Traditional advertising is still important in the customer journey

Technology has been a friend to marketers for a long time. Customer data has played a crucial role in facilitating this. However, with more privacy laws coming by and people having more awareness, it will be interesting to see how marketing agencies use technology to continue offering tailor-made services. 

Technologies like AI, ML, and Robotics have been helping marketers in achieving personalisation to a large extent, without which it would have been a tedious task for them. ‘We! Interactive’ is a creative, digital and social marketing solutions provider based out of Singapore. The company provides a range of services including Social Media Marketing, Digital Production, Marketing Automation, Data & Analytics and more. ‘We! Interactive’s clientele includes American Standard, Oppo, Quaker, Mountain Dew and many brands from across industry. Matthew Lim, the founder of We! Interactive discusses the trends, opportunities and possibilities of marketing technologies in the days to come. Edited excerpts.

What are the upcoming trends in the marketing technology you notice?

Martech will evolve together with the role of Marketers. Over the last few years, we have seen the boundary of Marketing and Sales getting blurrier in many ways. The future of Martech will be to assist Marketers to help drive business growth for the organisation. 

We could start seeing Martech getting increasingly focused on the experience it can deliver to the recipients. Delivering personalised and relevant content will be key, hence we could see many techs allowing integration of various data points to provide a single source of view to the customer.

With the issue of privacy now becoming a hot topic and causing several adtechs to relook at their deliveries, it is even more crucial for organisations to treasure the leads they have now and make better use of Martechs to increase conversions.

How will technologies like AI, ML, and Robotics impact marketing in the years to come?

For many large organisations, marketers cannot work on personalisation at scale without the use of technology. It is simply too tedious and time-consuming. The use of such technologies will aid them in better understanding the audience, gather data, plan content and communication delivery and then gather response data. Marketing is an iteration process. With the response data they get, the Marketing platform can then use it to optimise and again understand the audience better, and everything will go in one full circle.

The improvement in accuracy and efficiency of such technologies will help better the marketing efforts and take mundane tasks out of Marketers. This then frees up time for marketers to focus on planning strategies to best align with organisational goals.

What is the future of traditional ad and marketing agencies? What is the way ahead for them? 

The simple answer will be for agencies to start adopting technology to aid their client for better decision making. That being said, it is not asking every agency to transform themselves to be a digital agency. Traditional advertising is still very important in the entire customer journey to help build brand awareness and reputation and cannot simply be overlooked. However, the use of technologies and data can help agencies better decide on their strategy and develop their content.

How can brands use technology for below-the-line advertising like surveys, sampling, kiosks and others?

There are already many technologies in the market to aid such efforts. Below-the-line advertising serves as a very good data collection point for organisations to better understand their customers. Cleverly planned surveys and sampling activities can help organisations understand customer preferences. This allows them to tweak their message and product to increase the chance for conversion and also improve their prospecting process to get better quality leads.

Location-driven marketing – what are some of the challenges in driving this? 

Location marketing was really made possible because of mobile devices. However, the challenge of this moving forward is also because of mobile devices. With the topic of privacy getting more widely discussed, consumers are now more aware and conscious of what kind of information they are giving away. This has been and will be the key challenge for location-based marketing as apps and devices will now have to have opt-in features for tracking locations. Without consumer consent, it wouldn’t be possible.