Bringing Technology Marketing Into the Future: VR, AI, Speech

Tech marketers have seen great strides in the products and services their clients can offer their customers. Smartphones have more computer power than the machines NASA relied on for the first moon landing. Virtual reality enables consumers to see how furniture, etc., would look in their home before they make a purchase. Artificial intelligence helps route calls to the most appropriate contact center agent, enables companies to sharpen their target marketing and provides a variety of other benefits.

The new technologies are also critical in helping tech marketers reach out to business customers to promote their products.

It is more important than ever to offer a virtual experience of solutions for customers, especially if the trade shows have yet to return to in-person events, said Maike Videskog, marketing manager, Americas, for Mobile Industrial Robots (MIR).

With virtual reality, a company can offer a customized virtual platform that can be available during any scheduled event, enabling attendees from anywhere in the world to join presentations and workshops or even visit the virtual demo room to see the robots in details, talk with sales teams or technicians, and learn more about specific applications and workflows.

“Our new MiR World has been especially valuable during the pandemic, when tradeshows have been closed and customer visits extremely limited,” Videskog said.

“Customers in an early lead stage can visit the site from any location to get a solid understanding of how our autonomous mobile robots work as well as the possible workflows AMRs can automate, and can even learn specifically about how they can meet their industry-specific needs. It’s an invaluable tool for any marketer.”

Videskog’s marketing team also relies on MiRAcademy, a new online learning platform that provides educational courses for both channel partners and customers.

“MiRAcademy has been another great marketing tool to generate leads and demands. They can log-in, take workshops, learn how to plan mapping of the robots all in a very early stage,” Vikeskog said. “Educating our customers and leads at this stage helps facilitate the deployment process as they learn how easy MiR robots can be to deploy and manage within their facilities.”

AI Aids Marketing Strategies

“In B2B marketing, we’ve already seen clients like AK Preparedness using VR and AR to run training and presentations (especially in light of the pandemic) and you can expect that as more people get used to this technology it will be an area ripe for new advertisement and promotional activity,” said Christine Pietryla Wetzler, president of Pietryla PR Marketing LLC.

The company also uses AI to offer more real-time content and responses in active CX strategies.

“Everyone who has used a chat toll online has talked to a bot. Right now, they are easy to spot, but they are getting better and better,” she said. “The thing about AI is, the more information it has the better it creates. So, as this technology gets stronger, then we’re going to see it used more often. I usually counsel clients to think about how they’d use AI if it was perfect 100 percent of the time. Then, let’s work backward from that outcome.”

We’re heavily involved in content development and AI can play a critical role in this area, added Scott Krady, principal with Magnitude, Inc.  First, it helps us learn more about our customers and helps streamline processes when we’re facing an enormous amount of overload.  It’s also helping us to shape content that fits company’s narrative and value proposition as we can use tools to understand where there may be white space, particularly as it relates to areas that a company wants to achieve share of voice.

With AI, we can create content that is much more personal, and create email and other campaigns that are highly targeted or can be based specifically on customer behavior.

Related: How To Enhance Campaign Performance Using Precision Matching On Social Media Platforms

“Before this process even begins, we can use these tools to collect data,” Krady added.

“So, if you’re working with a company, you can help it market to customers at different phases of the customer journey. This allows you to deliver a more meaningful experience.   It can also help businesses with their search engine optimization strategies since AI is capable of understanding patterns and behaviors of users. Hence, it can be linked to content and analytics used to show whether potential customers are engaging with your content.”

AI also is inherent in most social media, according to Krady. So brands that use social media sites to market or engage customers rely on artificial intelligence by learning what content to serve you based on prior behavior or to target advertising based on that behavior. AI can also be used to engage with social media as there are platforms that provide analytics and insights that enable brands to be proactive on social media and drive engagement.

Speech Technology Aids Efficiency

Numerous technology companies are using speech technologies in their contact centers to intelligently answer increasingly complex calls and, if an automated assistant can’t provide the needed information, then to route the call to the agent best able to the query. With voice technology combined with natural language understanding, customers and prospects can ask questions in a number of different ways.

Providers of this technology continue to increase the number of languages and dialects that it can handle, which is important for B2B tech marketers, many of who have prospects and customers in multiple countries.

B2B tech marketing technologies will continue to evolve, with AI increasingly becoming more intelligent; VR and AR providing more comprehensive and immersive experiences; speech technology more accurately and comprehensively answering queries and other technologies making helping marketers be more efficient and to be able to offer more intriguing campaigns.