Digital marketing techniques for 2017

I was reading the “Digital marketing techniques for 2017” article (http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/marketing-innovation/digital-marketing-trends-2016-2017/) on Smart Insights and thought the following were particularly interesting

Big Data: Big Data marketing applications include market and customer insight and predictive analytics. Big data is expanding on 3 fronts at an increasing rate – data volume, data variety and data velocity. The 3Vs of Big Data show why this is a key trend selected by many, who have experienced the increase in volume, real-time data and data formats in their business and want to exploit the value to increase sales through personalization on websites and email marketing through predictive analytics.  It's also closely tied into machine learning where big data is mined to identify propensity to convert given different customer characteristics and behavior.

Marketing Automation: This includes CRM, behavioral email marketing and web personalization. Businesses will increasingly rely on predictive analytics to automate marketing and personalize content to consumers. As businesses progress up the learning curve, more businesses will be putting lead scoring in place, or refining it and learning the best places on to feature content through predictive analytics.

Mobile Marketing: Mobile first strategy does not fit all businesses; it works well for some businesses but may not work for others. Research shows that retail conversion rates are significantly lower on smartphone compared to desktop. So a better vision for mobile strategy is treating it as part of a multiplatform or multichannel strategy.

Internet of Things (IoT) marketing applications: IoT is one of the most important marketing technology applications of the last 2-3 years, but it is of most relevance to devices makers and retailers, so it is relatively high-up in this ranking of priorities. There are expected to be 75 billion connected devices by 2020, meaning there will be ten times as many devices able to talk to one another as there will be people on the planet. The implications are huge and far ranging. All this sharing of data will transform the way we live our lives. 

A good example of IoT is Uber – Spotify link: Uber and Spotify have linked their services so that customers can connect their Spotify account to their Uber app, and then when taking a ride in an Uber you can use the Uber App to play music through the car’s speakers via your Spotify account. This is two Apps talking to one another, and then talking to a car! It improves the customer experience and helps retain customers by getting them locked into their product ecosystem.