Does your business pay attention to media changing trends going on around you? I hope you do, as they can be critical to your marketing efforts. Knowing as much as you can about your market and your customers is a great way to start your marketing strategy.
Watch for media changing trends.
Within five years, if you’re in the same business you are in now, you’re going to be out of business.
Peter Drucker
For marketers today, everything begins and ends with consumers. Understanding consumer preferences and behaviors are essential to developing a successful campaign, brand, and offers. Consumer trends tell us what habits or behaviors are becoming more prevalent.
They help us track what people buy, why they buy, how they use products, and how they communicate about brands.
“What’s that word again that you used for stealing content,” my newspaper editor friend asked me? “Curation,” I said, “and it’s not stealing content.”
It seems to me that at the heart of the controversy is a fundamental shift in the value of information. It used to be scarce, but now we’re drowning in it. That’s creating a fundamental shift in the economics of media. Therefore, the answer lies not only in product innovation, but business model innovation, which is even harder.
Trends are driven by basic consumer needs and desires (like in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs), coupled with short-term or long-term cultural shifts, economic undulations, new technology development, politics, or even popular culture.
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.
With consumer behavior and preferences changing faster than ever, businesses need to seek to regularly understand and apply consumer and market trends to marketing strategy.
We consistently study the market and consumer trends.
For this article, we have categorized them into three groups: social care, time-related, and technology. Let’s get going in discussing them.
Social care
Creativity is the biggest need
No matter how much you are spending time on social media, it won’t fetch any result until and unless you are creative. You cannot expect the audience to react positively to messages that are cliché and old. Instead, try to think something out of the box.
Be it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform, you will have to design the content in a manner as creative as possible. And once it is created, the content is sure to attract lots of viewers.
Most of the major social media platforms are likely to remain relevant well into the future. However, marketers will need to put more time and energy in creative content to keep in front of potential customers.
Related post: Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study
Personalization continues its surge
Customization is becoming more routine in all marketing tactics. As we move forward in time, it will be harder to market mass-produced products and services.
The “one size fits all” approach to marketing where mass messages on television and traditional media are becoming less effective due to media saturation.
We are seeing the rise of personalized marketing on e-commerce sites, websites, and emails that tailor the advertising and user interface to the relevant interests of consumers.
Visit an online store once and come back and the website knows that you are male and like Nike runners. The next email that arrives has also been personalized with products that you visited while shopping online.
The web is capturing your habits as it reads the data applies intelligence and serves up information that is relevant to “you”.
This trend is being driven by technology using “big data” to increase marketing effectiveness.
This reorganization and repackaging of the web’s growing content is an example of the consumer’s desire for personalized experiences. Consumers are no longer reliant on brands or news outlets to satiate their intellectual curiosities.
Instead, we are seeing the rise of user-centric platforms that discover, reformat, and organize a myriad of digital content outlets.
Spawned from crowd-shaped content discovery tools like Digg, BuzzFeed, and Reddit, the next generation of content consumption platforms is highly personalized, catering to users’ interests, social networks, and preferred learning styles.
Consider Flipboard, the mobile application that lets users aggregate content from the news, blogs, and their social networks into a magazine-style format, heavy on visual and sensory cues.
Upping the ante of content personalization, Flipboard recently purchased Zite, a competing content curation platform that relies on algorithms and user feedback to personalize the stream of articles displayed to users.
On the other end of the content customization spectrum, there’s the app Umano. Serving the busy lives of consumers on the go and catering to audiophiles, Umano reads articles aloud to users so they can catch up on the news at the office while driving, or while working out.
The iPhone app relies on a mix of behavioral algorithms and editorial oversight to curate important news stories each day and then has voice actors record audio clips of top stories.
Time-related trends
Real-time marketing
The intersection of location awareness, social media, and mobility is finally delivering the ability to target customers with incentives and coupons at the point of decision-making.
This is compressing buying cycles and creating the need for more agile thinking and actions. But these tools are also providing a powerful way to listen to customers and understand trends and micro-trends as they pop up.
Social media is an excellent process for companies to connect directly with their customers. Most of the companies are likely to continue utilizing this opportunity to the fullest. And in addition, the concept of real-time marketing is going to become more and more popular.
So, brands need to be consistent in their activities. They have to respond as fast as possible to the comments and queries that the end-users and potential customers are posting on the social media platform.
However, companies need to be prudent enough to leverage different opportunities to remain connected with the audience on a regular basis.
Sense and respond not to make and sell. Be more nimble, fast and responsive based on customer insights
Although the vast majority of retail sales are still made in-store, online shopping is grabbing market share at an explosive rate.
As consumers become more reliant on online shopping, the demand for expedited shipping will continue to grow, especially for high-income tech-savvy Millennials.
Major tech companies and retailers are taking notice and scrambling to meet the demand. eBay, Google, Amazon, and Walmart are all actively testing same-day delivery offerings.
As an example, eBay launched eBay Now, allowing consumers in targeted metro areas to receive products from local merchants, including Target, Best Buy, and Walgreen’s, within one to two hours for $5 per order.
Orders are delivered by the courier closest to the merchants in question, and users can track the delivery’s progress and phone the courier directly. While it’s currently available in limited metro areas, eBay has plans to expand the service.
Amazon charges $8.99 for most same-day delivery purchases, or just $3.99 for Amazon Prime subscribers, who already receive free two-day shipping for their annual membership fee.
Same-day delivery is available as long as the item is in stock at a nearby warehouse or a third-party seller can quickly send the item.
To further improve delivery time, Amazon is building new warehouses, adding refrigerators and robots to existing warehouses, and routing deliveries through multiple carriers, including FedEx, UPS, and now the USPS for Sunday deliveries.
Implications for marketers Shipping and delivery times will become a much more important incentive for marketers to use in converting shoppers into buyers.
E-commerce and brick-and-mortar retailers will need to cater to demanding consumers by shortening fulfillment and shipping times, along with concrete delivery dates and times.
There is an opportunity to work with established shipping services (e.g., UPS and FedEx) or integrate third-party crowdsourced services like PostMates, Deliv, Zipments, or WeDeliver.
Deliv, for example, connects e-commerce retailers with local crowdsourced delivery personnel to allow online shoppers to receive their orders in hours, not days. Postmates, on the other hand, serves local brick-and-mortar retailers by offering delivery from any local store or restaurant within an hour.
Consumers will also place increasing pressure on retailers to offer universal free shipping for all non-expedited orders.
For years, e-commerce retailers have fought to offer free shipping on all purchases due to costs, but with the advent of same-day and near-instant shipping options, consumers will further question the value of paying for regular ground shipments.
Retailers will need to adjust their strategy or lose the business.
Visual content always has had a major impact on marketing endeavors.
So, its use on social media platforms is expected to increase as well. But the use of visual content on social media is not going to be limited to images only.
With the dwindling patience of people, short videos are also likely to emerge as a new mode of communication in the near future. So, video marketing is going to be one of the most important forms of marketing on social media platforms.
Companies are likely to create short but informative videos on their products and services. And this is going to be one of the best ways to connect with the target audience within the shortest possible time.
Visual marketing
With 70% of marketers recently reporting that they planned on increasing their use of images in 2015, image-centric content is becoming a central part of most marketing plans.
Using attractive and well-placed images within your blog and social media posts, as well as using infographics to drive traffic and build inbound links, are both now common practices among businesses who understand the importance of visual design.
Businesses looking to reach certain demographics – such as women and teens – will need to continue to expand their presence on visually based social platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.
We first saw the creep of visual marketing into the landscape when YouTube entered mainstream consciousness a few years ago. Since then this creep has turned into a torrent of visual marketing with the emergence of Pinterest, Instagram, and even Slideshare.
This has gone to a whole new level as Vine’s 6-second snack-size video and now Instagram’s new 15-second video app has marketers scrambling for creative inspiration to apply and leverage this new trend.
The bottom line
Our message for businesses is simple. Think more like an 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. Innovation isn’t about talking, it’s about doing. The action.
Like anything else, fostering creative business ideas require practice. And distinguishing between creativity, invention, and innovation. 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.
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:
Case Studies to Evaluate New World Marketing Concepts
How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study
Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Lessons and Examples
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.
