8 Technologies That Could Change Digital Marketing Forever

With technology rapidly changing and improving, there’s no telling which direction it might go from one day to the next – While services like AdWords & Bing Ads were all the rage previously, as these technologies advance, there are a lot more for digital marketers and advertising agencies to consider adding on to their business; even more so since more traditional media such as TV or printed advertisements are slowly dying off. It is then extremely important for advertising agencies and businesses to keep up with the digital marketing trends & technologies and get into them before they become too famous or mainstream for their advertisements to make a difference. Below, we have reviewed 8 of the most recent technologies that can change digital marketing forever. Most of them have not rolled out to the public yet, instead only limited to certain states or regions as more beta testing is under way.

                Search advertising is out, and voice search marketing could be the next up and trending form of advertising technology. Google Home works as an in-home device, and is almost fully hands-free. Activated with a simple, “OK, Google”, this home assistant can be integrated with other smart home devices to utilize Google Chromecast and play movies or music on the devices connected to it. Currently having about 23.8% of the voice-enabled speaker market, it is projected that by year 2019 39.3% of millennials will own at least one smart assistance in their home. Users can utilize this home assistant to get the answers to a simple query such as “Cheapest hotel rates in Budapest on the 29^th of December 2018,” by just voicing the question out loud. When and where will voice search advertising stand in the next few years? No one knows yet, but Google has informed that they are still years away from monetizing voice searches like how search, display and other ad formats have been for the past years.

                This also brings changes to the keyword selection and heightens the importance of SEO keywords, even those long-tail phrases that users tend to submit over voice searches as compared to text searches. As an example, users will search “gas station near me” on Google, but through voice search, most of them are used to submitting queries such as “Where are the gas stations near me?”

Amazon Echo

                Similar to Google Home but holding a much higher voice-controlled speaker market at a staggeringly high 70% in 2018 alone, Alexa users along with Google Home users have been known to use natural language more – which clearly displays the user intents. As mentioned above, vendors and business owners have to start considering adding question phrases to their digital marketing campaigns to ensure that their business shows up first on the list to be read out loud by Alexa or Google. Unlike the traditional text searches with queries such as “fish food”, where users could simply be reviewing the types of fish food, or shops selling fish food nearby, voice search users will reveal their intentions clearly so that the search results are highly relevant. They will search with question phrases – what, who, how, where and the like – and it was found recently that these voice searches are geared towards local areas.

                This means that local vendors will need to start adding on to their online presence now more than ever! Your local, business and crowd-sourced sites needs to be regularly updated and active to ensure that your business can be found by these voice assistance. With these searches on the rise, it is important to ensure that your listings include the correct & updated phone numbers & addresses so that you are not left out in these long-tail queries searching for your services & products.

                While still not very common in suburban areas, multi-display digital signage and video walls are growing to become something more mainstream in bigger public places; Airports, restaurants, hotels and transportation centres – frequently high-traffic areas – are employing this method of digital advertising to market their ad slots to other businesses when they are not using it to further advertise their new services and products. Most of these video walls will include front and rear displays, and while these can feature LED, LCD or plasma displays, about 90% of the video wall market is filled by front projection walls and LCD displays. This could perhaps be due to the smaller bezels and lower prices for displays larger than 32”.

                Whereas digital signage typically takes up the size of a plasma TV, these video walls are much bigger and recently with touch integrated into these walls with infrared technology and capacitive touches, immersive experiences for users become the main goal of their ad projection. The ads need be interesting before this was in, and now it is also important that the ad truly engages with its audiences. User experience for video walls will be quite drastically different as compared to touch experiences on smaller devices such as by using a tablet. Video walls containing several smaller screens are different from and better than having a single big LCD display - due to the resolution required and how immersive the user experience can be on the video wall projection.

                When one thinks about Oculus Rift, it is common for their first thoughts to go towards Virtual Reality games. However, there is much more than just an immersive gaming experience for users now. Similar to video walls, these virtual reality simulators stress on immersive experiences. But this certainly opens a window of opportunity to brands to explore 360-degree views and experiences, or even entering the gaming concept to captivate their audiences. Traveling agencies in particular, can take 260-degree views and videos of areas they are advertising, and allow users to experience the fantastic view for themselves as part of their creative marketing strategy. Rather than just relying on descriptive texts like “featuring beautiful views of the sunset,” tourism hotspots can deliver the views straight to users without them having to even leave their seat.

                While most advertisers have not caught the wave on this entire virtual reality concept yet due to their pricing, it could be less pricey in the future. Currently, a 3-minute virtual reality video can cost more than $1 million just for production, but with technology’s rapid changes and new hardware & software frequently popping up, it is expected that as the hype dies down a little, the virtual reality concept will take digital marketing by the storm. Other industries can make use of this technology as well – imagine the experiences for a 3D interior designer!

                Microsoft’s HoloLens are relatively new when compared to Oculus Rift. While both products focus on virtual reality and its consumer engagement experience, Microsoft associated this product of theirs with a more technical, workspace-like and business-centered touch. The HoloLens centers around a custom holographic processing unit, making holographic computing possible. Just like other VR units, the HoloLens, when worn by a group of people, allow them to be ‘linked’ and viewed as hologram figures in another user’s view. So, what else can digital marketers utilize for their advertising & marketing strategies? In the healthcare & medicine sector for instance, a virtual-reality symptom checker could help doctors and patients understand each other more. In the gaming industry, of course, one can view and play an RPG game on a whole new level – quite personally.

If equipped with immersive touch experiences, viewers can experience how a product works in the virtual reality space, and these interactions within the VR experience can be reported back to the marketer in real-time. With plenty of these insights and increasing options to have detailed targeting aimed at users who have interacted with certain points of their campaign, virtual reality can be just a simple starting point with plenty of space to improve. Other businesses considering using virtual reality to market their products but are unsure where to start can make use of 3D advertising as a placeholder meanwhile.

Automation is getting stronger day by day, replacing needs for actual human workers and positions. Basic customer service-related questions can be answered with pre-set keyword-based questions and answers to ensure that customers get their replies instantly. Facebook is one of the first few platforms to utilize this function – pre-programed chatbots. Business owners can set up several question and answer sets that users can click on, and without even being there, these same owners can set an auto-response to indicate that the users’ messages have been received and will be replied soon. This is, of course, only if there are no pre-existing answers to answer the users’ queries.

Bigger brands like RedBull have started utilizing this feature on their Facebook page to connect with its users. By simply entering the chat, users will be greeted with multiple-choice questions such as “Are you interested to know more about the recent RedBull events?” or “Send me promotional details!” that they can simply click and get an answer for immediately. These answers can point to specific pages of their website, or just a simple answer if so desired. With enough time spent configuring the messages, businesses can potentially leave their chatbot unmonitored for a while, even while setting the chatbot to send visitors to the page of their latest promotion as a greeting or end-message. Imagine the possibilities this feature could entail!

                You might know this better as artificial intelligence, although technically, deep machine learning is a subset of AI. This is the basis of how chatbots can function. Basically, personalized digital experience is created from a big collection of data which frequently gets updated as their increase the algorithm networks to mimic human intelligence as closely as possible. While this is not entirely new, deep machine learning has just begun to slowly creep into the digital marketplace to help organizations with their marketing automation processes.

                How far can you automate with deep machine learning, you might wonder. Since machine-learning technology is advancing quickly, it enables a large amount of analytical data to be processed to gain some insights that actually leads to some critical information. This information could be used to improve your marketing campaigns by using detailed targeting towards the audiences that you might not have noticed before. Since they slowly build their algorithm network, you can be sure to gain insightful data that are more personalized and lead-driven, or whichever campaign objective that you are more interested in. Anyhow, data-driven storytelling using machine learning is sure to be more user-friendly to understand, and it has also started to derive upcoming trends and applications based on existing data. The more data you collect, the more insights you can get, so surveys’ importance could still be maintained despite all the changes in digital marketing recently.

                If you were not familiar with Waymo, this is a project started by Google in 2009 as a self-driving technology company. While this is still under way of further optimization and is only slowly rolling out in the United States, the concept of self-driving cars can bring a huge change in digital marketing. Imagine if you do not need to focus on the road while ‘driving’. Users who are already mobile-heavy would be able to utilize their phones even more, pretty much focusing their entire concentration on their screens. This would mean that billboards, road signs and small posters by the road will serve less and less function as self-driving cars become even more common anywhere around the world. Instead, the focus on mobile advertising could become more important than ever when this car eventually starts becoming more famous. Like the VR concept and augmented reality however, this product could be taking a much longer time before monetization based on these vehicles gets more attention and options, or even start to become effective at all.

                This also brings the possibilities of advertisements on third party apps such as Google Map, Waze or other navigation apps on their vehicle becoming increasingly important. In fact, just recently, sponsored advertisements have started to appear in Google Map, resulting in some locations become more prominent and noticeable than other locations. This further stress on the importance of keeping your business listing updated.

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