Digital Marketing for Newbies

We all make five year plans, ten year plans for ourselves, we all have goals and dreams for the life we hope to lead, but very rarely will those dreams or goals consist of thinking about what lays beyond what we must do to accomplish those things we want to.

In the case of Digital Marketing, the name of the game is to personalize the individual experience to cater to someone’s exact interests, and even predicting what those people might want that they haven’t even guessed yet. I believe that is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) has pounced on all of us. Just a few years ago to many of us it was a punchline, or was the subject of our worst dystopian futuristic art such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. The reality is closer to heart with our need for constant improvement, innovation, and gaining any competitive edge a company has possible. Being able to organize and interpret massive amounts of data and finding preferences, patterns and behaviors faster than a human can do the process, while being able to avoid human error or the unnoticed trends we cannot always see. We will also see more AI in the future doing the “busy work” we do not always appreciate or want to do, such as customer service questions and developing ways that allow AI to impact our return on investment. (ROI) At this moment this is arguably the great hurdle facing AI integration as many companies have discussed adoption, but finding ways to actually utilize the software that shows culpable benefits is still proving difficult.

Our second topic in this blog is how more companies are collecting first party data strategies. “63% of consumers expect personalization as a standard of service.” (Patel et al, 2020) But how do we find the balance considering that “83% of consumers are concerned about sharing personal data online,” (Patel et al, 2020) as well as “72% would stop buying from a company because of privacy concerns.” (Patel et al, 2020.) First party data strategies link online and offline data from target audiences that are received directly from those customers to improve the customer experience. In the near future we will continue to give our information in exchange for a personal and unique experience. We even joke about the algorithms that bring us the funny videos we like, the news we want, to see the hobbies we like, and recommend the clothes, games, and shows we might like. As we go toward the future, I see that first party data strategies are leading toward an online future that moves beyond cookies. Cookie-less marketing is helping marketing move into the first party data world so that consumers can avoid the privacy concerns, and embrace how marketing can benefit us all.

Finally, I believe the third trend that will become the growing usage of voice search. Now that generations have grown up with the usage of Siri, Cortana and Alexa, we have gotten to improve speech recognition over the past decade, even Google says 20% of mobile searches are done be voice. (Reynolds, 2024.) This strategy benefits consumers as it allows their longer searches to be better accommodated by voice recognition. When we look up things, it is often urgent and we expect the exact answer we want every time, and by utilizing voice searches we can get our most complicated inquiries answered even without important keywords. Voice Search is also a useful tool for users that cannot type or navigate search engines and technology as easily as other users do. By catering to a larger customer audience, it also is a more natural version of taking our real life experiences and translating them to online settings.

Citations:

Bensal, D. (2024, June 24). Council post: The role of AI in Digital Marketing: What you need to know. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2024/06/28/the-role-of-ai-in-digital-marketing-what-you-need-to-know/

Yildiz, G. (2026, January 28). The 12% problem: Why only a fraction of AI investments deliver measurable returns. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/guneyyildiz/2026/01/28/56-of-ceos-see-zero-roi-from-ai-heres-what-the-12-who-profit-do-differently/

Mantz, O. (2024, March 26). The rise of voice search and its impact on digital marketing strategy | by Owen Mantz | medium. Medium. https://medium.com/@okmantz/the-rise-of-voice-search-and-its-impact-on-digital-marketing-strategy-28602ba0efa0