The Future of Digital Marketing
By: Dhanur Sehgal
Tags: Digital Marketing, Innovation, Marketing, Productivity, Growth Hacking

What lies at the cutting edge of digital marketing?

Where is it now & where is it headed?

That’s a burning topic that most marketers wonder about.

So without any further ado, let’s dive in.

1. Marketing AI & Machine learning tools:

A whole army of complex AI & machine learning tools is being built.

Recently a college student used GPT-3 to write a blog and ended up at the top of Hacker News.[source]

Generic content writing & content curation will be replaced by Smart AI & machine learning tools. Tools like articleforge are already rocking the market.

Non-original content writers & content curators may see a huge slump in demand.

2. Marketing Automation:

All repeatable processes in marketing will be automated by efficient tools.

All tasks in marketing that have some sort of pattern or predictability will be automated.

Imagine an SEO tool that scans your entire website, gives you intelligent recommendations, identifies internal linking opportunities & content clusters, suggests semantic words to include in the content & then starts to A/B test different meta titles to improve the CTR, all of that with just one single click! Such tools are already being developed & many are already available to the masses.

3. Use of Data Science & Analytics:

We all know it, data is the new oil. Future marketers will collect data from each & every part of their funnel & use it to make smarter decisions, understand more about the target audience, build better products, leverage better channels, reach more people, improve conversion rate & enhance targeting. While collecting a lot of data is important, analyzing that data & extracting critical insights carries much more significance. Skills & subjects like data science, business analytics, data mining, web-scraping & big data will play a crucial role.

Remember, the best of the best marketers have a T-shaped skill-set.

4. Growth Engineering:

Growth engineering is an amalgamation of tech & creative marketing.

It requires product skills, tech skills & marketing skills. (with a pinch of creativity & imagination)

Gone are the days of one-time marketing funnels, it’s the flywheels that drive real growth.

In order to retain users & build habit-forming sticky products, one must understand the fundamentals of product management & product innovation.

Creative viral marketing & growth hacking plays a vital role in optimizing the growth engine & reducing acquisition costs.

Tech skills enable the marketer to automate the processes that may take weeks or even months of effort if done manually. I recommend the growth hacking book 2 for learning more about growth hacking & growth engineering.

Notice that all 4 points above have at least some involvement of tech.

Smart tech & tools will revolutionize the marketing world forever.

Are we there yet?

Not quite, but we’ll be there in the coming 2–3 years.

Innovation of 3 years in tech space is the same as innovation of 30 years in other industries.

What can you do about it?

1) Up-Skill:

Embrace new skills & develop a T-shaped skill-set. A vast amount of cross-domain knowledge & experience helps you see the bigger picture, work more efficiently, generate better ideas, plan more effectively, extract better insights & take much better strategic decisions.

2) Leverage:

Tools & technology can be a great leverage.

Imagine a human being fighting a bionic cyborg. Can that human beat that cyborg?

It’s not possible without leverage.

Humans can think better, but code can execute & scale better.

Code can get 100x done in less time & that too without any inconsistency, failure, fatigue, or mistakes. Leveraging smart tools is one of the smartest things one can do to improve output, both qualitatively & quantitatively. BrowseBetter is one such free tool that can improve your throughput & work efficiency up to 3 times. It’s a personal productivity super tool that transforms your web browsing experience into so much more.