Marketing and advertising strategies are constantly evolving, and in a world where web rules, what’s relevant one day may not be as effective or influential the next. Today it all comes down to the technology, meaning you not only have to be a marketing expert to handle your business’ promotional activities, you have to be a tech-pert too. Thankfully marketing and advertising has moved on from expensive, prime time TV and newspaper advertisements, and has even moved past the digital video and display strategies that secured success this time last year.

Technology is helping us to understand consumer behaviour as well as individual strategy strengths and weaknesses, so cue the marketing tech trends that are changing tactics now…

Native ads

When is an advertisement, not an advertisement? When it’s a native advertisement of course. Native ads blend in with surrounding content to provide a paid but original advertising option, and it’s proved to be more successful than other forms of advertising. Facebook has led the way with native advertising, with their sponsored in-feed posts providing an accurate representation of what a native ad should be. Offline, print media is following suit, with publications like The New York Times making it difficult to tell sponsored pieces from news.

By complementing or even copycatting the surrounding user experience, native ads provide increased click-throughs. However, marketers and publishers must correctly label native ads in accordance with the latest regulations.

Influencer marketing

This is no new trend, influencers have been creating a buzz throughout the marketing realm for some time, particularly in social media. For those of you who don’t know, influencers are powerful people or organisations within specific market sectors. Their power is often dictated by the following that they have, especially online, with their huge social fan bases providing a direct route to engagement with potential customers. Choosing the most fitting influencers, and more recently micro influencers (individuals with smaller niche following), to communicate specific brand messages is becoming an increasingly popular way of reaching consumers and tapping into an already engaged fan base.

Smart technologies

Whilst less and less businesses are using prime time TV advertising to get their brand messages into homes across the country, Smart TVs offer huge potential from a marketing/advertising perspective. Using the most up-to-date digital targeting technologies, companies can now use their TV-computer hybrids to their advantage relaying their messages to television audiences everywhere and across a multitude of devices.

Smart TV and device use is altering how businesses and the marketers that represent them collect data about their customers too. The connectivity of these devices, often referred to as the ‘internet of things’ or IoT, ensures useful information can be collected across the board to ensure more efficient targeting for forthcoming campaigns.

VR advertising

Virtual reality or VR headsets are becoming more and more accessible to consumers, and the 3D, fully interactive experience they create has been featured in a number of TV advertisements of late. With their growing popularity, and the introduction of Google Cardboard – a tech innovation that allows you to turn your phone into a VR headset with just a piece of cardboard! – creating VR and augmented reality advertisements is something businesses are increasingly experimenting with.

It’s easy to make your marketing and advertising strategies future proof if you’re ahead of the game with tech. Need help using emerging marketing technologies within your business? Get in touch with our team for assistance.