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The Future of Digital Marketing
The heart of digital marketing is about “managing different forms of online company presence” – this is usually achieved by reaching out to the target customers via the digital space, such as by online advertising and social media marketing. Nevertheless, technological innovation today changes so rapidly that many companies are struggling to keep up. To stay ahead of the game, companies integrate modern technologies with traditional marketing techniques to create innovative marketing solutions. The doom of the high-street shops is nigh as digital marketing becomes increasingly dominant. The Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence hold the key to the future of digital marketing.

Virtual Reality and Customer Experience

It is apparent that today customers do not just want products, they want experiences .Customer Experience Management (CEM) are replacing the Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Many companies have begun using Virtual Reality as part of their marketing strategies to offer a fresh and unique experience to customers. A prime example is “Coca Cola’s Santa’s Virtual Reality Sleigh Ride”. This marketing campaign gave the people in Milton Keynes (UK) a chance to be Santa for a day, flying on a sleigh in an immersive experience. By using the VR experience, Coca-Cola has effectively established a strong connection between the brand and the joy of Christmas. An experience such as this last longer in the mind of customers, thus, encourages a higher consumption of Coca-Cola products as the positive experience with customers enhances the brand image. Currently, there are around 43 million users worldwide. As this technology continues to develop, it is estimated that the number of users will reach 171 million by 2018.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence

In March 2016, artificial intelligence’s greatest achievement went down in history when Google’s Deepmind’s AlphaGo beat a Go (game) professional player, Lee Sedol from South Korea. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that the game of Go has long been very challenging for artificial intelligence due to the boundless possible ways to play the game – the number of possible positions made up of more than the number of atoms in the universes. With the new machine learning algorithm, the technology has continuously improved itself at an exponential rate, shaping the world beyond our imagination. For instance, the new Samsung refrigerator can track what groceries you buy at your local supermarket; it places an order on your behalf just before your food hit the expiry date. Amazon’s “Anticipatory Shipping” also integrated AI tech to help determine when to relocate products to its nearest fulfilment center, making it available before you click the “Buy it now” button. Given the development of this technology, many marketers today work alongside artificial intelligence to deliver effective and impactful customised ads across the digital channels. Some criticise that using artificial intelligence may make marketer job obsolete. However, developers defend the use of artificial as follow: marketing is about connecting with the customers emotionally to implant a lasting memory within the mind (see brand awareness), thus, it will require the human intellect to come up with creative campaigns – AI tech will make this job easier.

In the future, data and information will be more important than ever. Those with access to new technologies will have the upper hand in the digital marketing realm: the smarter the machine learning capabilities, the better the data, thus, the more effective the execution of the marketing campaigns.