In this fast-paced city, everything you can imagine changes by seconds.  Most recently, Elon Musk ignited a global discussion on Artificial Intelligence (AI).  He predicted that humans might be doomed if we make machines that are smarter than us.

At NDN, we have outlined our views on the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it all might affect our businesses in the future.

1) As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly advanced, AI systems will be more widely adopted by businesses.  With all the big data that we are creating, improvements in algorithms will transform AI from a tool that many forward-thinking companies use to gain a competitive advantage today to one that is required simply to survive in business.

According to a research by Gartner, artificial intelligence will lower the cost for business operations by 30% by 2019. Few Organizations are ambitious enough to take the cost of operation down to 90% in 5 years time.

When artificial intelligence becomes an essential element in our business environment and enabling businesses to stay competitive in the market, more and more businesses will adopt AI applications and usage. AI will eventually be something like having a website or mobile application for a company.

2) Instead of replacing human workforce, we think we should focus on the good side of AI that its application will improve the productivity and accuracy of workers and empower our workforce.  When businesses start adopting statistical computing, natural-language, big data, and machine learning to improve operation, the human workforce will also start to embrace all kinds of AI tools and upscale their job roles and duties.

3) Artificial Intelligence will revolutionize our business relationship.  Customer Engagement with a human touch will turn into a premium.  AI will take over many of the tasks that can be automated with algorithms, but it will not yet be able to take over our human touch, our empathy towards each other, express our emotions, or understand our cultures and wisdom.

As the topic of AI has been widely discussed and the applications of AI has been growing exponentially, in partnership with IBM, NDNX invited Joshua Zheng, a Program Director of IBM Digital Business Group USA, to share his knowledge and experience in the AI field. He will also talk about how to leverage Watson Cloud APIs on other daily operation usages with designated programming.

Together with Joshua, we would like to explore all kinds of AI and Chatbots applications that we can build for our business and look into some of the existing showcases in the market that’s riding on top of IBM Watson’s Cloud APIs.

We are excited to see how AI and Chatbots applications could help automate our businesses, driving cost down as well as improving productivity and efficiency of our business operations.

Please join us with Joshua Zheng and Register here:

Joshua currently leads developer relations for IBM Watson, IBM PowerAI, and Data Science Experience. He spends most of his time talking to developers in various communities to help them build better applications using AI. Before joining IBM, he led software engineering at a data mining company in D.C., where he used machine learning to understand political dynamics around the world. He has a master’s degree from Yale in Robotics and a B.S. degree from Johns Hopkins in Biomedical Engineering.

NDN Group is a major digital conglomerate and investment group focused on building, acquiring, and growing companies in the digital space. Our businesses are involved in a wide range of industries across multiple markets, including artificial intelligence in Hong Kong, China Marketing, big data analytics, digital advertising, mobile app development, social media services, E-commerce, content development & distribution.

Founded in 2002, by serial Entrepreneur Andy Ann, NDN Group has evolved over the last decade from a single digital business in Hong Kong, to a broad-based total solution corporation dealing with clients in 11 countries. The group now owns a portfolio of nine companies ranging from B2B services to online multisided platforms.

NDN Group also specializes in delivering consulting services for major international corporations and delivering executive training in order to support the increasing demand of digital transformation experts.

In September 2017, we have awarded the Top 25 Artificial Intelligence companies in 2017 by CIO Advisor. Tailored for APAC, CIO Advisor is an esteemed platform for seasoned Chief Information Officers to learn industry opinions and trends.

In CIO Advisor winner’s announcement, the magazine acknowledges NDN group’s creation of RocketBots, an AI-powered Chatbot solution to help clients reduce their business costs in customer service rather than only generating profit for the organization. “The bot uses Conversational Marketing, Machine Learning, and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to engage with customers within a chatbot environment.” The magazine also mentions NDN group’s plans to include payment and data analytics into its AI platform. RocketBots is one of the initiatives of NDN group’s Intrapreneurship program, which drives innovation from within the company. Learn More….

IBM’s Watson supercomputer is a question-answering supercomputer that uses artificial intelligence to perform cognitive computing and data analysis. With a processing rate of 80 teraflops, Watson performs deep-level input analysis to present accurate answers to questions generated by humans.

In 2011, Watson competed on the “Jeopardy!” television show against top human contestants and won the first-place prize. Since then, Watson has been used for utilization management in medical centers.

Watson uses more than 100 different computing techniques to analyze input and match it to the most accurate output. Building on prior machines like Deep Blue, IBM presents Watson as a system on the vanguard of technologies like machine learning and natural language processing.

If you want to find out more on how IBM Watson can help some of the media companies like us, please check out this blog for more information.

As the times have changed and the constant virtualization of everything has made life heaven on earth, adaptation is the key to survival. Thanks to this new digital world, loads of task are done in the blink of an eye, the revolutionizing ideas shared through digital platforms have aided in making this era the most technologically advanced one. A comparatively new concept known as “Digital Assets” has surfaced is yet seen as absurd by some, alongside with digitalization of everything the mainstream old world had to offer, some still believe that making transactions online is asking to be conned.

Digital assets are the next step in revolutionizing this world even further. In order to grasp the concept of blockchains, one must have a clear understanding of what digital assets are. They are a decentralized digital currency that can be earned and exchanged via the internet, they exclude the need for verification from a third party and the need for a bank to oversee the transaction, relieving one of the additional fees associated with physical currency. Worldwide use makes them highly preferable and all without the fear of having one’s account frozen. A blockchain is a software that provides a platform for the digital assets. The most widely used digital asset is a bitcoin and has all the properties of a digital asset. Blockchains are a collection of time-lapse that connect each block to the previous one, in the form of a chain.

Blockchain technology

Blockchain technology was originally designed to aid in acquiring and exchanging digital assets. It alone established a brand new type of internet. Blockchains can be made to record any transaction of value. Information on a blockchain is seen as a shared, continually reconciled database, making it easy for an individual to check the authenticity of the data available. Since digital assets are decentralized, they are free from cyber-attacks and hackers. Blockchain technology is also transparent and free from corruption.

Ethereum

We have talked about digital assets, decentralization and blockchain technology, applying the previous knowledge will make understanding of Ethereum comparatively easy. Ethereum is basically a platform, a software that is based on the blockchain technology that aids in the development of decentralized applications.

Ethereums should not, however, be confused with bitcoins as the purpose they serve is different from one another. Ethereum is a platform that runs a programming code to create decentralized applications, while Bitcoin is itself a decentralized digital currency.

Ethereum for the digital world

Looking at the surface, it is easy to find a connection between the digital world and blockchains, Ethereum and digital assets, but in depth these concepts hold greater significance than they might lead you to believe, causing a greater impact on the internet of things.

Unlike most of the mainstream software, Ethereum does not limit its user. It allows the user to engage in an unlimited set of operations, allowing them to use the platform for developing applications. This further sheds light on how immense the digital world really is. With just the use of a simple platform, millions of decentralized applications can be created and all for different uses. As revolutionizing as it might be, bitcoin is very limited as compared to Ethereums as it is made for a two-way transaction. Being very limited and specific in its nature, another blockchain application has to be constructed to widen the usage of blockchain technology.

The Ethereum network; instead of building a new application, consists of a new type of program. Ethereum networks enable the user to run any program of their choice regardless of the programming language being used. This eliminates the need of creating separate blockchains for the creation of each new application, making Ethereum networking the motherboard of thousands of different applications.

Decentralizing centralized services via Ethereum; Ethereum broadens the spectrum of the digital world as it can easily decentralize any program or service that was previously centralized, making it more secure and more resistant to corruptions and hackers.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO); is completely decentralized, meaning it has no one specific leader, making it autonomous. They are run by different programming codes that have been written on Ethereum blockchains. However, the design of the code differs from the average code as it eliminates the need for people, making it decentralized.

The impact of blockchains on the digital world

Digging further, the fact that blockchains are a step forward towards a better understanding of the IoT is undeniable, blockchains are the state of the art technology that has benefited in the development of the digital world in many ways, some of them will be discussed below:

• Eliminating Risk: Two parties are able to partake in a transaction without the fear of fraud, as third parties are not involved in the process whatsoever. This greatly removes any financial risks regarding a basic transaction and promotes welfare.
• Empowerment of the users: Users are in control of their individual profile and hold credit over the services they have provided by mining to gain access to blocks and in return earn significant bitcoins. This sense of control promotes further transactions as the user profile is made private for each user.
• Superior data: Blockchains provide complete data, with no room left for further interpretation, eliminating the chances of error. The data provided by blockchains is complete, accurate and timely, making the digital world absolute.
• Faster Transactions: In the traditional terms, processing of transactions can be time-consuming, at least in comparison with online transactions. Blockchain transactions are not bound to office hours and no physical presence at the bank is required in order for the transaction to take place.
• Immutability: Blockchains can be freely viewed by the public. They are transparent, any change can be viewed. However, the transactions being made are immutable, which means they cannot be altered or deleted once they have taken place.

Reliability and Longevity: As stated multiple times above, blockchains are decentralized. The less the concentration, the less are the chances of an attack from any malicious programs, making blockchains highly reliable and longevity. Adding further into the perks of using digital platforms.

The desire to understand customer journey can lead marketers and business owners to search for more effective methods in their marketing strategies to increase in sales and customer satisfaction.

In accordance to Thunderhead Blog and some researches, Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) will be the one of the main focus for marketers in 2017. Why is that? In our previous blog post, Integrated Marketing Stack ( IMC) has introduced the benefits for setting up Customer Journey profiles, highlighting ways of data implementation and process methods. Bearing the common motive with the previous post, this article will aim to run through ways of integrating the customer journey analytics with their marketing plans.

Customer Journey Analytics refers using a CRM and marketing system data to find out a group or individual customer journey over time.

Firstly, by understanding the basis of a customer’s journey, marketers will be able to predict an individual customer journey patterns, so the marketers can tailor specific marketing campaigns or promotions to what may appeal to the targeted customers.

Communications with customers always comes as priority for business owners and our society becomes more driven by the web and social media, so it drives the marketers to reach out to bigger audience group by placing their brand/business on the web. The web has become competitive as the real world, and by making your services/products available online simply isn’t enough. Marketing campaigns and advertisements remains essential, yet to stand out from different competitors, marketers need to have some effective strategies in maximizing the business’ exposure. Social media marketing have proved to be a major factor in boosting brand exposure and sales, and many marketers aim to reach out to more potential consumers by adapting social media.

Marketers will need to pinpoint their consumers’ thought process prior the purchase decision, i.e. what made the customer search for this particular service/product, what are their alternative choices and considerations? In many cases, longer customer journey usually revolves around products with a higher price point, whereas shorter customer journey belongs to single purchases usually with a lower price point. Through comparison, customers who are motivated by desires instead of needs tend to spend a lot more.

For example, Ben wants a new car, his current one is rather old but still fully functional. At this point, what motivates Ben of his purchase decision as his car is still fully function. At this point, what motivates Ben of his purchase decision even his car is still fully function. Before making the purchase decision, he began to research what are available on the market. Thought the process of the research, he needs to consider whether he wants to go for something different that will suit his lifestyle or go for his regular choices. He will weigh in the pros and cons of whether to go for electronic or petrol, hybrid or regular, finance, rent or lease etc. Every time he sees a pro, he will weigh in the con to see which is the best cost for his money, and as natural consumers we all go through that. With CJA mapping out customer profiles, marketers can appeal to consumers like Ben before he even begin his research.

Based on the previous example, from mapping out individual customer journeys like Ben’s marketers are able to predict future interests and patterns of Ben’s life cycle as customer. For instance, marketers may be able to predict when is the best time to appeal to Ben, based on the information of when he had purchased it. This prediction depends entirely on the product, therefore when applied to other products such as mobile phones, the life expectancy of the product is much shorter.

Through identify segment groups and gathering more customer profiles, marketers can set up dashboards that not only summarized groups of individual customer journeys, but also with insights and comments that allow marketers to customise and generate solutions that appeals to individual customers. Based on these touchpoints, marketers will be able to get an update and further understanding of their target audience, allowing them to re-position themselves in the market to appeal more.

Consequently, with all the information gathered through CJA, marketers can adapt the appropriate methods to their customer groups. These insights are pivotal to future marketing activities, and the more you gathered the more connected you customers will be. At the end of the day, all marketers have same goals in maintaining and strengthening customer relationship in maintaining customer bonding and their loyalty.

In the coming year, an increasing number of businesses are looking at new integrated marketing automation system – Integrated Marketing Stack in order to look into “customer journeys” in order to understand their customers’ needs, allowing possibilities for their businesses to re-position themselves in the market. By understanding their customers’ needs, business owners can offer better services to their customers through a series of strategy based on their researches. A study by Gartner showed that 89% of marketers expect the knowledge of customer journey in 2017 to be the main differentiator for their businesses.

Integrated Marketing Stack is a Customer Experience Journey Management (CEM) system for tracking, organizing, and managing all interactions between the business to groups or individual customers. By tracking and maintaining this valuable information, the marketers will be able to customize and generate solutions that feels authentic to individual customers.

By mapping the customer’s  journey allows you to predict how the consumer may travel through their life-cycle as a customer. In initial stages, through identifying the segment groups the marketers can create multiple customers’ journeys, and based on these touchpoints, the marketers can therefore identify their target audience groups.  The more customer journeys gathered and defined,  signifies that more content can be discovered. Essentially, mapping out the gathered journeys will allow you to detect any gaps in engagements, pain points, and other potential breakdowns within communications at an earlier stage.

Integrated Marketing Stack is a combination of Target Architecture and Agile Transition process.  To deploy an Integrated Marketing Stack for business, we can have multiple suites and can redistribute it all over a period of time starting with the highest impact system, so that we can strategically progress towards the ultimate goal.

The deliverable shall be provided according to the following methodology, as we would want this project to maximize the benefits of the system, as well as minimizing the cost of deployment.

Target Architecture is a process of defining of our needs and here are the following procedures:

After defining our needs, we can then follow the SCRUM Model – Agile Transition method to consolidate and filter the data.

SCRUM Model – Agile Transition

After those process, the system will be segment a group of customers’ or even a single customer views. Multiple APIs from different platforms will all be connected into this data infrastructure system.  This component is what allows the system to remain agile, by permitting individual platform solutions to be replaced, as marketing needs change over time.

After gathering the data into a central database system, the next step is to analyse the results of the customers’ journeys. The mapped insights allow the marketers to make effective adjustments to their customer journey strategies, which could also maximize their time and costs with a higher efficiency.

Thus,creating loyal customers who are willing to make sales continuously will always take time and commitments. As marketers are running long term businesses, you must know how to build trust and confidence between your brands and your consumers. This type of relationship require you to engage with consumers at various touchpoints from social media and digital platforms, through to the login journeys to their purchases.

Creating some level of responsiveness can mean the difference between making a purchase decision or not, and most importantly  it can turn loyal customers into ‘die-hard fans’ for your business.

Do keep in mind that as marketer, your main goals are to foster customer relationships and to construct brand confidence which will lead to an increase in loyal customer following.

Get in contact today if you want us to help building a right ‘customer journey’ by using Integrated Marketing Stack.

The demand for Marketing Automation has vastly increased in the past few years and according to Marketo & Ascend report on 2015, 91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels.

It allows more targeted campaigns for different advertisers depending on the digital user group profiles. It also reduces cost of advertising, leading to an increase on Marketing Automation’s ROI at the same time.

Marketing Automation is a set of software technology which helps marketers to automate the marketing action. All of these automated actions are designed to deliver relevant and personalised messages to the targeted customers via digital media. In other words, marketers are creating and automating types of content with the goal of actively attracting, qualifying and moving prospects through sales towards a purchase.

It also makes the marketing campaigns/adverts to be focused on increasing the chances that some of the targeted customers will progress towards a successful purchase. This also allows for different campaigns/adverts to be played to different groups at the same time depending upon the groups of the digital profile.

Marketing automation is a system of recording the marketing activities. It’s the place where the marketers can collect and manage all the data and create a rich profile of their target audiences. With this intelligence, they can send out the right information at the right time to move prospects along on their purchasing journey.

It creates a more personal feeling towards the advertising campaigns which make the targeted users to be more engaged with the overall purchase journey. (rather than dictate the audience group)

It also enables the marketers to gather all their prospects leaving through digital interactions and identify when a prospect is sending buying signals so the marketer knows that prospect is ready to speak to sales.

For example, if a person is looking on certain sites, then it could trigger that they are looking for a new item and hence will trigger a targeted campaign. E.g. – Washing Machine, shoes, jackets and etc…

On the other hand, marketing automation systems can link into CRM systems allowing marketers to give sales revenue visibility into all digital strategy so sales can do a better job and close more deals.

(Telesales doing cold calls is not very successful but Telesales with intelligence can make the difference between a sale or not. If the right information is available to the sales person, they can help to guide the person forward.)

Read More: 4 Practical Use Cases for Marketing Automation: Here’s How It Works 

The technology by itself is only an enabler. Although the marketing department can use automation to manage their database, send out campaigns and review the reporting, the company has to align and compare the marketing automation information to their sales departments. Marketers should strategically plan what kind of data to be collected, otherwise they might waste resources when dealing with vast amount of valueless data. Besides, automation needs to happen based upon tested processes that have gained good results in the past.

Nurture the users – Most of the marketers believe “data” is a key element, however it’s also about the strategy set up. It means thinking a step before understand who you wish to target, influence and create personas.

Building a strategy is the most important process. After that, you can design the systems to execute your desired outcomes before sending out to the public. A poor strategy may make potential buyers interpret the adverts as spam.   It needs to be in tuned with the users and make them feel as if they are part of the solution.

Once you know your strategy, whom you are looking for, what data and how your data should look, it will be much easier to increase your marketing automation solution’s ROI.

In addition, you need to be imaginative and create pilot test groups to see if the marketing process or messages are correct or not, as everyone sees, feels, tastes, uses things in different ways based upon their personal mind set.

Knowing our strategy targets would also help us to overcome proving the ROI challenge. As the platform where all the marketing data and campaigns are created and executed, a good model of marketing automation allows marketers to see what is working and what is not working in terms of response. Once the marketing automation system is connected to the CRM system, marketers are then able to see how marketing is influencing pipeline.

With a good model and alignment with sales, marketers can get to the point where they can predict where certain investments in programs at certain stages of the funnel can create pipeline.

In traditional media, demographic information is all that marketers really have available to them. Today, the most valuable information a marketer can have is behavioural data.

The combination of ‘who they are’ and ‘what they do’ is what gives marketers the information they need to feed prospects with the right content to educate them along their purchasing journey.

Most marketers can probably benefit from all aspects of marketing automation which can offer them. Normally, there might be few ‘pain points’ they feel that compel them to buy.

The beauty is that once they have the system in place they can continuously improve and extend how they are using marketing automation. Most customers follow an adoption curve where they add sophistication as they master the basics.

Gathering the user data, ensuring it’s being maintained up-to-date with the services on offer and keep up the current market trends are the must for all the modern marketers.

Do you use marketing automation for your business? Check out our Marketing Automation Service page for more information.

Not using marketing automation today is a crippling setback for businesses.

Marketing automation helps your small business tap right into the power of technology, and systematize lead generation. For business owners continuously strapped for time, cash, and resources, it’s a blessing.

IDC group, in fact, opines that if you don’t use marketing automation, you are already behind the 8 ball. See Source.

Marketing automation is an interplay of a set of processes, systems, and strategic concepts all working together to meet the goals of your business, without you ever lifting a finger (at least, that’s the goal of every business that seeks to automate the marketing function).

Marketing automation is not truly hands-off, “set-it-and-forget-it” endeavor:

• It demands development of systems and processes.
• It requires onboarding of team members, employees, staff, and vendors.
• After it is set into motion, it needs testing, tweaking, and re-deployment.

If you manage to do it right, however, marketing automation truly works wonders for your business. At best, here are four different practical use cases that it has the power to influence:

According to Email Monday, a lead generation survey (2014) reveals that more than 26% of marketers surveyed use marketing software to automate and manage lead generation.

Also, more than 36% at least tried using marketing automation software.

The Aberdeen Group’s State of Marketing Automation report 2014 states that at least 70% of businesses, however, swear by the efficacy of marketing automation and are in the process of using a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP).

Marketing automation bring efficiency into your sales processes, aligns marketing efforts with that of sales, and obviates the need to do many tasks manually.

By automating most of the digital marketing channels where manual labor is either enhanced or removed completely, the entire digital marketing engine gets to run smooth, efficiently, and relentlessly.

Blog posts happen on schedule, social media accounts are flush with content, and emails go out automatically based on user-generated triggers.

Since manual input is not necessary and because systems and processes are more reliable with automation software taking over, brand awareness is more pronounced and continuous.

What price do you pay for that?

One of the most critical areas of marketing where automation really shines through is lead nurturing by engagement.

Since not all your customers are ready to pay the moment your ad shows up, email marketing is the best way to keep your leads nurtured.

Why, you ask? Nurtured leads are more sales ready. On average, DemandGen reports that sales opportunities increase by 20% compared to non-nurtured leads.

The more nurtured your leads are, the more “trusted conversions” you are likely to see.