Is Marketing Technology Making Us Lose the Personal Touch?
Technological advance can be a polariser. Early adopters seek the excitement of the latest tech in order to exploit competitive advantage. Critics can’t shake the notion that we are sliding towards a Terminator-style future without the appropriate safeguards in place.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Not all tech is going to deliver competitive advantage simply because of its newness. And even luminaries like physicist Stephen Hawking and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk have warned about the existential risk from superhuman artificial intelligence.
For marketers, the fast-evolving opportunities of technology require us to seek new ways to build warmth and emotional connection in our communication and interactions with our audiences.
New email and social media tools offer time and cost savings through automation. But there is no reason why automation has to result in a less personal approach.
Quite the reverse.
It’s more important than ever to create a brand persona and nurture personal connections in our communications; to offer our customers a picture of the people sitting at the other end of the exchange.
It’s more important than ever to create a brand persona and nurture personal connections in our communications; to offer our customers a picture of the people sitting at the other end of the exchange.
CRM solutions help us to track our interactions with particular customers and adapt accordingly. It’s a proven way to prevent those relationships and sales opportunities slipping through the net. They also allow us to show how much we care about our customers by understanding their needs on a deeper level and starting to anticipate their wishes.
We can precisely measure the effects of our marketing communications and interactions. Over time, and with appropriate testing, we can build up a complete picture of what messaging works for whom. We can segment our audiences and tailor our messages with greater understanding of how each audience segment will respond. This isn’t based on the clumsy demographic segmentation of the past but, rather, built by analysing real responses in a way that sheds light on an individual’s behavioural characteristics. In this, we have a much more powerful way to drive personalisation.
Connection and loyalty can be built in a more meaningful way than they were by the mass communications of the past.
Increasing marketing automation is no reason to lose the human connection to our customers. Rather, the need for the personal touch is greater than ever. Technology simply gives us more tools to nurture personal relationships in a more nuanced and intelligent way.