As the digital marketing landscape evolves, staying on top of the latest marketing trends is essential for success in any business. New modes of marketing and advertising are surfacing every day as online communities and infrastructure continue to develop, and shifting consumer mentalities are also shaping the marketing of tomorrow.
Here are five strategies to employ in the coming year to ensure your business is staying on top of the trends:
Focus on the customer experience.
While the advertising used to consist in large part of simply relaying information about a product or service to consumers (prices, features, etc), with the powerful technologies consumers now have at their fingertips, finding this type of information is a breeze.
Marketing has now turned more towards providing a compelling experience for customers, which both compels consumers to look into the company further and works to build a positive brand image. This type of advertising which focuses on customer experience utilizes consumer data to personalize – not generalize – and provides targeted groups with engaging and relevant experiences. While old models of advertising relied on putting out large amounts of basic advertising content, higher quantity is no longer an effective approach. Instead of casting a wide net with your marketing strategy, try crafting advertisements that are personal and specific to a targeted group. This focus on meaningful customer experience will allow your marketing to have a deep reach.
Take advantage of influencer and micro-influencer marketing.
Content is still king when it comes to marketing, so taking advantage of influencer marketing on Instagram and other platforms can be a great way to reach customers and keep up with trends. Now, even micro-influencer marketing has become a serious form of advertising.
While big-name influencers are widely recognized and tend to have millions of followers, micro influencers have followers in the thousands and generally appeal to a specific niche. This is great for brands as advertising through a micro-influencer is going to be much less costly and have results that are much more targeted to a specific audience. And since micro-influencers have fewer followers, they generally have a more intimate relationship with their fans, which means the followers are more likely to feel an advertisement coming from a micro-influencer is more genuine and trustworthy.
Generate interactive content.
Another upcoming trend in digital marketing has come from the shift in the variety of content consumers find interesting and relevant. Nowadays, interactive content such as polls, quizzes, surveys, and live video tend to be the best at grabbing the attention of viewers. This is an especially effective way to market as it can even combine advertising with collecting data on consumer preferences, which can then be used to generate more marketing materials targeted at a specific demographic.
Take advantage of the opportunities offered by video content.
If your marketing strategy does not involve video content, you are going to be left behind in 2020. Video continues to grow as a medium for digital marketing, and consumers are ready for the higher degree of engagement this type of content can offer. It is expected that both short clips and much longer-form video content will both increase in popularity in the coming years, so figuring out now how to develop diverse types of video marketing that is engaging to your audience will have a big return in the long run.
Optimize your marketing strategy for new trends in search.
It has always been the case that an essential strategy for digital marketing was to ensure your company or product are appearing in a favorable position in search engine results. As technology continues to develop, however, the rules of the game are changing. Zero-click results now make up a huge portion of all search results (62% on Google), so getting onto that drop-down menu before competitors is essential. Smart speakers and voice search are also a growing trend and now count for 20% of all search queries.
As these new technologies continue to change how users experience searching the internet, the marketing team and SEO specialists at Britefish will help you stay on top of these trends to maintain an effective marketing strategy in 2020. Contact us to request a consultation.
