Business Strategy

Why marketers need to understand how software works

One of the keys to marketing is truly understanding your audience. Once you know their wants and needs, you know how to relate to them and, as a result, how to get them to like your brand. Studies have revealed that adults spend more than four hours every day on their mobile devices, which means if your brand isn’t engaging your audience on mobile, you’re majorly missing out. Before you start throwing ideas against the wall, it’s important to understand the technology available.

Setting expectations is essential

Few things hurt as much as selling a client on an amazingly creative idea and then having to come back to tell them it can’t be done for one reason or another. You can find yourself in a similar bind if you pitch app ideas without understanding the technology behind them. An app that gives shopping recommendations based on credit card transactions sounds cool for a mall, but the hoops you would have to jump through to get digital access to financial records makes it impossible. Pitching apps that can’t be built (or require hundreds of thousands of dollars to build) will likely hurt your reputation with your clients more than if you never recommended an app in the first place. Bottom line: If you aren’t sure, ask a developer.

Learn the digital behaviors of the audience

There are tons of tools out there to help you profile and understand how your target audience uses mobile devices. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and more all provide analytics to track the people interacting with your brand online. By understanding where your audience spends their digital time and what they like to click on will give you key insight about what features or content they will respond to best.

Stop doing manually what can be automated

Marketing automation like HubSpot is a wonderful tool for marketers. There are so many things that used to be hugely time consuming (like trying to keep track of potential leads and figuring out what blog posts were driving leads to contact you) that can be automated. Original content is of utmost importance, and a software program can’t write that for you. Software can distribute it, though. Learn how to use marketing automation and use your limited hours per day for the best return.

Become more valuable to your team

You can’t afford to be illiterate in digital strategy these days. By having a thorough understanding of how technology can work for you to make your job easier and reach the right audience faster, you become an asset to your team or client. If you know the basics about how websites track visitors, how software can automate a complicated process, and how data can be shared between apps, you can be the decision maker about what digital tools are best for the job.

Ready to learn more about your audience?

Let’s chat about an integrated marketing campaign for your business. By combining advertisements and software, your company’s next milestone could be within reach. Drop us a note!

By Emily Hart