Does Technology Affect Which Business a Customer Chooses?

There’s so much emphasis placed on technology whenever business is discussed that you might feel as though it’s obvious that it’s something customers would care about, too. Yet that might not always be the case.

While some customers might be interested in the finer workings of business technology, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they all will be. Having a good idea of your target audience can help you to decide the approach that you take towards your business technology, as well as how much of an active role that it plays in your marketing.

When It Does

If the industry that you’re in is known for having a very technically minded audience, then there might be a lot of people who are keeping up with the ins and outs of a given business. In this case, it’s not just the prevalence of technology in your operations and marketing that might begin to play a role, but also the very tone that you use to interact with your audiences in general. You have to strike a balance between meeting them at the right level of knowledge, avoiding patronizing people who know more, and alienating people who know less.

A Focal Point of Your Industry

This might refer to something like gaming, where there’s a lot of discourse around how aspects of development will impact the experience, like the speculation about AI use in Grand Theft Auto VI. This is an industry where discourse is a large part of the way in which audiences engage with products, reviews, social media posts, and news; all of these things are very popular. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that this is what you talk about in your posts; after all, audiences are arguably more interested in what the technology means for their experience rather than the technology itself. That means that you might then focus more on what the technology means for the end result.

Technology as a Negative

Audiences want to know that a brand is safe and trustworthy, but that doesn’t mean that they want to hear all about the kind of cybersecurity that they employ. This might only draw their attention to their anxieties about if something went wrong through a leak or attack. It’s important that customers know you take security seriously, but the specifics of how you use dark web monitoring or AI firewalls might be more internal or B2B knowledge than it is suitable for marketing.

There will be other times when you want to actively avoid mentioning a certain technology at all. In some instances, for example, people might see it as a negative if a business uses AI in its operations, as it might imply a negligence of human employees. If you’re in such a situation and you’re not using these technologies, you might even draw attention to the fact that it’s not something you agree with, making your values a central aspect of your marketing.

When It Doesn’t

Much of the time, however, audiences might not really find it all that important. As mentioned previously, people ultimately care more about the result; it’s not always going to be that interesting to people to discuss how a certain brand got there. When it comes to hospitality, for instance, what dictates whether you go to one place over another is how comfortable and enjoyable the experience is. With food, someone might choose the healthier or the tastier option; the exact mode of cooking might only matter in an internal sense.

The Simpler Option

With so much technology all around everyone all the time, sometimes a more rustic and humble approach can offer its own appeal. Of course, in such a technologically driven world, it can feel nearly impossible to keep up with your competitors without utilizing some of those same tools. However, there is a balance that you can strike here, and the end result might be that your entire business is built around the image that you’re a “back to basics” approach that can offer a stark contrast to some of your competitors. Again, though, the feasibility of this is something that will depend on your line of work.

Results Speaking for Themselves

If results just speak for themselves, that can seem like an argument to put all of your eggs in the technological basket, finding out which tools can help you to achieve the best result, regardless of which industry you’re in. However, this is something that could also directly impact the results, especially if you’re spending more on this technology than you can afford, or if you don’t have the staff skills necessary to properly operate it.

If customers don’t care about the technology that you’re using, then the best approach becomes identifying the best tools for your own specific circumstances. If you’re able to meet the demands of your current audiences, then that might be all that you need for now, if your audience grows, then you can begin to think about how you’re going to expand along with them, but you don’t want to go too extreme too early or your budget might not be able to keep up.

Ask the Audience

This is also an area where customer feedback can be incredibly crucial in deciding how you approach this issue. If you survey your customers and they say that it’s not important to them, that might help you to refine your marketing to their tastes.

At the same time, it’s important to be aware of what audiences say against how they really act. By analyzing your business data, you can see which way their tastes lean in relation to your marketing and the services of yours that are most popular. There might be times when audience members don’t want to think of themselves as being swayed by something like the tools a business uses, but when push comes to shove, it could be more of a deciding factor than they let on. This makes a holistic approach to analyzing customer behavior crucial to determining your approach.