction is through audio, like Amazon Echo and Google Home), mobile phones and increasingly desktop devices that have voice search capabilities.

The main impact areas from voice search are: 

1. No screen for results

Only the first result is read out by devices, so being number 2 in the results now has little benefit. The fight to be the number 1 search result is going to become increasingly intense for marketeers going forward.

2. Longer and question-based search queries

Voice searches tend to be longer and more sentence-based than typed search queries. The impact here is that you need to start optimising your content for themes, not rigid sets of keywords.

3. Retained context & personalisation

The Al is retaining the context of what has been said before, which means that the results provided are dependent on this and increasingly granular personalisation.

4. Local & mobile bias

A large majority of voice searches are being done on mobile devices. Google has said that 40% of its mobile device / app based searches are now done by voice. Searches like ‘find a coffee shop near me’ take into account the user’s geo-location data to provide results.

5. Dis-intermediation

Voice search is facilitating greater disintermediation. If you ask Amazon’s Alexa to order you a large pepperoni pizza one will arrive from Domino’s. You do not get the choice. Being the chosen supplier or being number one in results gives massive market power when voice search is going direct to transaction.

Chatbots

Helpful chat boxes in the corners of websites have become increasingly popular. Often when discussing their use with clients over the past few years the issue has been manning these chat systems, so that web visitors have someone ready to interact with, especially in smaller businesses and outside of normal hours. This problem is ceasing to be a problem through the application of Al.

Chat systems powered by Al can understand the conversational tone and like search algorithm changes, hold previous data to form context. Good bots can provide personalised responses to people’s questions.

In 2024, we’ll see better chatbots as the technology becomes more mainstream and mistakes that have come before are learnt from and improvements are made. The other big difference is the way that bots can integrate with existing messaging Apps such as WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger by inviting the Bot to join a conversation. This will make bots much more prevalent in 2024 and just like voice search make their use by people habitual not exceptional. 

Smarketing

No, it is not a typo. The Smarketing theory is that businesses need to stop thinking about Sales and Marketing as two separate functions. This can be easier said than done, especially with established hierarchies and managers protecting self-interest, but it makes sense. To a potential customer they view a potential supplier in singular terms. To them the experience they have with that business should be consistently good throughout their buying journey. So, they should not experience a dramatic change in tone, approach, content or even offering when they move from browsing a website to being contacted by a sales person.

There is a benefit for businesses acquiring new customers by taking a Smarketing approach. If you have a joined up Smarketing team you do not face the issues of marketing pushing the wrong types of leads, or the wrong level of seniority, or too many / too few leads into the sales function.

A seamless Smarketing team leads to better customer experience, which is likely to improve close rates and reduces internal business inefficiencies, reducing cost and improving output.

Rise & Rise of Inbound

Inbound marketing has been around for some time. Since John Deere started the Furrow Magazine in 1895 if you include the offline. approach. However, digital inbound marketing continues to gain ground and is set to become as mainstream as having a mobile-friendly website for B2B companies.

Inbound also feeds into the trends from search engines to look for content and optimising for themes. Building great content is great for your visitors, the search engines know this, but inbound marketing and content marketing places the emphasis much more on getting this content to achieve the business goals.

If you follow inbound marketing techniques you create your content in a much more structured way. Content is focused on specific audience groups, personas, and their needs. Their need for information changes through their buying journey and good inbound marketing addresses not only the differing content needs at different stages, but crucially also moves the prospect along the buying journey.

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To help you get the New Year off to a cracking start, here’s a free Marketing Guide —  ‘13 Marketing Strategies to Ignite Your Brand in 2024’

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