Image credit: Pixabay

On the whole, it’s an exciting time to be a creative marketer. Options abound, with so many viable platforms and channels and a general understanding throughout the business industry that it’s no longer good enough to have plain marketing. The level of competition makes that futile. To stand out, and impress the modern consumer, you have to pull out all the stops.

Of course, it’s also tricky. There’s so much to know, and so many methods to try, that it can be hard to keep your skills and awareness updated. The best way to stay on top is to follow the development of technology. Why? Because that’s the biggest driver of change in the digital marketing industry. Let’s take a look at 5 tech trends that are reshaping creative marketing:

Big Data

The internet generates an amount of data you could almost consider absurd. The record of just one website view can encompass the circumstances of arrival, the actions taken, the pages visited, the time spent, and the final destination (and that’s all without considering user logins).

The big data industry is all about taking that immense pool of data and usefully parsing it: for instance, ecommerce sellers can map their customer journeys in great detail. Factor in other data sources such as freely-accessible APIs (used, for instance, to build price comparison engines) and you have a wealth of options.

This is so impactful for creative marketing because it provides incredible insight into what people like and dislike, love and hate, want to see and want to avoid. One day, it’ll be possible to have an analytics-driven service guiding the content production process — popping up to say that pages including this element or that element retain attention for 16% longer on average.

Collaboration Tools

The best creative marketing is achieved through collaboration: at the very least, creatives need sounding boards to check their ideas and spark further thoughts. Traditionally, this called for classic office setups, with people working nearby and being able to gather for meetings when needed. When people weren’t able to get together, they’d need to settle for phone conversations. Not so today.

Through using incredible collaboration tools, creatives can share their thoughts remotely, building up complex mind maps and achieving better results as a consequence. This also means that companies can hire creative talent from almost anywhere in the world, greatly expanding the range of suitable candidates and leading to stronger teams. 

Geo-targeting

Now that we all carry around smartphones laden with sensors. Modern mobile devices track location, using it for map applications and weather updates (among other things), and marketers can take advantage of it. Options have greatly expanded for marketers, and one of the most notable benefits is being able to use geo-targeting.

It’s particularly useful for catering marketing messages. For instance, if you want to market to people who’ve downloaded your mobile app, you can use push notifications to send out one message to everyone in the neighborhood of your premises — likely offering a must-be-used-today discount — and another (less forceful) message to everyone else.

AI Conversation

Using software to accurately mimic human conversation is a task long considered essentially impossible. Sure, programs capable of passing highly-limited Turing tests have existed for some time, but that doesn’t amount to much. But while it’s true that we’re still fairly far from fooling anyone paying attention, we do have chatbots that can effectively understand common human requests and interact with people in effective ways.

Many big companies already use chatbots to not only field customer queries on a 24/7 basis (they’re excellent at that), but also to get some marketing done. It’s easy to set up a Facebook Messenger bot for your business, for example — if someone adds it to ask it some questions, it can then share promotional suggestions fairly naturally.

Creative marketers who want to expand the reach of their content can try creating some interesting message chains for company chatbots. If you get the tone of voice right, and manage to accurately predict what most people will say, you can create a very impressive chatbot.

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

This is a tech trend that’s opening up new creative worlds in a very literal sense. VR headsets are now a mainstream product, and AR technology is viable in the average smartphone. Marketers have totally new ways to present the products, services, and brands they’re promoting. For instance, if you’re trying to build interest in a piece of furniture, you can create a virtual model and allow people to preview it in their own homes.

You can also create more interesting types of content. Oreo created a 360-degree video for its “Wonder Vault” that took viewers into a virtual world of whimsical cookie creation, and that’s surely a sign of things to come. When VR tech becomes polished enough to be a household standard, brands will start investing far more heavily in 3D content.

Each of these tech trends has already affected how creative marketing can be done, and will continue to change things as time goes by. If you work in the field, take the time to investigate the options available to you — there may well be more you can do.