More and more people are looking to set up e-commerce stores which allow them to sell products from their own home. First, you must get your E-commerce store noticed.
After all, these businesses can be relatively easy to set up and operate, which makes them a fantastic way to earn money while working from home, whether this is a full-time position or a way to earn on the side.
Additionally, you can sell practically anything online regardless of whether it’s a digital product, a physical product that you have made, or physical products that you have sourced from elsewhere.
With that in mind, here is our must-know guide for getting your e-commerce store noticed.
Sell In-Demand Products
Your e-commerce store will never succeed if you are selling products which not many people want or need. Instead, look into trending products that you can easily sell from home. There are then various ways that you can sell these goods.
A few good examples of current in-demand products include:
Smartphone accessories
Clothing
Health and beauty products
Fitness products
Maternity wear
Video games
To get noticed and develop a brand reputation, you will need to sell products that are of the highest quality.
Make sure that anything that you make or source will satisfy the customer.
Social Media
Social media is a fantastic tool for raising awareness about your e-commerce store. Invite your network to follow your professional pages and use relevant and interesting content to be shared to attract new followers.
You can also use promotions such as “like and share” competitions to encourage people to share your pages.
Create High-Quality Content
Following on from this, you can get noticed by generating high-quality content that your target audience will find helpful.
A few good examples include:
Product demonstrations/reviews
Explainer videos
Interviews
How to guides
Industry news
Internet Marketing
One of the most effective ways to get your e-commerce store noticed is to use internet marketing from a reputable agency.
They will be able to increase your web presence and visibility online, which will direct more traffic to your website while simultaneously establishing your brand as an authoritative figure.
Influencer Marketing
Another useful form of marketing is influencer marketing where you get an influential figure (on social media) to promote your products.
It can be highly effective as the recommendation is coming from someone else but also somebody that is influential and respected amongst their followers.
Customer Reviews
Similarly, getting your existing customers to leave reviews for both the products and service is a great way to increase your reputation, which will help you to get noticed and become a trusted seller.
You can also use any negative feedback to learn and adjust your business model.
Setting up an e-commerce store can be a great way to earn money, but it can be challenging to get your store noticed in such a competitive marketplace.
Once you have developed a reputation and lots of people are visiting your store, these businesses can be relatively easy to operate, but first, it will require hard work and patience when starting out with these all being effective ways of getting noticed.
To answer that question, we have to go back to the very definition of digital marketing. It’s the concept of delivering advertising through digital channels.
It may be your website, online ads, social media, apps, or email. It’s a very broad term that grasps the essence of a modern marketing campaign: reaching the online audience.
Without a strong online presence, the marketing campaign for a business is not complete. It’s not good enough.
So it’s clear: every business needs a digital marketing campaign. Moreover, every business and marketer has to follow the trends in digital marketing. Let’s focus on the aspect of trends, shall we?
The Digital Marketing Trends of 2017
To understand where we’re going, we have to know where we’re coming from. In short – what notable digital marketing trends made 2017 special?
Big data – online marketing campaigns were based on predictive analytics, coming from market and customer insights.
Internet of things – it’s a trend that just started, but it’s changing the way small businesses approach to content
Influencer outreach – we’ve seen almost every social media influencer promoting something.
Mobile advertising – it’s going stronger by the day.
Live videos – people mostly use them to share moments of their days, but marketing experts are slowly finding their ways to benefit from this trend.
Marketing automation – since businesses have to be present on several online channels at a time, they are automating parts of the marketing campaign.
We’ll just stop there. Some of these trends will be growing in 2018. We explore and expand them to a whole other level.
Now, let’s look forward. What digital marketing megatrends will make the upcoming year different than 2017? What should business owners and marketing experts focus on?
Virtual Reality Is Getting Bigger
VR is better with friends. That’s the motto of a new Facebook project, which is still in its beta version. It’s called Spaces, and it brings virtual reality to social media. With this feature, people will get to be themselves in a different kind of reality. They will use their Facebook photos to build the VR character.
How will brands translate this trend into their digital marketing strategies? We’re sure of one thing: the opportunities are endless. They can create their own VR characters and stories, and use them to build relationships with the target audience.
Big data was one of the most notable marketing trends of 2017. It continues to grow bigger! We’re seeing more people getting connected with more objects, using more services, and sharing more of their preferences.
We’re constantly getting an increased volume of data to work with, and that helps us elevate the effectiveness of our marketing strategies.
The forecast leaves us in awe: the revenue from big data and business analytics on a global level are expected to reach $168.7 billion in 2018.
What customer is tracking data sets will we see in the upcoming year? Digitally-mature brands will rely on customer journey data and customer experience mapping. With these techniques, they can understand the experience of their users and deliver a personalized service. A business that doesn’t rely on this trend risks wasting time and developing ineffective marketing campaigns.
It’s not something new, but it’s a trend that will definitely grow.
Conversational Marketing
All businesses are aiming towards the very responsive to messages badge on Facebook. When people see that badge on your profile, they are encouraged to drop you a message with their questions or comments.
If they want to get in touch with the customer support to solve any issues or get answers before buying the product, they expect quick answers. With this badge, you prove that your support system is impeccable.
Facebook’s Messenger allows businesses to interact with the audience at a fairly face pace. That’s part of the marketing process, too. It’s the type of conversational marketing that’s going to be huge in 2018.
Let’s say you’re trying to buy snow tires for your car, and you found few local businesses on Facebook. They all sell different kinds of tires with different prices. You may write on their profiles, but maybe you don’t want all your Facebook friends to know what you’re looking for.
You’re just interested in the offer and the price, so you want to directly contact the support. If you do that via Facebook Messenger, you’ll most likely choose the business that does conversational marketing well.
Generation Z Is Now in the Focus
Move over Millennials; Gen Xers are about to take the spotlight. In 2018, the older representatives of the Generation Z (also known as Post-Millennials, Homeland Generation, or iGeneration) will be hitting the workforce.
They will have their own money to buy our products and services. Thus, marketing experts will have to include the needs of this generation in their promotional processes.
What makes this generation different than the Millennials? For starters, they prefer Instagram and Snapchat over Facebook. They are younger and more vibrant. They have more free time on their hands.
They use more devices in a day, and they are experimenting with every platform you throw at them. They would rather type a message than have an actual conversation.
Most of all, Gen Xers are Internet experts. Thus, your digital marketing campaign will have to live up to their standards.
Social Media for the Entire Organization
Digital marketing will no longer be limited to the marketing department of a company. We’ve seen this in action: employees promoting the company in its best light. MAC Cosmetics involved its employees in a social media campaign back in 2012. That gave a more “human” touch to the entire marketing process.
The online audience does not particularly trust corporate marketing. They want a subtler approach. When a company involves its employees in the process, they deliver what the audience expects: direct contact with the brand. Plus, they get to promote products and services along the way.
Chatbots are everywhere, yes?
Chatbots
What does a chatbot have to do with marketing? Isn’t it mostly for customer support? It is. However, the customer support process is part of a good digital marketing strategy.
If you have an impeccable customer service department, it will promote your business in a good way.
Chatbots saw a quick rise in 2017. We still haven’t seen the TacoBot, but we expect it to revolutionize the concept of the chatbot. We have to admit one thing: the marketing campaign developed around this tool is pretty great.
The chatbot itself is smart, effective, and it has a sense of humor. It gives us a hint into a very special trend: chatbots are the future of customer service!
Personalized Content Marketing
Internet users are demanding personalization. They want it in the customer support processes. They want it in the service delivery. However, they also demand personalization in your content marketing campaign.
According to Monetate, “94% of in-house marketers believe that a personalized website experience is “critical to current and future success.”
Personalized web experience – that’s where content marketing gets merged with the process of personalization. Most visitors share names and emails to get valuable content, such as eBook or long-form articles. We can use that basic data to provide a more personalized content marketing campaign via email, as well as on the site.
Video Marketing
According to Forrester research, a minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. Whoa, that’s a bold statement, isn’t it? But, it’s true. A video is much more effective than written content. Content is in the essence of video marketing, so we’ll still need writing services like Essay Geeks in 2018. However, chances are we’ll be needing more video scripts.
If you check your Facebook or Instagram feed, you’ll notice that videos are dominating the platforms. As you scroll down, a video will catch your attention, and you’ll stop for a moment thinking “let’s see what this is!” That’s exactly how most social media users react to videos, and it’s exactly why digital marketers will focus on this element of their campaigns.
Infusing Marketing into the Customer Journey Mapping Process
The customer’s lifecycle tells us a lot about the way the user approaches our products or services. The process of customer journey mapping is quite complex. It goes through three important stages:
Outlining the buyer persona
Defining all stages in a customer’s journey
Designing a customer journey map
Through this map, the business understands how their ideal customers behave. Why is this important for the marketing campaign? The data you get helps you design a truly effective marketing campaign. You understand how your target user considers, buys, uses and maintains your product or service.
In 2018, we expect to see an evolution in the way marketing strategies are designed around a customer’s journey. It’s easy for us to start thinking from a user’s point of view and trigger the action we want them to take.
As highlighted in Econsultancy’s Content Strategy Best Practice Guide from July 2017, “solid understanding of the customer journey through customer journey mapping can establish a firm foundation for success.” In 2018, digital marketing strategies will be moving in that direction.
More Influencer Marketing
When you think of influencer marketing, you think of Instagram. It’s the center of this trend. We’re seeing people with millions of followers promoting all kinds of brands, products, and services through the platform.
But that’s not where it stops. Influencer marketing is present on all other social media channels, too. It involves bloggers, who influence to convince people to try anything they recommend.
This is a prominent current trend. With the rise of Instagram stories, it’s taking a different dimension. We expect influencer marketing to grow in that direction throughout 2018.
Through their stories, our favorite Instagrammers are not only sharing moments of their days. They also make recommendations that we trust, and they don’t seem intrusive by doing that.
Since the platform doesn’t serve this content in your feed, you see only the stories you want to see. That’s why you trust them more. That’s why brands can benefit from this marketing method.
Digital Marketing Growth Is on Its Way
With the ten upcoming trends we described above, we tried to predict how businesses will approach digital marketing in 2018. That brings us to the final and most important trend: digital marketing growth. It’s a never-ending process that doesn’t allow us to remain in any comfort zone.
Many of the old trends are still persistent, but we keep adding new ones in our practices. Digital marketing transforms the way businesses operate. In a good way. Does your business have a specific digital marketing growth program in place? It should have. Consider the above-listed trends and make sure to include them in your strategy.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Chris Richardson is a journalist, editor, and a blogger. He loves to write, learn new things, and meet new outgoing people. Chris is also fond of traveling, sports, and playing the guitar. Follow him on Facebook and Google+.
It is simple. Marketing is a form of communicating with people to sell them a product or service. However, it’s often a complicated dance of finding new and exciting ways to persuade them. The top marketing initiatives will yield the best persuasion.
Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be a remarkable marketer. In fact, most people don’t. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway.
Your goal is to please those that actually speak up, spread the word, buy new things, or hire the talented.
In this social-media-dominated world, the conversation is increasingly detail-oriented and high-tech. It’s for this very reason that the most powerful messages remain human-centric.
Technology will help marketers engage consumers more directly by circumventing distractions and increasing their marketing reach. These tactics appeal to fundamental aspects of human nature. As such, they can help marketers create carefully coordinated campaigns and conversations. Brands and consumers seek to coalesce into a shared experience, don’t they?
Here are 19 primary marketing initiatives that deserve your time and attention. If you capture their essence, they will help you address the challenges, opportunities, and complexities you’ll undoubtedly face as you move forward.
Interactive Content
There’s content you can read, and then there’s content with which you can interact. The second variety is certainly increasing in popularity.
For example, BuzzFeed’s “Which City Should You Live In?” quiz has been one of their home-run pieces. Think of ways to get readers to actively participate instead of passively consume.
Interactive content can include assessments (such as the classic Cosmo Quiz setup), polls, surveys, infographics, brackets, and contests.
Mobile video
Have you studied your Facebook feed recently? The chances are that 95% of it is video. And here’s a fun stat: mobile video views grew six times faster than desktop views in 2015.
In fact, in Q4 of 2015, mobile video views exceeded desktop views for the first time. We now live in an age of mobile video, and it’s time we embraced it.
Influence marketing isn’t new, but it is certainly maturing. Warren Whitlock, a noted influence marketing pro, says,
“Everyone has influence. Influence marketing is the practice of finding people who are already influencing your market. They will welcome your help to serve their audience better and reward you with reputation and trusted leads.”
What’s more effective than an ad in selling your product? A lovable social media personality is speaking highly about your product to his or her fans and followers. Influencer marketing is on the rise because people tend to trust recommendations from people they see as thought leaders.
The right influencers establish credibility through each social media post or advertisement. When they work with brands, it’s because they genuinely believe in them, and that trust is passed on to consumers.
Virtual and augmented reality
One of the recent biggest highlights was watching a screen-afflicted population carry their mobile devices out into the world to catch, yes, Pokemon.
The biggest takeaway from this phenomenon was augmented reality’s ability to drive real business results. This has become a very viable option for marketers looking to bring online into the real world.
Mobile-first strategy
A huge understatement is that the future is mobile. Internet traffic is now coming more from mobile devices more than desktops. If you’re not catering to your content, ads, and online experience to a mobile user, then you are missing a massive opportunity.
And remember: It’s not just about “optimizing” for mobile; it’s also about making sure that piece of content gets integrated with a user’s lifestyle on the go.
Back in mid-2014, we reached the official tipping point when mobile devices officially overtook desktops as the preferred method of viewing and downloading content on the web. By the 4th quarter of 2016, 50% of all B2B companies had implemented a responsive design for their websites, according to Gorilla Group. (Responsive design allows a website to be more easily viewed on smartphones, tablets, and notebooks.)
That was almost double the percentage of sites with responsive design in 2015 (26%). That trend will undoubtedly continue in 2017, as more and more B2B marketers realize the necessity of deploying mobile-friendly sites.
Mobile was in the top 3 three years ago, but as more companies have adopted mobile responsive web design and email templates they have seen less need to focus on it, or at least there are fewer opportunities for growth.
However, research shows that retail conversion rates are significantly lower on a smartphone, so there is work to be done for many businesses to optimize conversion on mobile, although they will likely always stay lower than desktop.
Chatbots
Do you think of chatbots as an annoying popup on a website that looks like it was built in the mid-’90s? Not me. I believe chatbot technology has become much more sophisticated.
A great example is the behemoth Facebook, which invests a significant amount of resources into bot programs that provide users with news updates, personalized responses, and more. Are you talking to a human or a bot? If you can’t tell, then the bot is working as intended.
Native Advertising
Viewers, followers, and consumers are getting wise to the tricks of advertisers, and it’s becoming harder and harder to earn and maintain their trust. Native advertising means integrating your advertising efforts into content that already provides value to readers and viewers.
For this reason, it tends to be more effective. Look for ways to weave your products and offerings into a larger narrative, instead of just blasting with ads.
It’s much less intrusive, can provide educational benefits for the reader, is more likely to be shared, and can be very cost-effective for the advertiser.
This type of content usually is useful, interesting, and targeted to a specific audience — all of which makes it one of the best platforms to launch any marketing campaign.
Data-driven marketing
There are two types of marketers: those who want to use what’s popular and those who use what works, regardless of whether it’s popular or not. Data tells you what’s moving the needle, and the truth is that every marketer needs to be conscious of it.
Data-driven marketing applications include market and customer insight and predictive analytics.
Social media “buy” buttons
We are moving into an age where purchasing doesn’t need to happen on a third-party site. Users are on a social platform, so why should they have to leave to buy something? “Buy” buttons are quickly turning social media sites such as Facebook and Pinterest into social shopping experiences.
Internet of things (IoT)
IoT is one of the most important marketing technology applications of the last 2-3 years, but it is of most relevance to device makers and retailers. This makes it relatively high-up in this ranking of priorities.
There are expected to be 75 billion connected devices by 2020, meaning there will be ten times as many devices able to talk to one another as there will be people on the planet! The implications are huge and far-ranging. All this sharing of data will transform the way we live our lives.
Personalization means segmenting your content to reach different types of audience members based on their preferences, habits, etc. The most common form of this strategy is through lists, where certain content gets sent to certain types of users based on which lists they’ve opted into. In a world of too much content and not enough time, personalization is a huge win for brands looking to earn the attention of their consumers.
But daily information overload has made people more resistant to advertising. Today’s consumers can spot obvious sales pitches or marketing come-ons, and they’ll be turned off by it. Targeting consumers on a personal level allow marketers to cut through the torrent of stimuli.
To capture an overwhelmed customer’s attention, marketers must reach him or her with personalized, relevant content. It’s all about creating marketing tactics that home in on exactly what consumers are looking for or thinking about.
Tracking consumers’ habits, interests, and browsing histories are essential to creating strategies that get them to execute a purchase.
Above and beyond viewability
Currently, most companies use viewability to measure their success. Instead of solely focusing on views or clicks, companies should measure their ROI on things such as sign-ups, downloads, and purchases. This requires going beyond CPMs and looking at the performance-based metrics instead.
Customer experience balance
Probably the most impactful marketing trend will be a tighter focus on improving the customer experience. Strive to use a balanced approach to building customer loyalty.
Instead of focusing solely on “customer-centric” methods based on your customers’ lifetime value, offset it with “customer-focused” techniques that enable you to provide relevant experiences across all touchpoints. Concentrate on what your customers value most.
Artificial intelligence/machine learning
The integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into marketing techniques will continue to increase. Recently, Forrester Research predicted that “AI will provide business users with access to powerful insights before they are available to them.”
How?
Through the use of cognitive interfaces in complex systems, advanced analytics, and machine learning technology. Many vendors are already embedding components of cognitive computing capabilities into their solutions.
Visual content marketing
According to HubSpot, marketers still place increasing emphasis on the importance of visual content in their marketing portfolios. The primary driver is the desire to make content more engaging, compelling, and shareable than just the written word.
The most common forms of visual content that are being used is a video (including 360-degree video), infographics, and images in blogs and social media posts.
Top marketing initiatives … experiential marketing
Instead of just sending a marketing message to a prospect, experiential marketing creates an opportunity for your customers and prospects to truly experience your brand, whether in a virtual setting or in person.
Spend some time educating yourself about the latest experiential marketing strategies and techniques, and give some thought as to how you could integrate them into the interactions with your customers and prospects.
You might also want to consider how experiential marketing could be used within your organization for engaging, educating, and energizing your employees.
Social media
In 2016, 39% of marketers reported significant ROI generated from social media marketing, contrasted with only 9% in 2015. While this data implies that challenges still exist, year-over-year increases show that marketers are becoming more successful at converting social media activities into sales leads, and ultimately, revenue.
Next-gen automation
Some studies conducted by Aberdeen Group, Ovum, Marketing Sherpa, and others have revealed that the adoption of marketing automation technologies continues to be one of the fastest-growing marketing trends today.
The next generation of marketing automation tools is now being used by all sizes and types of organizations to accomplish a variety of objectives. These objectives include driving e-commerce revenue, generating and nurturing leads, accumulating customer intelligence, managing cross-channel campaigns, among many others.
According to Forrester Research, 58% of the top-performing companies where marketing contributes more than half of the sales pipeline have adopted marketing automation.
Marketing automation is growing at an impressive rate, with 71 percent of companies currently using this tech. Marketing automation does exactly what the name suggests, using software platforms designed to put repetitive tasks on autopilot.
Collaboration
Although the need seems obvious, most B2B organizations still aren’t willing—or don’t know how—to align their marketing and sales efforts. You can argue that customer experience should be added to the equation as well so that all three functions are marching to the same drummer.
That approach will help tear down the inherent silos that exist in most organizations and will encourage everyone to turn their focus to the customer.
Also, experiment with incorporating shared goals in your compensation programs for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams. It’s amazing what financial incentives can do to change behavior when it comes to alignment and collaboration.
Content marketing
Content marketing sometimes is confused with native marketing. Though the two often go hand in hand, content marketing is its beast.
Native marketing is simply another way for marketers to distribute content. Content marketing is a strategic marketing technique to create and distribute relevant information to attract a target audience. It’s not a paid-and-done transaction, like placing a native ad. Rather, it’s an ongoing process that’s best integrated into an overall marketing strategy.
It can serve as the cornerstone to nearly any marketing plan and works for all types of brands because everyone uses it differently. The key is to be consistent, staying in character for your brand. If that brand voice is clever, interesting, or funny, your target audience can’t help but be engaged.
The bottom line
Our message for businesses is simple. Think more like a marketing innovator. Learn the innovation process. Spend time at the front end on what the marketplace needs, rather than trying to build a slick marketing campaign selling your invention.
That is the best way to succeed. Marketing innovation isn’t about talking, it’s about doing. The action. So get moving and begin your journey.
So exercise and practice this skill and utilize it in as many areas of your business as you can.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Brands are verbs, what they do matters more than they say. It is an amazing fact … social media has been with us for over a decade now. So there are many social media celebrity marketing ideas and lessons to be learned.
And many new ones are being created every day. Celebrity brands certainly are putting emphasis or doing more than saying. Recent social media celebrity marketing ideas from our research illustrate this point.
Are you one that believes that marketing creativity can be learned? We are among that group. We also believe in suggestions for innovative thinking can boost marketing creativity through effective collaboration.
Through a series of sparks and not a single flash of insight. Certainly our way of thinking.
Businesses have seized upon this trend as it matured and according to a CMO survey by Duke University social media represents 6.6% of marketing budgets (about $4.6 billion in dollar terms) and is expected to climb to nearly 16% over the next 5 years.
So social media is still a small part of digital and marketing budgets. But the fastest-growing and in reality, it has just begun.
Celebrities from all stripes are now continually testing the limits of online engagement and transparency. Their brands are developing a true online voice and seeing positive, bottom-line results. Let’s examine some of their ideas:
Employing influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing
One thing Taylor Swift understands and consistently delivers on is maintaining the magic and the mystery in her brand. She knows that audiences today are motivated by the surprise in the relationship, as she puts it.
Swift says: “In the YouTube generation we live in, I walked out on stage every night of my stadium tour last year knowing almost every fan had already seen the show online.
My generation was raised being able to flip channels if we got bored, and we read the last page of the book when we got impatient. We want to be caught off guard, delighted, left in awe.”
But she also doesn’t show too much. She still keeps an air of mystery about her and maintains aspects of her strategy, career, and personal life behind locked doors, achieving a balance for her brand.
Another recent awesome example of influencer marketing is from Adele, who announced her new album with a music video. The singer’s video for the song Hello, which premiered online, has already been watched more than 88 million times on YouTube, reports the BBC.
It’s one of the first music videos to be shot with large-format IMAX cameras. A fantastically entertaining video.
Related post: How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
Celebrity marketing examples … stay visible
If anybody knows anything about the dark arts of social media, it’s Kim Kardashian West. With 48.8 million followers on Instagram, Ms. Kardashian West has built her career and empire on social media. Her appeal online boils down to one major thing, social-media experts say: showing up and being visible.
Since she joined Instagram in early 2012, Kim has posted more than 3,180 images and counting. That’s a little more than two images a day on average. Many sources say celebrities tend to post three times more than the average brand.
Like Adele, Beyoncé released a surprise album with a 10-second video on Instagram and a nearly four-minute video on Facebook.
Last fall, Harvard Business School published a case study about her eschewal of the traditional music-industry practice of releasing singles and doing an array of press appearances to promote an album.
Beyoncé now takes to social media to directly respond to rumors and unfavorable news. When rumors swelled about marital problems, for instance, she went onto Instagram to post photos of her happy family.
Celebrity marketing strategy … engagement and dialog
In July 2014, a young Taylor Swift fan wrote a missive about unrequited love on Instagram. Then the singer wrote back.
This kind of thing has become so common, there is an Instagram account dedicated to Ms. Swift’s fan interactions called @taylornoticed. The account, which tracks Ms. Swift’s likes and comments, has about 47,000 followers.
The big lesson here: Validate your followers with likes, comments, and retweets. It builds goodwill. Companies should search for tweets and posts mentioning their brand, and respond, retweet or repost generously.
Social media celebrity marketing ideas … partnering with celebrities
Partnering with a celebrity and tapping into the celebrity social media influence is one of the best ways for a brand to reach an already engaged and targeted audience; and a strategy that highly influences future purchase decisions based on that association.
When brands brought their famous friends to social media, they were able to add something they never had before: interactivity. With most celebs being active on social media, brands gained the opportunity to be endorsed in a highly personal way across highly personal media.
As an example, H& M announced its partnership with Miranda Kerr on Twitter. The tweet received over 3000 favorites and is the most engaging tweet of 2014 for the brand.
In Nike Basketball’s partnership with LeBron James, the brand created the hashtag#witnesshistory. Nike Basketball asked followers to use the hashtag to congratulate the player on his back-to-back championship wins.
This gave followers the ability to personally convey wishes to the star himself, thereby giving them a compelling reason to tweet using it.
The hashtag stands as the most used and most engaging hashtag of all time for the brand. Nike Basketball only had to use it 3 times before followers used it 21,000 times
Light on direct promotion
Vin Diesel, star of the “Fast and Furious” franchise, enjoys one of the most popular accounts on Facebook, with more than 95 million likes. Another Facebook favorite: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, boasting about 52 million.
While both use Facebook to promote movies, they also share personal stories. Mr. Diesel regularly posts photographs of his friend and former co-star, the late actor Paul Walker, and frequently mentions how much he is missed. Mr. Johnson recently posted about the painful decision to put down his dog Brutus.
Celebrities also take part in other cultural moments on social media, such as “Throwback Thursday” on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, where users post old photos.
As an example, a company like Ford Motor Co., for instance, could use the occasion to post ads from the 1940s.
Crowdsourcing ideas
Jason Mraz is a crowdsourcing genius. He has actually run two social media crowdsourcing campaigns: he asked fans to capture his irresistible; swoon-worthy (my words) single “I Won’t Give Up” in one Instagram photograph.
He then picked the top 25 images, put them on canvas, and organized a gallery-type event for the public.
Currently, Jason Mraz is running a campaign in which he’s giving Twitter users the chance to create plotlines for his “The Woman I Love” music video.
People tweeted ideas to Jason Mraz with the hashtag #MrazingTheVideo (I think this hashtag might be subpar considering Mraz’s gifted lyricism but to each his own).
The director of the music video takes the best ideas and creates a storyboard for the video.
Mraz’s campaign is innovative and ground-breaking, but it also interactive: it lets fans take a direct part in the creation of one of their favorite musician’s music videos.
It strengthens that celebrity-fan connection. And it can certainly be replicated by regular businesses.
Special interest messaging
Jesse Williams has amassed a social media following of close to 2 million fans between Twitter and Instagram, but where many celebrities primarily use their platforms for self-promotion, he has decided to take things in a different direction.
A former high school teacher, Williams sees social media as a means to encourage dialogue and personal growth in his community of followers and illustrates how he is doing those activities.
Leading their own campaigns
But there are still more new avenues being explored. Some events that seem small but will be significant social media marketing lessons for us all.
Normally millions are spent on traditional media. Lady Gaga hyped her latest album by spending millions on bus advertising, billboards, 2 pop up stores and performed countless interviews. The result. She sold 305,000 copies in 2 weeks.
But Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are also known for focusing on building long-term personal connections with her fans over the short-term revenue.
Even though they could have played bigger venues early in her career (after all, the demand was there), they wanted to play small venues so that she could really connect with the audience.
Beyoncé, who has 8 million Instagram followers and over 53 million fans on Facebook decided to go a different route, going straight to her fans. It was launched directly to iTunes and social media. She invoked the power of “Word of Mouth” … the best marketing approach.
Her results:
It sold 828,000 copies in 3 days.
Twitter reported 1.2 million Tweets in 12 hours.
It was the largest single week ever in the Apple iTunes store.
It was iTunes fastest selling album worldwide.
A sign of things to come in social media?
So what is the significance for the average small businessman you may ask? The implications for marketers and small businesses go beyond a celebrity with millions of social media followers.
The bottom line
Remember this: the future of marketing belongs to brands that not only understand their customer advocates but go the extra mile to build personal connections with their biggest fans and nurture authentic, long-term relationships with them.
“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”
Do you have an idea that will change the world? Well, it’s not worth anything unless you can turn that idea into a reality. So take the plunge and see just how far that idea can take you. Or, you can sit around trading advice over the internet.
The choice is yours.
Make your thinking vivid by including what comes naturally to you. You may be excellent in infusing your visualization with emotional charge and great feelings.
Your senses are wonderful tools for you to engage while unleashing the power of the imaginative mind. Make it colorful and exciting.
Make your imagination your ally and your best friend.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on social media design from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
It is simple. Marketing is a form of communicating with people to sell them a product or service. However, it’s often a complicated dance of finding new and exciting ways to persuade them. The top marketing initiatives will add to this discussion.
In this social-media-dominated world, the conversation is increasingly detail-oriented and high-tech. It’s for this very reason that the most powerful messages remain human-centric.
Technology will help marketers engage consumers more directly by circumventing distractions and increasing their marketing reach. These tactics appeal to fundamental aspects of human nature.
As such, they can help marketers create carefully coordinated campaigns and conversations. Brands and consumers seek to coalesce into a shared experience, don’t they?
Are you one that believes that creativity can be learned? We are among that group. We also believe in suggestions for innovative thinking can boost team creativity through effective collaboration.
Through a series of sparks and not a single flash of insight. Certainly our way of thinking.
Here are 19 primary marketing initiatives that deserve your time and attention. If you capture their essence, they will help you address the challenges, opportunities, and complexities you’ll undoubtedly face as you move forward.
Interactive Content
There’s content you can read, and then there’s content with which you can interact. The second variety is certainly increasing in popularity.
For example, BuzzFeed’s “Which City Should You Live In?” quiz has been one of their home-run pieces. Think of ways to get readers to actively participate instead of passively consume.
Interactive content can include assessments (such as the classic Cosmo Quiz setup), polls, surveys, infographics, brackets, and contests.
Mobile video
Have you studied your Facebook feed recently? The chances are that 95% of it is video. And here’s a fun stat: mobile video views grew six times faster than desktop views in 2015.
In fact, in Q4 of 2015, mobile video views exceeded desktop views for the first time. We now live in an age of mobile video, and it’s time we embraced it.
Influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing
Influence marketing isn’t new, but it is certainly maturing. Warren Whitlock, a noted influence marketing pro, says, “Everyone has influence.
Influence marketing is the practice of finding people who are already influencing your market. They will welcome your help to serve their audience better and reward you with reputation and trusted leads.”
What’s more effective than an ad in selling your product? A lovable social media personality is speaking highly about your product to his or her fans and followers. Influencer marketing is on the rise because people tend to trust recommendations from people they see as thought leaders.
The right influencers establish credibility through each social media post or advertisement. When they work with brands, it’s because they genuinely believe in them, and that trust is passed on to consumers.
Virtual and augmented reality
One of the recent biggest highlights was watching a screen-afflicted population carry their mobile devices out into the world to catch, yes, Pokemon.
The biggest takeaway from this phenomenon was augmented reality’s ability to drive real business results. This has become a very viable option for marketers looking to bring online into the real world.
Mobile-first strategy
A huge understatement is that the future is mobile. Internet traffic is now coming more from mobile devices more than desktops. If you’re not catering to your content, ads and online experience to a mobile user, then you are missing a massive opportunity.
And remember: It’s not just about “optimizing” for mobile; it’s also about making sure that piece of content gets integrated with a user’s lifestyle on the go.
Back in mid-2014, we reached the official tipping point when mobile devices officially overtook desktops as the preferred method of viewing and downloading content on the web.
By the 4th quarter of 2016, 50% of all B2B companies had implemented a responsive design for their websites, according to Gorilla Group. (Responsive design allows a website to be more easily viewed on smartphones, tablets, and notebooks.)
That was almost double the percentage of sites with responsive design in 2015 (26%). That trend will undoubtedly continue in 2017, as more and more B2B marketers realize the necessity of deploying mobile-friendly sites.
Mobile was in the top 3 three years ago, but as more companies have adopted mobile responsive web design and email templates they have seen less need to focus on it, or at least there are fewer opportunities for growth.
However, research shows that retail conversion rates are significantly lower on a smartphone, so there is work to be done for many businesses to optimize conversion on mobile, although they will likely always stay lower than desktop.
Chatbots
Do you think of chatbots as an annoying popup on a website that looks like it was built in the mid-’90s? Not me. I believe chatbot technology has become much more sophisticated.
A great example is the behemoth Facebook, which invests a significant amount of resources into bot programs that provide users with news updates, personalized responses and more.
Are you talking to a human or a bot? If you can’t tell, then the bot is working as intended.
Native Advertising
Viewers, followers, and consumers are getting wise to the tricks of advertisers, and it’s becoming harder and harder to earn and maintain their trust.
Native advertising means integrating your advertising efforts into content that already provides value to readers and viewers.
For this reason, it tends to be more effective. Look for ways to weave your products and offerings into a larger narrative, instead of just blasting with ads.
It’s much less intrusive, can provide educational benefits for the reader, is more likely to be shared, and can be very cost-effective for the advertiser.
This type of content usually is useful, interesting and targeted to a specific audience — all of which makes it one of the best platforms to launch any marketing campaign.
Data-driven marketing
There are two types of marketers: those who want to use what’s popular and those who use what works, regardless of whether it’s popular or not. Data tells you what’s moving the needle, and the truth is that every marketer needs to be conscious of it.
Data-driven marketing applications include market and customer insight and predictive analytics.
Social media “buy” buttons
We are moving into an age where purchasing doesn’t need to happen on a third-party site. Users are on a social platform, so why should they have to leave to buy something? “Buy” buttons are quickly turning social media sites such as Facebook and Pinterest into social shopping experiences.
Internet of things (IoT)
IoT is one of the most important marketing technology applications of the last 2-3 years, but it is of most relevance to device makers and retailers. This makes it relatively high-up in this ranking of priorities.
There are expected to be 75 billion connected devices by 2020, meaning there will be ten times as many devices able to talk to one another as there will be people on the planet!
The implications are huge and far-ranging. All this sharing of data will transform the way we live our lives.
Personalization means segmenting your content to reach different types of audience members based on their preferences, habits, etc.
The most common form of this strategy is through lists, where certain content gets sent to certain types of users based on which lists they’ve opted into. In a world of too much content and not enough time, personalization is a huge win for brands looking to earn the attention of their consumers.
But daily information overload has made people more resistant to advertising. Today’s consumers can spot obvious sales pitches or marketing come-ons, and they’ll be turned off by it.
Targeting consumers on a personal level allow marketers to cut through the torrent of stimuli.
To capture an overwhelmed customer’s attention, marketers must reach him or her with personalized, relevant content. It’s all about creating marketing tactics that home in on exactly what consumers are looking for or thinking about.
Tracking consumers’ habits, interests and browsing histories is essential to creating strategies that get them to execute a purchase.
Above and beyond viewability
Currently, most companies use viewability to measure their success. Instead of solely focusing on views or clicks, companies should measure their ROI on things such as sign-ups, downloads, and purchases.
This requires going beyond CPMs and looking at the performance-based metrics instead.
Customer experience balance
Probably the most impactful marketing trend will be a tighter focus on improving the customer experience. Strive to use a balanced approach to building customer loyalty.
Instead of focusing solely on “customer-centric” methods based on your customers’ lifetime value, offset it with “customer-focused” techniques that enable you to provide relevant experiences across all touchpoints. Concentrate on what your customers value most.
Artificial intelligence/machine learning
The integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into marketing techniques will continue to increase. Recently, Forrester Research predicted that “AI will provide business users with access to powerful insights before they are available to them.”
How?
Through the use of cognitive interfaces in complex systems, advanced analytics, and machine learning technology. Many vendors are already embedding components of cognitive computing capabilities into their solutions.
Visual content marketing
According to HubSpot, marketers still place increasing emphasis on the importance of visual content in their marketing portfolios. The primary driver is the desire to make content more engaging, compelling, and shareable than just the written word.
The most common forms of visual content that are being used are the video (including 360-degree video), infographics, and images in blogs and social media posts.
Top marketing initiatives … experiential marketing
Instead of just sending a marketing message to a prospect, experiential marketing creates an opportunity for your customers and prospects to truly experience your brand, whether in a virtual setting or in person.
Spend some time educating yourself about the latest experiential marketing strategies and techniques, and give some thought as to how you could integrate them into the interactions with your customers and prospects.
You might also want to consider how experiential marketing could be used within your organization for engaging, educating, and energizing your employees.
Social media
In 2016, 39% of marketers reported significant ROI generated from social media marketing, contrasted with only 9% in 2015.
While this data implies that challenges still exist, year-over-year increases show that marketers are becoming more successful at converting social media activities into sales leads, and ultimately, revenue.
Next-gen automation
Some studies conducted by Aberdeen Group, Ovum, Marketing Sherpa, and others have revealed that the adoption of marketing automation technologies continues to be one of the fastest-growing marketing trends today.
The next generation of marketing automation tools is now being used by all sizes and types of organizations to accomplish a variety of objectives. These objectives include driving e-commerce revenue, generating and nurturing leads, accumulating customer intelligence, managing cross-channel campaigns, among many others.
According to Forrester Research, 58% of the top-performing companies where marketing contributes more than half of the sales pipeline have adopted marketing automation.
Marketing automation is growing at an impressive rate, with 71 percent of companies currently using this tech. Marketing automation does exactly what the name suggests, using software platforms designed to put repetitive tasks on autopilot.
Collaboration
Although the need seems obvious, most B2B organizations still aren’t willing—or don’t know how—to align their marketing and sales efforts. You can argue that customer experience should be added to the equation as well so that all three functions are marching to the same drummer.
That approach will help tear down the inherent silos that exist in most organizations and will encourage everyone to turn their focus to the customer.
Also, experiment with incorporating shared goals in your compensation programs for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
It’s amazing what financial incentives can do to change behavior when it comes to alignment and collaboration.
Content marketing
Content marketing sometimes is confused with native marketing. Though the two often go hand in hand, content marketing is its beast.
Native marketing is simply another way for marketers to distribute content. Content marketing is a strategic marketing technique to create and distribute relevant information to attract a target audience. It’s not a paid-and-done transaction, like placing a native ad. Rather, it’s an ongoing process that’s best integrated into an overall marketing strategy.
It can serve as the cornerstone to nearly any marketing plan and works for all types of brands because everyone uses it differently. The key is to be consistent, staying in character for your brand. If that brand voice is clever, interesting or funny, your target audience can’t help but be engaged.
The bottom line
Ditch the dream and be a doer, not a dreamer.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Top digital marketing trends are made up of a lot of actionable topics – SEO, social media, marketing automation, PPC, and more. New technologies, techniques, and ever-changing Google and Facebook algorithms keep digital marketing teams hopping, including ours. Part of our job is to stay up-to-date on the upcoming trends so our clients’ digital marketing campaigns remain effective.
It is more
important than ever before for marketers to understand and stay ahead of the
curve when it comes to digital marketing trends. Doing so ensures you have the
right tools at your disposal, an up-to-date strategy, and the required skills
to make the most of social media.
As
we enter a new decade and tech continues to change at a rapid pace, here are
the digital marketing trends where we’re predicting growth:
Interactive Content
91% of buyers are looking for more interactive
content online. Shoppable posts, AR/VR, 360-degree video, quizzes, and polls
are just a few examples of interactive content.
Interactive
content will be one of the decades top marketing trends for a few reasons:
This type of content is new and original, helping it cut through the noise
It gives visitors a reason to stay on the page
It’s extremely shareable (almost everyone has seen someone shareresults of a silly quiz like “What kind of cheese are you?”)
Voice-Powered Search
As the growth in technology continues
to increase rapidly, we will start to see more people using smartphones with
voice assistants.
Features like Google, Alexa, and Siri are useful in digital marketing. Voice assistants can search for things, read text loudly, and even voice dictate text messages for you so that you can be hands-free.
Voice search is also essential when using it for your business. It’s helping in the growth of a mobile-friendly movement and adding value to local SEO. Voice search also boosts the use of Artificial Intelligence and prioritizes semantics of searches.
that
people may ask concerning your products and provide detailed answers.
Immersive Technology like AR and VR
Augmented
reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have exploded in popularity over the past
few years and are quickly becoming one of the top marketing trends. While VR
was the more popular of the two for a long time, it is predicted that AR will
outpace VR in 2020 and
by 2021, VR won’t be able to catch up.
AR
is already being used by major companies like IKEA. Using their app and AR,
customers can see what a piece of furniture would look like in their space
before purchasing (or even setting foot in a store)!
Shoppable Posts
By
now, you know that social media is a huge part of online marketing. What you
might not realize is just how many people shop on social. 60% of Instagram
users say they discover new products on Instagram and in a survey of over 4,000
Pinterest users, a whopping 70% said Pinterest helps them find new products.
These platforms have taken note of the fact that people are using them to shop and have made it easier for merchants to sell via social media. Over the past few years, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook all have ways for eCommerce stores to create shoppable posts using a native integration that makes it easy to tag and shop products directly in your posts. For online retailers, this is a great way to drive traffic to product pages.
By
utilizing social commerce, you’re reaching new customers, reducing the barriers
to purchasing, and dramatically shortening the sales funnel. While shoppable
posts have been on the rise for the past few years, we expect them to become
the norm in the next decade.
Influencer marketing
Utilize influencer marketing
Influencer marketing has been around for several years now, and it’s not going away any time soon. Influencers used to be huge celebrities or “internet celebs” with tens of thousands of followers but now, companies are turning to people with much a smaller social media following to be influencers.
Leveraging influential people on social media allows you to reach their audience with a voice that they trust.
Personalization
Currently, only a few companies are
using some form of personalization. And big conglomerates like Amazon are
already doing it well.
This household name built their huge
internet business by analyzing customers’ behaviors and promoting products
based on assumptions and the user’s past purchase history. It showcases
products that a person may be interested in by putting forth similar or
complementary products in a Recommendations tab, and Amazon found that this
upsell tactic works in getting more business.
The primary benefit of personalized
marketing is having the control to reach a specific group of customers. And by
collecting user data from list segments, surveys, or studies, you’re better
positioned to create more relevant and effective email campaigns towards
targeted audiences based on their buying habits, interests, and behaviors.
90%
of 1,000 people surveyed said they find personalization appealing and 80% said
they’re more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized
experiences. Customers are beginning to expect personalization and there are a
lot of ways for digital marketers to deliver.
The rise of
alternative platforms
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram tend to be the core platforms used by B2C brands, with LinkedIn also being vital for B2B companies. However, many users are growing fatigued with these core platforms while brands have to fight harder than ever before to achieve good levels of organic reach and engagement.
While TikTok
is unlikely to be the best option for B2B brands, B2C companies with a younger
target audience (41%
of TikTok users are aged between 16 and 24) could find it to be a great platform to encourage engagement with
users who are stepping away from more traditional social media platforms.
As well as
TikTok, a good platform to invest in for those looking to encourage e-commerce
sales through social media is Pinterest. Although Pinterest is far from new on
the scene, it has experienced a recent resurgence, meaning it is now used for
more than just saving recipes or getting decorating inspiration.
Pinterest has
found that it fits well into the e-commerce space and has an audience that is
engaged with the idea of buying products they see on the platform. In
fact, 75%
of Pinterest users say
they are “very interested” in new products compared to just 55% of people on
other social media platforms.
Increased use of artificial intelligence
The name “Artificial Intelligence” is
exactly how it sounds; it refers to robots or machines having the ability to
work like humans. AI uses a combination of different features such as chatbots
and voice assistants to quickly find answers.
For
instance, Alexa and Siri are voice assistants that provide excellent customer care. Just like a human, they can take
orders from the users and work behind the scenes on their behalf.
Transparency
Research indicates that companies
producing transparent and easy-to-digest information are likely to retain the
bulk of their customers.
However, how you handle a customer’s
private data is vital. In 2018, the GDPR policy was more actively enforced to
ensure that companies handle customer data transparently.
This means that there will be more
emphasis on this in the future; companies will be required to be completely
transparent on what kind of information is being shared to promote their
products.
Be an open book to your customers- tell them as much as you can about who they are doing business with.
If customers raise some concerns or questions, respond immediately.
Be able to take constructive criticism from your customers and respond in a friendly, non-judgmental tone.
Telling stories
on social
Since the launch of Snapchat, other social media platforms have rushed to add the story’s format to their offering. The result has been huge growth in the usage of this format for Instagram in particular, which as of January 2019, boasts 500 million daily active Stories users across the globe.
Stories offer a different experience to feed-based sharing due to the fact that they are visual and designed to be both created and consumed in-the-moment, rather than shared to a feed that will remain visible.
There’s a lot of room for experimentation, tongue-in-cheek posts and fun, which makes stories highly engaging, and it is one of the likely reasons as to why stories had a growth rate that was 15x the rate of Feeds in 2017.
However, the growth in stories isn’t just among consumers, businesses are also utilizing this social media tool for marketing purposes.
Right now, a lot of different changes are taking place in the search industry and updates are happening constantly. These changes in the search algorithms have profoundly affected the user’s search results.
Every new algorithm comes with different benefits or problems, depending on how you look at it. Ultimately, the goal of search engines is to help users get specific results that answer their questions.
Therefore, you will see in the next
decade that the quality of search results will improve dramatically.
The bottom line
We know a
lot of the stuff mentioned above isn’t talked about a lot and they aren’t
popular marketing topics that everyone wants to hear… but it is the future.
These are trends that will
come true, some already are, and you have to adapt for them.
Here’s the beautiful part,
though. You just read this, and now have a chance to act on the information
before your competition. So, make sure you go and do so.
We want to see you not only
succeed but also want you to beat your competition. And we believe you can,
whether you are a big company, or just starting off with very little to no
money.
It’s difficult to predict which methods will connect with consumers most effectively in the ever-changing landscape of marketing. Just when marketers believe they understand their audience, a new technology, new behavior or even an entirely new audience alters everything. It is drastically disrupting the marketing landscape.
Disrupting the marketing landscape.
The digital marketing landscape that encompasses SEO, social media, PPC, content marketing
and more is witnessing a dramatic shift. There may have been a time when you
could’ve dismissed artificial intelligence or visual search as gimmicks from
the latest blockbuster science fiction film, but that time is long gone.
There are many new digital marketing trends and strategies that are evolving in the current high-tech, Internet-connected era and businesses nowneed to use them to succeed in their efforts because what worked for you last year may
not work this year.
Social
media,
streaming content, and the ease of creating or consuming digital content have
made the internet the place to be. So if you want to market to your audience online, how should you do it? In this article, we explore the top trends
digital marketers should know or prepare to master.
Disrupting the marketing landscape … voice interaction
According to Search Engine Land, voice-based commerce sales in the United States reached
$1.8 billion in 2017 and are projected to reach $40 billion by 2022. Yep,
that’s 40 billion! This trendmeans you must get ahead of the
game.
Voice searching is an
ingenious bit of technology. After all, who doesn’t like being able to simply
say out loud to the nearest smart speaker, “Place an order for school supplies”?
Not only does voice
searching make it easier to find information online without pulling out a
device; people love it because it reduces their screen time. Next year, make
sure you’re optimized for voice searches.
Content marketing remains king
Content marketing will always have a strong impact because of the exposure and backlinks you can receive for your brand. Writing interesting content and marketing it to influencers is a win-win.
You are helping people with solution-oriented content, and the influencers help your exposure and outreach so it’s widely seen by the right audience and shared with their peers.
Influencer
marketing is a type of word-of-mouth marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market. Rather than marketing directly to a large
group of consumers, you instead pay influencers to get out the word for you.
Using influencers
is a very effective marketing tool that works to attract customers. Influencers
can be anyone from celebrities and Instagram or YouTube stars to well-known
bloggers and journalists who help spread the word about your business or
product through their social channels.
As influencer-tracking technologies continue to improve, brands are becoming better equipped at fielding and managing large networks of
high-engagement, low-following micro influencers for their campaigns.
This largely untapped market will soon allow for more brands to
avoid the significant costs of mid- to high-level influencers and invest in
more down-to-earth and relatable influencer marketing.
Disrupting the marketing landscape … a bigger AI role
We are all watching the rise of artificial
intelligence (AI) in marketing and how it affects our clients’ relationships
with consumers. As a company that focuses on bringing out emotionalconnections through physical environments, we’ll see AI play an even bigger role for brands
as they look to personalize and automate more digital and traditional
communications.
AI can also monitor consumers’
online patterns and help you understand their behavior in real time, though
there are legitimate concerns about whether this is ethical or not. Even if you
decide not to take advantage of AI in this way, however, it’s smart to pay attention to how consumers react to it and whether your competitors use it.
Artificial
intelligence will take over the world! Or at least the world’s simpler jobs.
It has the highest
year-over-year growth compared to all other technologies on the list.
Audience engagement
The ability to engage with audiences (that is, making audiences
part of the brand story) will have a huge impact. The less friction there is to
engagement, the more connected people feel.
Brands that are more willing to interact with customers publicly
will have a strong impact—and brands that can show how this engagement
influences their products and services will make an even bigger impact.
Audiences seek expertise, critical insight and ways to be better
at all points of interest. Experiential and interactive engagement with a brand
is the future of consumer-brand connectivity.
From livevideo to recorded advice, to content with real-time responses, to contests and beyond, it’s about offering information and encouraging feedback from stakeholders in a way that establishes trust.
Don’t just think
YouTube. To witness higher engagement with your video marketing, you can make a
video post or start a live broadcast on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.
Live video is
gaining popularity, with a large number of businesses using it for interviews,
product demos and “behind the scenes” glimpses of events, life in the office,
how products are made, etc.
While
YouTube may be the most popular way to consume videos, even more popular than
Facebook, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be putting videos on Facebook or
any of the other social media platform for that matter.
Video
digital marketing, in some ways, offers the best of both worlds. The actual
budgeting and mechanics of video production are well understood and documented,
since video itself is a 20th century medium.
However,
now video is paired with the incredibly accurate and valuable user metrics of
digital media to provide much more useful data on how specific efforts are
performing.
Interactive video content
Video marketing has been trending upward for years now.
We’re seeing an increase in
videos on social media, websites, and blogs. People are even running
successful video blogs.
But now we’ll start seeing
additional changes in the way video is consumed. I’m talking about interactive
videos.
As the video plays, users
have a chance to view the entire area by clicking the navigation button in the
top left corner of the screen.
The idea behind interactive
videos is to increase engagement.
Live video is a separate yet important thing
While video is a valuable
tool, one of the fastest rising stars in digital marketing is the use of live
video. Part of this is due to the massive spike in streaming services, thanks
to popular channels such as “Twitch,” which allows people to easily
stream video game play, or even devices like Sony’s PS4 game console that come
with live streaming abilities built right into the box.
Live streaming, as it is
called, is especially big for digital marketing when combined with influencer
marketing. Whether it’s the new generation of social media influencers or
traditional sources, such as celebrities, athletes, and musicians, having a
live stream with an influencer who is interacting directly with comments is a
huge draw for an audience.
Is this nfluencer marketing?
Chatbots
Chatbots and live chat
isn’t new technology by any stretch. However, we’re definitely seeing a shift
in the way these are being used from a marketing perspective.
Have you seen chatbots
recently when visiting websites?
And 80% of companies say
they’re already using or plan to use chatbots by 2020.
I’m expecting to see a huge
increase in chatbots being used for marketing purposes in 2019 in order to
reach that number by 2020.
You should consider using
this technology in your business if you’re not already doing so. That’s
because implementing
live chat provides better customer service.
It’s much easier for
customers to communicate with chatbots online than to send an email or call a
representative.
Micro-moments
People spend an
average of 3 hours and 35 minutes on their smartphones every day, and by 2019, mobile devices will be the medium that gets the most minutes
in the U.S. (finally surpassing television).
This is changing
the way brands must work to capture buyers’ attention.
Micro-Moments is a “new consumer
behavior,” as termed by Google, that delivers your marketing message
clearly and concisely in a way that is of interest to the consumers – all
within a span of seconds (otherwise, they lose their attention and are onto the
next article!).
People generally
make instant decisions on what to eat, which restaurant to choose, what to
purchase, or where to go, so Micro-Moments that that every marketer should know
about are:
Beacon technology
Beacon technology is
similar to GPS, but it’s not quite as complex.
Businesses are leveraging
beacon technology to target customers, especially in retail stores. Here’s how
it works.
First, companies need to encourage their customers to download their mobile apps.
Once the app is installed
on a user’s device, it will track their location. When an app user walks by a
beacon in a store, the company knows exactly where the customer is within that
store.
It’ll be able to tell when
the person is shopping for a specific product. Then, the brand can send the
user a promotion via a push notification that’s related to what they’re
looking at.
So to stay ahead
of the curve and increase conversions in the coming year, you’ll need
to get better at producing custom, conversational content – particularly audio
and video content – to share with your better-targeted audience.
Digital Spark Marketing’s Firestorm Blog
New technology and ease of
accessibility have made marketing more competitive than ever before. That’s why you need to recognize the newest trends.
It’s
up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor
may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that
it is within you already.
All
you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day
you learn and apply new lessons.
When
things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try.
Learn. Improve. Repeat.
When
things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next
step. Call
today.
Are
you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself
and your team?
Mike
Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer
service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that
relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital
Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.
We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a
free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
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