Five New Technologies to Create a Better Sales Funnel

Technology is quickly changing digital marketing and the process is ever more disrupted by AI technologies.

Yet, fast-developing technologies are deemed either too complicated or too expensive (or both) for small businesses to afford. Yet, there are platforms that make innovation both easy and affordable. Here they are:

1. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI), i.e. teaching machines to think and react like human beings, is the fast-growing branch in computer science affecting all areas of our lives, including – not surprisingly – marketing.

Artificial Intelligence has been changing digital marketing for a few years now. AI solutions help aggregate and understand complicated data, generate domain names, qualify sales, predict future ROI, improve customer experience, better predict ideal customer profiles, and come up with a competitive advantage. AI-based marketing platforms can help define more competitive, contextually relevant pricing as well as predict the effectiveness of upselling strategies.

Yet, most small business owners still shy away from AI-driven technologies as it is not clear where exactly they can help.

Recommendations AI is a perfect example of how Artificial Intelligence can help make your sales funnel more effective. The solution personalizes product recommendations, auto-generates the most effective CTAs, and delivers the best user experience in real-time.

2. Semantic Search

Semantic search is not exactly new technology. Google has been using semantic search for several years in order to generate more relevant search results and search snippets.

What is new is that semantic search is making its way into marketing technologies allowing small business owners and marketers to better understand search intent and create a better converting copy.

Text Optimizer is one example of that technology allowing content creators to analyze all possible buying journeys and adjust their copywriting techniques accordingly.

3. AR (Augmented Reality)

Augmented Reality (AR) means overlaying virtual objects on top of a real-world environment. AR enhances reality by making it a more effective tool for marketing allowing buyers to test the product in the real-world context.

“Can you imagine having this?” 

That’s an important question AR is answering in a most convincing way when applied to marketing. The basic idea is that the consumer is much more likely to invest in something they can “see” having.

AR is transforming the shopping experience by allowing consumers to try the product on from the comfort of their homes. Once you see the product in your real environment, it becomes next to impossible to reject buying it.

Here are a few examples of AR-empowered marketing:

• IKEA Place allows you to virtually “place” IKEA products in your room.
• Topology Eyewear allows you to try their eye-glasses on before you buy them

Apple offers free tools that allow you to create AR-based apps to integrate your product into the surrounding reality.

4. Text to Video

It is hard to imagine just about any marketing campaign without videos.

Videos capture attention on social media, make ads more effective, improve email open rates, make your assets more engaging and shareable, etc.

Yet, not many businesses have budgets to invest in video content.

Luckily, new technologies allow you to create professional videos with literally a few clicks of a button by turning your existing assets (like text and images) into videos.

Invideo is one the pioneers of that small-business-friendly video creation technology that make video marketing doable on a modest budget:

Here are a few examples and templates that make the text- and image-into-video process easier to understand.

5. Remarketing

Remarketing (also referred to as retargeting) was initially introduced by digital marketing giants like Facebook and Google. Simply put, the technology allows you to reach out to people who once interacted with your brand or your site. Since you already have data on what they interacted with, you can reach out in a more meaningful way.

Yet, not many businesses realize you can also create on-site remarketing access to better engage your past visitors. For example, if a user once read your guide on how to sew a cushion, you can serve them custom CTAs to buy your cushion sewing kit as they continue their journey through the site or even the next time they visit the site.

Finteza makes it pretty easy to create on-site remarketing campaigns to make your sales funnel more effective:

Ultimately, remarketing allows marketers to consolidate multiple marketing channels to create more detailed customer profiles. The more channels we use, the more data we collect. This includes on-site data, email engagement, social media interactions monitoring, etc.

All that allows us to develop a genuinely customer-centric focus providing tailored, cross-channel, consistent, and connected experiences. Remarketing has a positive impact on SEO KPIs pushing marketers to re-think shopping behaviors and focus on conversions rather than clicks.

Conclusion

Ultimately, technology will improve search and product discoverability by introducing more advanced emotion detection; facial, speech, and vision recognition; creating personalized experiences, and letting marketers understand (and serve) their target audience better.

To accommodate the fast-moving technology, businesses should always be trying to implement it in their marketing strategies. Luckily, marketing technology is fast advancing allowing even small businesses to innovate and keep up with the latest marketing trends.

These days marketers have a wide variety of advanced marketing applications to choose from including advanced content development and lead nurturing applications, smart and increasingly independent chatbot-building platforms, enhanced dynamic personalization software, and more.

Marketers should always be looking, learning, and testing (new tactics, new tools, etc.) Luckily, we have powerful tools that make innovation possible for small and medium brands.