The competitive nature of the online marketing landscape is constantly keeping marketers and business owners at their heels, prompting them to step outside the traditional bounds and stride towards the direction of a more original and creative promotion strategy.
This constant need to innovate demands, advertising teams have to be well aware of the newly rising and hot trends and also have to make sure that they flex their creative muscles to bring their own ideas to the table.
With rapid advancement and growth in the technological sector, we take a look at some of the more viable and ever-so relevant marketing strategies that company owners can employ to reinvigorate their online presence and build upon it.
Video content is booming with platforms like YouTube and Facebook, where the amount of views registered and search queries processed are not so far behind in the race with search engines like Google. Apart from the live video content hosted on the aforementioned sites, TikTok is the latest contender to be a part of the competition.
By being the number one app download on the Apple Store, with 150 million daily active users in China alone, there’s a lot of potential when it comes to integrating ads and brand marketing, especially where celebrity endorsements are concerned.
Film studios like Universal Pictures were quick to steer this success into their marketing campaign for a recent film, while Musical.ly also wasted no time to merge and declare TikTok as its partnering company. The key aspect of video content, understandably, is the engagement with the user as this type of content has a likelihood of retaining 88% of the viewers and indirectly boost conversion rates by 71% if the users are successfully convinced to purchase a product or service.
Computers are becoming smarter and this presents us with the opportunity to rely on them more when it comes to performing automated tasks, communicating with customers and analysing user data to understand the consumer behavioural patterns.
Using this data can help a business articulate more accurate segmented group in the audience for marketing. Virtual assistants and chatbots are on the rise in sectors ranging from banks to e-commerce. In fact, a huge growth in the use of this type of customer service is expected by 2020, almost a 23% jump.
Apart from entertaining queries of customers and addressing them instantly with increased efficiency, virtual assistants play a vital role even in the deeper areas of marketing by collecting user data made public via social media sites including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The Hotel industry has employed the use of such tech for improving the hospitality measures in lieu of a more smooth and “special” guest experience. Similarly, insurance companies and banks utilize the machine learning aspect of AI to both improve customer service via chatbots and create accurate models that will allow them to determine and analyse customer churn rates better.
Users today demand and appreciate a versatile and flexible experience pertaining to a business service. This calls for any relevant information being made available regardless of the channels the platform is operated from. By allowing your platform to be accessible readily from social media, mobile devices and the web will ensure your consumers are provided with a seamless experience.
Having an interconnected network allows user to try out the service and make suitable decisions on their own. They can easily check details on different platforms, verify and confirm their purchases and remain updated about the progress of item delivery via a third medium. This type of strategy is quite successful as Invespreports a staggering 89% customer engagement is established using an ominchannel approach to market and deliver products.
Typed queries are getting old fast as there are new alternatives making their way to the digital market which consume both less effort and time. Voice and visual search provide a more accessible and streamlined browsing experience.
Voice search, via platforms like Google Assistant and smart-speaker services which are integrated within programs like Amazon’s Alexa, allow users to get instant results by being more natural and conversational in their queries.
The process of finding contact details about a particular online business, which is considered to be the first step in a user’s journey from visitor to consumer, can easily be facilitated by voice search. BrightLocal notes in their survey that 58% of consumers have used such a feature to obtain commercial details.
Visual search is becoming a popular phenomenon as well, especially when you consider limitations of things which an individual cannot seem to describe clearly or put it into words. The first two platforms to embrace this function were Pinterest with their “Lens” feature and Google Lense, both of which analyse the capture photo to give you relevant pieces of data relating similar products, reviews, purchase options and specifications/characteristics of the merchandise.
Podcasts utilize renowned audio channels with the likes of Spotify, SoundCloud and iTunes to host regular episodes encompassing different genres, topics and subject matters. Due to the growing community of podcast listeners, with an incredible 550,000 active listeners, global businesses are investing resources in creating podcasts for their own marketing or securing spots as short-duration commercials during popular podcasts.
According to Midroll’s findings, 60% of the surveyed 300,000 podcast listeners purchased a product after hearing about it in a segment of the podcast series. Thanks to the nature of the platform which keeps users engaged, 81% listeners are likely to pay attention up to the very end of the podcast, so no matter where you product is promoted in the time-frame of the episode, it’s almost guaranteed to be heard by the avid listeners. Some brands, particularly the e-commerce ones, will take the extra step of announcing a special discount or voucher code for careful listeners, luring them in towards their website.
Whether it’s about promoting content via video channels, through image-recognition or voice-enabled mediums, an omnichannel approach that integrates all particular platforms of the respective business, marketers have to value user-satisfaction and ease-of-use in order to leave a positive impression that might cause the individuals to edge closer to making a purchase.
Such technology calls for more automated tasks in the future where AIs can work alongside marketing teams to devise targeted strategies aimed at personalized and engaging marketing campaigns for potential consumers. If you really want to increase your businesses digital footprint, consider the aforementioned trends to revamp your marketing efforts.