The year is 2023. You have a concrete digital marketing strategy filled with recent trends and consumer behavior. You start seeing exponential growth and fantastic client retention with the proper execution of this strategy.
Feels good, no?
With enough time on your hands to plan a functional, convenient and trendy digital marketing strategy, you can own this reality!
To give you an ancient example that teaches us the power of marketing, in 1930, there were two strong competitors in the cereal industry, Kellogg’s and Post. But the great depression hit the world at that time.
While Post decided to cut back on marketing expenses, Kellogg’s doubled the budget and marketed more aggressively. The result? When the economy rose again, Kellogg’s not only defeated its competition but also increased its profit by 30%.
Cut to almost 90 years later; not much has changed. Marketing has evolved into digital marketing, and new and interesting trends have come into play. But the motive remains the same; the results continue to expand.
10 digital marketing trends
With huge dependence on social media trends and impulsive mem culture, it is quite difficult to accurately predict the trends. But there are industry experts who can give insights on such topics so that you don’t miss the time to totally nail it.
Now, predicting and acting on these digital marketing trends is not only important to be at par with your competitors but also because it decides how and where your revenue will be spent.
There will be expenses to follow these trends and also to later maintain a coherent digital marketing flow. Even if doing so has a high chance of bringing in revenue and profit, being mindful of such expenses can help a lot.
There are these areas that will boom for the marketing industry in 2023:
- Best customer experience
With new apps and websites opening up every minute that provide similar products and services, the safest bet of standing out from the crowd is through enhancing the customer experience.
Good customer service not only brings new clients but also helps a lot in retaining old clients. These old customers can help build a social proof of the services provided and hence help in more profits.
A seamless experience that has no points, which can trigger distress in the customers, comes in handy in a world where instant gratification sells. Customers are not only impatient but also demand quality experience.
To incorporate good customer experience, you can even consider taking surveys and questionnaires from your old clients to get a sense of the practical problems they face. This will help widen the sales funnel drastically.
- Purposefully visualized content
You must have heard a zillion times that visual content is preferred over textual content any day. What’s new in that?
The new trend is inserting and expressing a purpose with the way you present our content. It should be clear why you are presenting that information visually and how exactly it is helping the customer.
According to a survey, almost 51% of companies said that more than 90 % of their content had some form of visual data to support this point. More than half of the companies are a big number, and you should not be left behind in leveraging this opportunity.
Science supports this because 60% of us are visual learners, meaning the information we acquire through visuals can be retained better than textual information.
Knowing what kind of visuals to use also plays a huge role in leveraging this area. Data charts, GIFs and memes, videos, and even stock photos can be used.
- Personalization
Remember how we emphasized good customer experience earlier? Well, it is not totally dependent on the technical aspects of the app or website.
Customer experience can also be built through personalization and telling your story in a way that connects with the audience.
Like the quote that says, “People remember how you made them feel,” adding a personal touch increases the chances of your audience feeling something with your brand massively!
- Market transformation
While focusing on Customers seems like the only option available to amp up your digital marketing skills, looking sideways and focusing on your competitors can also do some good.
Believe it or not, all the brands that have stayed around for a long time have transformed the market in a way that makes it easy to remember them.
For example, let us look at Apple Inc. Unlike android devices, apple worked on building an ecosystem with its own products. Because of this, a customer who bought the apple phone found it convenient to use an apple laptop instead of another brand.
Triggering a market transformation may look intimidating at first, but in reality, it just makes the process of branding a whole lot easier.
Such a market transformation might push our competitors to comment on these changes, which means more marketing for you!
- Social media
While you might have expected that the dependence of people on social media might reduce as we move on from the pandemic, it is not entirely true, seeing how things have fared out.
Social media still influences the buying patterns of people quite heavily.
Leveraging social media has a lot of stages, such as optimizing the profiles, adding the right keywords and optimizing for the platform, and adopting the tone and mood of the people using that platform.
There are numerous tools that can help you achieve this, and following a systematic approach can help you reach your goals faster.
- AI – Artificial Intelligence
There is an increasing shift in the digital marketing strategies of major brands to take only data-driven approaches. This approach is backed by accurate and precise data, which helps not only in the decision-making process but also in execution.
Automation of data collection at important points in the customer buying journey helps save time and energy and can be used to improve it further.
For these purposes, AI is seen as an emerging tool.
AI should be used only for backend processes where automation can be done without losing that personal touch. Trusting AI to handle human aspects of the marketing strategy can backfire as well.
Predictive analysis is also possible with the help of AI and big data tools. These can improve customer experience and reduce employee workload.
- Instant communication with customers
In a world of instant gratification, making customers wait is dangerous.
Almost all services that have seen instant success in the past few years have prioritized timely communication with their customers.
Addressing their queries and maintaining some form of communication with them, either through emails or promotional text messages, goes a long way in making them remember you and come back to you for purchases.
For this, many companies use a mix of modern technologies such as AI and human help. AI can help in categorizing the queries and directing them to the right department.
Addressing such queries instantly also shows the commitment and dedication a brand has toward its customers. Such a positive relationship helps with client retention and strong social proof.
- Influencer marketing
Another way in which the social media of your brand can get a push is through Influencer marketing.
Except for the clout that influencers have for their skills, their accounts can prove to be a gold mine of reach and impressions for you. This is because they already have a lot of people who would be interested in your services.
Leveraging these people is a skill you need to learn. It can be done by various methods, such as sending PR packages or collaborating with influencers who would help you.
- Virtual events
There has been a roof-touching rise in the number of virtual events held ever since the pandemic. This is because it gives people a medium to interact with other people without leaving the safety net of their homes.
Virtual events can be used for promoting products, knowledge, and services where a community can be built.
Virtual events can also be used as a place for you and your customers to have fun, where you understand the possible problems they might be facing, and they understand your brand story.
- Internet of things ecosystem
There are a few homes where an ecosystem of digital devices has still not been built. Kids are growing up by learning about advanced features such as voice search. Not optimizing these features can make you lose out on a lot of probable audiences.
Smartphones nowadays are integrated with your whole life in the form of smart TVs, smartwatches, and whatnot.
IoT can help to derive customer insights that can help you really build a comprehensive strategy to retain customers and attract new ones.
Conclusion
Digital marketing strategies are destined to evolve frequently with upcoming trends. But leveraging these changes for maximum profit needs skills.
By keeping an eye out for such new changes, you can actually predict these and help them help you and your brand.
It is also more helpful to let professionals handle these trends for you. At McElligott Digital marketing, we believe in following a result-seeking and data-driven approach.
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