Technology + Talent = Futureproof Marketing

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Definition: The unlikeliness to become obsolete

To put it simply, it’s your organisation’s ability to adapt. It means being equipped enough to keep ahead of changing buyer expectations no matter where they are in the customer lifecycle. This is where Operation teams like mine come in. Our challenge: to build an agile business fit for an agile world.   

Keep up with technology like you do with the Kardashians  

Blink once, and AI has taken over. Blink twice, and Blockchain is here. Blink again, and VR has become part of our reality. With the speed at with technology is changing, we need to keep up — especially when it affects the way our business runs and how our teams will work.  

Take data-driven marketing, for example. Analysing data using a predictive marketing platform gives you trends and insights across targeted accounts, enabling you to do segment marketing, vertical marketing and ABM. It’s a win-win: you get to turn the heads that count and your consumers get the level of personalisation they want.  

How do you know what is the right technology to choose, though? You don’t. When it comes down to technology, it’s all about experimenting. The market today is saturated with hype-culture technology, so testing them out will help you sift out what does and doesn’t work for your market.  

For example, only through experimentation on Facebook Group pages and its Messenger features did we gather that B2B marketers in APAC are not as open to having industry conversations on more casual social media platforms like Facebook, as compared to LinkedIn.  

But for you to realise the full potential of these tools to make your marketing more efficient and effective, your team needs to be made up of people who know how to use these technologies and ask the right questions of your data.  

Curiosity didn’t kill the cat. It created the mousetrap.  

With the nature of our industry, you need to have a team of people who are flexible enough to keep adapting, and curious enough to keep learning as marketing technology changes. The reality is this: we are looking for individuals with skills and roles that didn’t exist a few years ago, but these are necessary in order to keep creating the ideas and messaging that speak to today’s modern audiences. 

So what are you doing to help your team develop their skills, or to build an environment where they can – and want to – explore, innovate and create?  

For starters, you need to build a space that lives and breathes cross-team collaboration. You see, it’s natural for anyone to stagnate if they aren’t given opportunities to learn and grow. That’s exactly why at MOI, we leverage on platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams for daily conferences, collaboration, and facilitate effective learning with a weekly workshop where each office shares their best practices.  

It’s also about finding talents that understand the head-turning power of using data and creativity together. Don’t believe me? Just look at brands like Spotify, Ikea and Netflix. Their daring creatives and game-changing advertising is proof that consumer data should no longer be studied in a vacuum. So get individuals on-board who know how to look beyond standard fields like age and gender, and use the information to shape unique, meaningful stories. 

Bottom line: operating in siloes just doesn’t work today. The emphasis of openness, inclusiveness and co-creation in technology and talent is ironically, the full proof way to futureproof marketing. Tried and tested an effective way to stay ahead? Share it in the comments below!