6 Marketing Tools That Will Soon Be Obsolete

Some applications come around and become part of our daily lives for years. It is fascinating to look back and see the different platforms that once were new and full of potential that are now cast-off with the other no-longer relevant applications. Take a look at three of the marketing tools that will soon be obsolete below.

Any CMS that isn’t WordPress

Websites worth their salt are built on top of a content management system (CMS). Since its launch in 2003, WordPress has evolved from a blog-centric platform to a comprehensive CMS suite that dominates the market. Based on my experience and that of my peers, no other CMS platform is as easy-to-use or search-engine and mobile-friendly.

A recent survey by W3Techs/Q-Success indicates that 62 percent of respondents do not use a CMS. Of those that do use a CMS, WordPress makes up 61 percent of the overall market share. After WordPress, the three most popular platforms (Joomla, Drupal, and Blogger) combine to account for slightly more than 15 percent of the remaining fragmented market share.

The dominant position WordPress has cut out is based on price, ease of development, and the vast library of available templates and plug-ins. For businesses with specific/unique needs, WordPress can be used as the content management front-end to a deeper database or e-commerce platform on the backend. For the foreseeable future, I expect WordPress only to increase its market share and dominance, at the expense of others.

Basic email platform

Email marketing platforms have evolved over the years. In 2002, I partnered with two friends to launch an agency that specialized in email marketing strategy. At that time, the market was still in its relative infancy and we saw an opportunity to provide affordable email marketing services with a relatively robust platform. Since then, the market has matured, but far too many companies rely on relatively outdated email technology and tools.

A few years after launching emailROI (now eROI), I watched three formerly disparate industries collide. Email marketing platforms started competing with and eventually merged with sales and marketing automation platforms. Email giant ExactTarget acquired marketing automation platform Pardot in 2012, only to be acquired less than a year later by Salesforce, the sales automation 800-pound gorilla. Many mid-sized and larger players followed suit with mergers and acquisitions. The reason this is important to you, the marketer, is that the email marketing platform you adopted years ago may no longer be on par with more affordable and robust platforms.

I’m by no means an email marketing expert these days, but I now expect a relatively broad set of capabilities from any reputable email marketing platform, including behavior-based personalization, advanced targeting/segmentation, CMS for rapid development and testing of emails and landing creative, and analytics that integrate with other platforms. Essentially, your email platform should include basic sales and marketing automation capabilities. Similarly, your sales and marketing automation platforms should offer reasonably robust email capabilities.

QR codes

I would be remiss if I didn’t include this somewhat outdated technology as a marketing tool. As I’ve outlined in previous articles, QR codes have been made obsolete by newer technologies like near-field communications (NFC), Bluetooth, and other apps. While adoption by brands may have increased over the past few years, users are jaded and usage is flat at best. The bottom line: Be cautious when using QR codes. Make sure they solve a problem better than newer, more intuitive technologies.

At Brainjar Media we know what’s trending verses what’s really working for businesses for their online marking goals. With Brainjar Media your online marketing strategy will be executed using methods that work and have the numbers to prove it. Call us to get started.

SRC: Read about the remaining 3 marketing tools that will soon be obsolete at imediaconnection.