Adaptation should be a central focus of any successful marketing firm, especially when the most faithful tactics are no longer working like they used to. Dips in visibility success should be treated as signs to shift how you approach things, not as anomalies that can be ignored. Innovative tech, especially artificial intelligence, is transforming the marketing industry, and it can do the same for your firm if you are smart about implementation. 

In this article, we discuss which marketing technologies are worth embracing and how to best incorporate such new strategies into your business.

New Technologies Worth Embracing

Routine Task Automation

Routine task automation is the most common use for AI in almost any industry, and that is especially true for modern marketing. Your firm can use tools that schedule social posts, tag assets, pull performance reports, or even format data. Such low-value tasks could take hours, but AI does this work in seconds or minutes so that your marketers are free to focus on tasks that only a human could do.

Media monitoring is one of the best areas of marketing to embrace routine task automation. Instead of reviewing every alert manually and then putting together coverage reports, your employees can use AI. These new tools can quickly synthesize coverage across a wide range of sources, identify the most important themes, break things down into relevant categories, and produce summary reports.

Real-Time Feedback Tools

Real-time feedback tools can surface engagement, conversion, and sentiment signals as they happen instead of your team waiting for quarterly cycles to finish. Cutting down on that wait time allows your team to assess campaign performance and adjust your approaches as needed. Course-correcting in real time is more effective and saves you money in the long run.

Share-of-voice tracking and brand sentiment monitoring are two of the most common forms of real-time feedback that such tools allow. No matter which area you implement this technology, the objective here is to give leaders more visibility so that they can make faster, more informed decisions.

Predictive Decision Tech

Certain new technologies can also provide the right predictive analytics so that your marketing firms can make better campaign decisions. One of the most overwhelming and time-consuming tasks that any agency faces is combing through massive amounts of audience data. Predictive decision tech can digest large and complex data sets and speedily identify patterns across them.

Predictive decision tools can analyze a whole range of website behavior, content consumption, and third-party data before surfacing the signals that require immediate action. They can also help identify which campaign strategies are most likely to generate and convert leads. Finally, such tools can also be used to catch emerging issues before they escalate into campaign-wide issues.

Personalization Tools

There are also new tools you can use to provide personalization at scale. They can analyze customer behavior signals, content engagement patterns, firmographic data, CRM history, and third-party data all at the same time. This technological shift allows your marketers to personalize faster and more intricately than before. Such personalization tools enable dynamic messaging adjustments, outreach timing, and content recommendations. 

Customer Data Platforms

Customer data platforms (CDPs) have also recently shifted from traditional software packages to new warehouse-native architectures. They can use real-time feedback, AI-powered identity resolution, and privacy-first governance to connect first-party data across a wide variety of consumer touchpoints. Your marketing firm may already be using older generations of this technology, but the newer versions are more flexible and AI-powered.

How To Incorporate New Marketing Strategies

Encourage Innovation and Creative Risk

The first and most basic way to incorporate new marketing strategies is by encouraging innovation and creative risk at your firm. Teams sometimes have to think in new and exciting ways to make moves when old tactics are no longer working as they used to. Leaders need to embrace the most reliable parts of classic methods while experimenting with innovative tools and new strategies.

Center Proactive Approaches

Another guiding principle of your marketing firm should be the centering of proactive approaches instead of relying on reactive ones. Being too risk-averse can be a major issue, but so can adopting new tech and new strategies without thinking through proper implementation. 

Your business should not immediately abandon all past and current tactics once there is a noticeable dip in your success metrics. Instead, you should try to thoughtfully collect as much information as you can and make proactive adjustments so that you are enhancing solutions instead of fully replacing them.

Embrace Data-Driven Strategies

Once your firm has a strong grasp on what is still working, you should look at new avenues and embrace data-driven strategies. Past experiences and gut feelings can still be part of how your business works, but obtaining and using quality metrics will help ensure that you find the right approach for your specific needs.

Identify the current issues and goals that inspired you to look for new ways forward, and then establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that match them. Adjust your marketing resources based on how close your firm is to reaching these metrics, and continue to collect ample data so that you best understand your audience and where campaigns still need work.

Maintain Channel Consistency

When putting in place new forms of technology and new strategies, it is best to maintain consistency across all official channels. Every touchpoint (e.g., brand website, social media posts, newsletters) needs to have similar content with a universal tone. In fact, it is helpful during major strategy transitions to implement specific procedures, such as proper digital asset distribution, so that all branded platforms remain consistent.

Prioritize Continuous Learning

To get the most from any new technologies, your firm should also prioritize a culture of continuous learning. You otherwise might embrace the right tools but not have the trained operators you need to use them. Coordinate with your teams about how AI and other new tech can help automate routine tasks and otherwise optimize their workflows. Make sure that it is a collaborative discussion with an emphasis on regular training.

About the author

David Maricich, President & Chief Creative Officer of Maricich Health, has spent more than 20 years leading healthcare innovation, branding, marketing, and communications initiatives for hospitals, health systems, and Fortune 500 healthcare companies across the U.S. and internationally. He has led growth, advocacy, and change-management campaigns while helping organizations improve public health outcomes through strategic, creative communications.