As the world becomes more technical and everything is digitalized, marketing and software are invariably entangled and marketing management necessarily includes software management. Today, part of the marketer’s job is to work with websites, analytics, social media, marketing automation tools, interactive content, mobile apps and more, all of which, at heart, are software applications. Software provides marketers with valuable tools and agile ways to reach consumers and engage with them at a more local and personal level.
Marketing = Digital = Software
Most marketers don’t realize that they are already software creators. “The two fields are much closer to one another than they were a few decades ago,” said Brinker. Software infiltrates everything that marketers do, and marketing’s focus on customer experience has become an increasing focus for software developers. Marketing professionals are normally creative designers who focus on user experience and perception, while software developers are normally analytical programmers who focus on automation. But in the growing technical world, marketing and software have become thoroughly entangled, and marketers need to be tech savvy to be successful.
Agile Marketing
This blend of marketing and technology ultimately becomes multi-taskers who are able to perform a variety of functions that may not typically be a part of their job description. This is agile marketing. “Marketers need to be able to use iterative thinking and drive experimentation,” Brinker told the audience. Marketing efforts should be executed in the form of customer-centric stories; marketing needs to be relevant in the moment of a user’s immediate context. Marketers need to be able to plan, produce and deliver.
This means responding to new events and information, deploying viable work into the market more rapidly, adjusting approaches based on feedback and experimenting with innovative, new ideas. Marketers need to stop wasting time on ineffective programs. Marketers can benefit from the Kanban Principles. As marketers and technology experts, brands need to be storytellers. Storytelling includes software bought and built, configuration and parameters, algorithms and process design, user experience design and data processing, all woven into the narrative of the buyer’s journey.
Innovation
Marketers need to experiment and innovate like software developers to find out what’s working and what’s not. Today’s marketers have already become multi-faceted strategists who work with mere communication. “Today’s marketers have a much bigger toolbox than marketers of the past and they need to use it,” Brinker encouraged the audience. Experiment with new things, explore data, fail fast and recover quickly, never let assumptions go unquestioned and work with a sense of speed and urgency.
Scalability
Bimodel marketing operates by having two management systems at the same time. One is for innovation and experimentation, and the other is for dependability at the core of marketing operations. Through having an unchanging, scalable structure and an experimental structure, marketers can test the waters while maintaining scalability. Standardization, exploitation, and dependability are all aspects of scalability, as well as being infallible and having the ability to leverage assumptions.
Local marketers need to harness the power of technology to maximize customer influence and increase your brand’s reach in the local consumer’s time of need. Technology and marketing are intertwined and incredibly powerful when used together. “There’s an opportunity to something really great in a digital world that has a mind of its own,” says Brinker. Marketing technology is the new wave of business, and marketers need to be prepared to incorporate technology into their brand strategy.
Topics: Local Marketing
Content writer @ Brandify.
