Technology
Impact of Technology on Marketing
Technology, particularly the availability of big data coupled with a wide variety of digital marketing channels, offers substantial opportunity for marketing professionals.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Recognize the variety of impacts technology has on the field of marketing, both for organizations and consumers
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Key Points
- Alongside pretty much every facet of business, marketing has been substantially impacted by various evolving technological factors.
- Organizations have access to more data than ever before. Obtaining, organizing, and utilizing this data is a key effort of modern organizations.
- The wide variety of marketing channels available, spanning from social networks to distribution platforms like YouTube, offers more options than ever to reach consumers.
- Consumers are also impacted by technological changes in marketing. Most notably, consumers are targeted by more ads than ever before, often with higher relevance to their interests due to the huge amount of data they share.
- This has resulted in ad blindness (particularly banner ads) along with a number of concerns revolving around data sharing and privacy.
Key Terms
- organic: Generated according to the ranking algorithms of a search engine, as opposed to paid placement by advertisers.
Technology has impacted the field of marketing significantly, along with virtually every other discipline in business. In marketing, the impacts of technology are diverse. Organizations are tasked with managing more marketing options than ever before, and consumers are more integrated with marketing information than they have been in the past.
Impacts on the Organization
From the organizational perspective, technology has impacted the ability to collect and organize marketing data, the channels the organization can use to reach consumers, and the process of developing different types and formats of advertising assets. Organizations have more data, more marketing formats, and more online places to communicate with consumers (i.e. social networks, blogs, search engines, YouTube videos, etc.).
When considering the impact of technology as a marketer, what’s most important is maintaining a full scope of the relevant options and channels that can be utilized to communicate with prospective and existing consumers:
- Search engine results
- Social networks (paid and organic)
- Banner ads
- Sponsored online retail content
- Online reviews and ratings
- Blog posts and web development
- Online video content (paid and organic)
- Smartphone ad formats
- Tablet ad formats
Web Banner Ads: When marketing materials are distributed online, it can be very complicated. Above is an example of a layout that might be encountered when developing web banner ads.
Impacts on the Consumer
From the consumer side, marketing has become increasingly integrated into everyday life. From Facebook advertising to Google paid search results, the average consumer has an increasingly personalized and data-driven exposure to ‘relevant’ ad materials. This is all not to mention the various devices and distribution formats, spanning from computer browsers to mobile to tablet distribution.
Thanks to the enormous amount of information available, primarily from social networks and browsing behavior, consumers are also being impacted from a privacy point of view. From what we watch on TV to who our friends are to what career paths we are on, all of this information is being utilized thanks to social networks and browser cookies. This creates accurately catered ads, albeit alongside valid concerns of privacy.
Ad blindness is another interesting outcome of the modern technology-driven marketing. As consumers are exposed to more and more sponsored content, the ability to ignore marketing materials (particularly online) has grown quite high. As consumers are accosted with more and more content, they have evolved the capacity to consciously and subconsciously ignore sponsored ad content.
Conclusion
For organizations and consumers both, the most important takeaway is the way in which big data, diverse distribution opportunities, products and consumers are all combined. Identifying the ideal target market from the data, figuring out which channels this market tends to use (social networks, etc.), and which products fill their needs is a strategic necessity in the modern technological era for organizational success (B2C particularly).