What Is the Future of Marketing in The Digital Age?
If the future of marketing is digital marketing, what is the future of digital marketing? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
This is a great question that I don’t think has been thought about deeply enough. The truth is that digital marketing has changed a lot and is changing a lot as we speak. There are so many marketing technology (“Martech”) companies that exist and are starting every day it seems like. And every day we told that something else matters and is the “new marketing”: “Customer experience is the new marketing!”, “Community is the new marketing!”
The truth is that all of these fall short, yet each of these is incredibly valuable when it stays in its own lane. Marketing is not product is not customer service is not community is not development. They’re all part of a company.
Now that I have that out of my system, here are the areas I am watching when it comes to the future of digital marketing:
#1. Understand The Data
Everyone has too much data these days. We don’t need more data, we need to make sense of the data that we have. I am not talking “big data” here, but rather getting the data you have in different tools and systems into a place where you can make sense of it and make good decisions for the future of your company. We’ll see a collection of companies come into the market to help businesses make sense of their data.
#2. Personalization
Instead of marketing to the masses, marketers are going to become better at personalizing messaging to the specific person based on all the data we can collect about them. I chatted about this with Brennan Dunn, and firmly believe it to be true. We can already do pretty cool things with people who are logged in, so it will be even cooler with people who are logged out. Personalization will matter more in marketing than ever before.
#3. Digital Advertisement
At some point, advertising will all funnel through the digital realm. We’ll see all advertisements on places like billboards tracked and measured like AdWords and Facebook Ads are today. Markets will shift because of this.
#4. Searching Voice
Mobile has come and is here. Voice search is going to matter more and more. With the quick rise this is experiencing, many hundreds of millions of people will use voice search rather than text search. This has very interesting implications for businesses who are just based online.
#5. Complexity
None of the existing channels will go away. We’ll still have SEO and AdWords and Facebook and organic social and email marketing. Things will just get more complicated.
I hope that helps shed some light on what the future of digital is.
Contributed by John Doherty, GetCredo.com founder, former head of marketing and growth, SEO expert, lab owner
