Business owners and marketing managers are always looking to gain an advantage over their competition. While creativity and hard work can yield significant results, new technologies can boost your results with little effort. That's why it is essential to always be current with the trends in marketing technology and what benefits these innovations have to offer.

1. Leverage Your Analytics

If you're not already using the analytics from your website and social media accounts to improve your business, you should get started immediately. For those already familiar with analytics, taking your data to the next level is the key to success.

Strategically segmenting your audience based on your analytics can prove to be ground-breaking. Predictive intelligence tools can take your existing data and transform it into visual graphics that can make your decision-making more accurate and useful.

Furthermore, predictive software tools can help you optimize your sales funnel. These tools will sort through your client lists and suggest which customers are more likely to convert. On top of that, you can customize your messaging for each step in the funnel to guarantee the best possible results. 

It's no wonder that the predictive intelligence software market is expected to surpass the nine billion-dollar mark in 2020 and continue to grow beyond that. Companies are continually looking for ways to automate their marketing tasks, and data analysis is one of those tasks.

2. Improve Efficiency with Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is the process of taking your ad buying to the next level using artificial intelligence. Real-time bidding is a way of getting the best-priced ad space directed at laser-targeted audiences.

Most large corporations and ad agencies are already taking advantage of programmatic advertising. If your business competes with larger players in your space, you need to move away from manual campaigns.

The ad marketplace is a type of auction where companies buy and sell ad space in real-time. Being able to get the best deals requires the flexibility and reaction time of a computer. Making use of a programmatic advertising software platform will give you this ability.

3. Maximize Personalization

Your communication with your clientele can be personalized and customized to a greater extent than ever before. The majority of consumers find generic advertising annoying. Over 80% state that they are much more likely to purchase from a company that offers a personalized experience. This should be reason enough for your business to provide a tailored message to your audience.

Personalizing a message isn't limited to sending out a newsletter with the customer's name in the greeting. While autoresponder services offer this type of capability, customization can go well beyond that.

Social media platforms such as Facebook (News - Alert) offer you the ability to use data from users' profiles to personalize your communication with them. This means that you can target a different version of your content to different groups of users based on their preferences.

If your business has a mobile app, you can offer customers the ability to create a personalized experience. Drawing from their purchase history, a bespoke order or offer can be produced. This is great for restaurants, supermarkets, and other retail businesses where customers' preferences vary individually. 

4. Automate Your Interactions (News - Alert) with Customers

You can forget about the awkward automated responses customers got when visiting a website with a first-generation chatbot. The days of typing in a request only to receive an overly mechanical reply are behind us. Today, interacting with a chatbot is very close to chatting with a human customer representative. 

In 2020, chatbots are already powering over 80% of customer service. Over 60% of chatbots operate on a 24-hour basis. Using a chatbot allows you to communicate with potential clients day or night, eliminating the risk of losing a prospect to a competitor.

Chatbots allow you the ability to take advantage of conversational marketing. Fostering conversations with an audience is a top marketing innovation along with artificial intelligence. With technologies such as smart speakers gaining traction, holding a conversation with users is becoming vital for closing sales.

Using a chatbot gives you the ability to hold two-way conversations with prospects about your brand without employing an army of customer service reps to do so. There are many options on the chatbot market. Finding the ideal option for your business hinges on its capabilities as well as the ease of use. A chatbot company that provides a free trial and plenty of tutorials and documentation is a sign of a quality software product. Some proponents say that ManyChat is the best chatbot available.