By Yoram Kraus
Yoram Kraus, Infibond Co-Founder & CEO
Yoram Kraus is a serial entrepreneur, with several investments in high tech over the past decade. He has more than 20 years of entrepreneurship in real estate & global engineering projects, and is the founder of the second-largest REIT fund in Israel. He has a degree in Civil Engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, he served as an intelligence officer in the IDF special forces and is a keen mountaineer and extreme sportsman.
So how will marketing transform as technology also evolves? We can look to Chinese digital trends to help make predictions for social media usage in the next few years. As mentioned previously in our blog on the development of mobile apps in China, messenger chat-bots are being used more frequently to generate automated or personalized answers in real-time. The necessity to build dialogue with the consumer is imperative to build engagement and in return, brand affinity. The opportunities for brands to promote special offers and pay for products are vast and make for a much smoother user experience. Over the next few years, we could arguably start seeing brands using trusted experts or celebrities through this medium to engage directly with the consumer to ensure optimum customer service in a fun and real-time way.
Statista predicted that by 2021, there will be 2.5 billion users of mobile messaging apps worldwide which is a huge platform for brands to engage with their consumers. With increasing security fears through using social media, messaging platforms are an increasingly more alluring way to communicate.
Gartner investigated social marketing trends to formulate their own predictions and found that new technologies like virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) will enable marketers to reach their consumers in innovative ways. Voice technologies such as Alexa will soon power social media activities that will disrupt the status quo.
Instagram stories, Facebook stories and SnapChat are all becoming real-time content creators and are starting to compete with broadcast and streaming networks as the go-to destination for entertainment and news content. This means that user-generated content is revealing itself as the favoured option, so brands need to be strategic in order to elevate this content and engage on an equal playing field.
Here at INFI, the future of technology, content and user engagement is always front of mind and we want to lead this evolution of engagement. We developed a platform called EmpathAI which combines deep psychological profiling with powerful, predictive algorithms. Through this AI platform, we can identify user habits on their mobile phone via meta-data to ensure optimum engagement. This also means we have the knowledge to predict future user behaviour and make content recommendations so we can engage with the user at the right time, retain them and transform the way brands interact.
