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Any technology and automation provider that wants to sell you a “definitive solution” for your business is lying to you, simply because digital trends evolve at a rate never seen before, and what can work for everyone today, tomorrow could become obsolete, as we have seen countless times.
Although there are some basic guidelines to optimize your business model that remain the same as always. You should not “marry” with any marketing, systematization or operation methodology that is not flexible and that does not allow you to scale and adapt at the same rate as the most successful companies. Constantly improving to optimize results is not optional and that is why we always have to keep an eye on the future and trends.
According to the experts at Sales Manago , these are the macro trends that will become more important in the next two years:
Customer’s Journey Analysis
It is very easy to lose objectivity when it comes to seeing our own product or service through the eyes of our customers, especially when the contact points between discovery and purchase are numerous and complex to track. The integrative analysis of the customer’s journey makes it possible to implement a model capable of closely monitoring and measuring each user’s activity, regardless of whether their experience is in a physical store, social networks, e-commerce, with a telephone executive, etc.
Having a comprehensive, real-time data-driven map of customer and prospect behavior today is essential to scale and offer more attractive options, detect both purchase and churn triggers, improve user experience, and really understand what wants and needs our audience, and in this way we can gradually become part of their lifestyle.
In this area, problems usually appear precisely at the moment of identifying, tracking, accumulating and analyzing information. The tools that allow us to achieve all of the above are very varied and range from automation systems to CDPs, but it is always necessary to have a technology expert capable of seeing the complete business panorama to implement the most appropriate solution.
Consent and preference management
Five years ago, the level of awareness of users regarding the way in which companies take advantage of the information they obtain from them, was not remotely as broad or cause as much concern. However, today your target audience knows that their personal information can be used to improve their user experience or to profit from it in ways that are not so ethical. For this reason, the issue of security and privacy has gained more and more relevance and has become a defining criterion of people’s trust.
Time and performance management is not the only thing that matters, the system should be that much transparent on both of the side. Employee should know what they do and employer should know what they’re up to. Employee monitoring software can be a good choice for both but must consider the privacy to at a certain level.
Investing time and resources in a good consent and preference management model is the best way to provide this trust and transparency to your audience, because in this way they decide how much information they share, how much you can use and what for, if they want to stop sharing. information, if you can share it with your business partners, etc.
Visual Search in Marketing
There are already many applications that allow you to capture an image. Or the barcode of a product to search for it on the Internet or obtain more information. Although it is not such a popular custom today in Latin America, the reality is that It is growing by leaps and bounds. Everything indicates that it will become, like voice search, a very common way to search for products and services online in a short time.
Just as in previous years, we had to adapt some aspects of our SEO and our e-commerce to the rise of artificial intelligence such as Alexa or Siri and their search criteria and results. Now we will have to do the same with visual search. Although they are still not very clear, the market opportunities that the expansion of this technology will bring will undoubtedly be enormous.
Conversational marketing
Broadly speaking, conversational marketing is the trend in digital marketing that seeks a personalized interaction between the brand and the user in the most spontaneous, human and close way possible. As the volume of users of a business frequently exceeds the capabilities of its customer service team, conversational marketing ends up directly linked to chat bots and artificial intelligence that allow emulating a conversation with another human being, or at least approaching it as more possible.
According to experts in AI’s and machine learning, we are really witnessing only the first steps in relation to the potential that automated response systems can have. There is still a long way to go in this area so that they can truly replace an executive of flesh and blood. On the other hand there are also many tasks that a chatbot can already carry out with absolute effectiveness, and that is why they are increasingly common.
Customer Data Ethics
Data ethics is a new area of marketing that focuses on aligning business practices with ethical and moral privacy policies and the correct use of personal information, which should focus more on offering a positive and transparent experience than on increasing the maximum economic benefit obtained. In other words, the increase in sales derives from optimizing the customer experience, not from taking advantage of sensitive or non-consensual information from our clients and prospects.
Personification
Unlike the already widely known “personalization”, personification refers to using the data available from a segment to create a theoretical “person” to build better user experiences and serve as a model to trace and analyze. different variations of the customer’s journey. The usefulness of the “person” in the new marketing will lie in the possibility of creating randomized models that statistically allow us to anticipate the needs of our real public in a more personalized way.
At Workpuls, the Customer Behavior Company, we take care that your business takes advantage of the best technology available for automation, but we also care that you have the newest tools before anyone else. So get in touch with us and discover what a smart investment can do for your business.