Marketing evolves parallel to technology. What worked a year ago may not work as well today. Think mass printing physical advertising materials. While they were quite effective at reaching a large audience before the internet, today, they are more likely to end up in a bin than on top of a table.
Even if not as outdated as printed advertising materials, using any marketing tool that has a newer, more powerful alternative means you are not making full use of the potential of your marketing campaign. You can have the best marketing strategy and team, but as long as you don't make use of the latest marketing tools, it won't work, and your team might look "behind the times".
That is why, together with the reasons below, your IT business needs to make use of the newest marketing tools.
The goals of marketing can be characterized into five main areas.
For your strategy to be effective, you need to implement it using the newest marketing tools. They have more features and are more efficient and capable. That makes them better equipped to reach your target audience and achieve their marketing objectives.
Using the newest marketing tools will grow your IT company by benefiting you and your business in the following ways.
The IT industry is quite competitive.
The only way to win is to come up with new and more efficient ways of solving clients' problems, and the only way to lose is to continue using outdated ways.
For you to convince your clients to interact with you, your marketing tools should reflect the solutions you are presenting to your clients - they should both be the latest. Using outdated tools and procedures make you appear backward and uninventive, so prospects can't trust that your tools are new and more efficient.
The newer your marketing tools, the newer your clients will perceive your solutions.
Your prospects' expectations are the wants and needs of the people you want to attract to buy your products and services. To meet them, you first need to identify them. And to identify them, you need to understand your prospects.
To understand your prospects, you need to be equipped with the latest marketing tools and trends. They can provide you with access to relevant customer data and even process it, presenting you with easily digestible information. This allows you to meet their expectations by aligning your products and services to create great value.
In a world where clients are bombarded with marketing messages from left, right, and center, how your marketing message makes them feel goes a long way in determining whether they interact with you or not.
There are various ways you can improve their experience. One such tool you can use is augmented/virtual reality. It gives users an amazing experience by allowing them to try your product before purchasing. This increases their likelihood of buying it.
Another new marketing tool you can use is interactive content. This trend is gaining popularity because it encourages user participation, which improves their experience. As an example, a mobile game advertisement that can be test-played to get the feel will get more users than one that shows mere pictures and text.
During the implementation of a marketing strategy, one cannot be sure what will work and what won't. Most businesses handle this uncertainty by implementing different campaigns such as content marketing alongside others on different channels then checking their performance. If any of them isn't effective, it's improved or dropped.
Outdated marketing tools make this a painstakingly slow process. Research and implementation take a huge amount of time, and monitoring them is too intensive and rarely accurate.
Newer marketing tools, like HubSpot (it integrates CRM, CMS, service, and operations) give you access to market aggregates so research won't require too much time. Thanks to automation, implementation and monitoring them is quite simple.
Additionally, based on certain KPIs, you can easily gauge the performance of each handle them appropriately. That means you will cut off the ineffective ones earlier than when using outdated methods, improving your ROI.
Marketing is very intensive as it involves repetitive actions. As such, it's impossible to handle marketing alongside other tasks such as creating software. It's a full-time job.
The newest marketing tools allow you to automate repetitive tasks, taking them off your plate. It also handles them better than a human. For instance, through automation, you are able to provide customized customer experiences for thousands or millions of people at a time based on their actions. This increases the number and quality of leads that you attract, resulting in higher conversion rates.
A trend that is gaining popularity in marketing automation is using chatbots. A chatbot is AI (artificial intelligence) software that can simulate a conversation with a user through messaging applications, websites, mobile apps, or phones. It allows businesses to serve lots of users at the same time at a low price.
Other things you can automate include email, lead nurturing and management, PPC optimization, social media posting, and ad creative updates among others.
This leaves you enough time to actually create and deliver software on time.
In many ways, you are in charge of how your marketing campaign performs. It does not end at showing your new products to your prospects. How you present the information matters. It affects your brand image and is the difference between being perceived as an innovative, or an outdated company.
That is why you need to make use of the best marketing tools.
However, it can be a bit hard to keep up due to the many details and complexities an IT company deals with. If you would like to make use of the latest marketing tool to increase traffic to your website, just schedule a call and find out how we can help you.