Online marketing has come a long way from spam emails and ad banners. Its projected growth of $786.2 billion by the year 2026 adequately proves this. Digital marketing continues to grow more sophisticated with each passing year, from ever-evolving techniques such as affiliate marketing to innovative concepts such as interactive marketing. The prevailing trends in online marketing can very well shape the face of commerce as we know it, seeing as so much of our business is done on the internet these days. If you're looking to ride the wave of the hottest digital marketing trends right now, read on to find out what they are and how you can get in on them.
Watchable Social Media-Based Video Advertising
In this day and age, the dominion of short form, social media-based video content is practically absolute, especially among young people. Instagram sees over 1 billion visitors daily, the vast majority of whom are under the age of 30. The prevailing success of brands who have managed to secure sponsorship deals with YouTubers who know how to make even advertisements watchable is nothing to scoff at. And that’s to say nothing of TikTok.
Due to the changed nature of social interaction in this post-pandemic world, we are experiencing a dramatic uptick in social networks that provide the most efficient method of information delivery available to us right now: video. Well-thought out video content holds attention much better than text or images, and has the potential to impress itself upon the audience by being catchy, sensational, funny, or otherwise memorable and watchable. "Watchability" is the key word here, and you can easily use audience feedback to gauge whether or not your ad placement went over well. You may have already come upon comments on YouTube or TikTok that go something like "this creator can even make ads entertaining!" That's the kind of content that you would want to associate your brand with. Failing that, a highly loyal audience base may still try out your products or services because they know that doing so will help support a creator that they love.
Conversational Marketing Tactics
These days, everyone is clued into the idea that corporations, especially large ones, do not really harbor any genuine concern about the welfare of their clientele. This gives you a unique advantage if you have a small or medium-sized business. Your smaller scale of operations makes you seem more approachable, just as the manager of a local store is more approachable than the administrator of a mall. You can leverage this to build trust and rapport with your customer base, such that they would even prefer you over larger, more established brands. The primary means to do this is known as conversational marketing. This philosophy is centered around communicating with the customer directly and in real-time. Then, they hone in on their needs and make an earnest attempt to fulfill them.
We have already seen the beginnings of this in the form of website customer support chat, and more recently in larger brands maintaining a constant presence on social media. However, these are widely regarded to be lacking in promptness and sincerity. Customers respond better when they feel like they are interacting with an actual person, not an AI or an overly drilled customer service rep. You can improve massively upon the lackluster attempts of companies in the past by playing the conversational marketing game more actively. Attract customers with a strong, accessible social media presence, and reel them in further with useful and informative tools such as a well-built website.
An experienced digital marketing agency should be able to help you with the heavy lifting there. Then, maintain your clientele by being casual and friendly, marketing your products in such a way that actually addresses their needs. This also entails being constantly available to assist clients, give free quotes and advice, and troubleshoot issues with your products. Such behavior makes you come across as far more sincere than a megacorporation responding to their clients in an overly clinical and robotic way.
Personalized and Interactive Content
People like to have agency, and to be allowed to engage with things at their own pace. That's why interactive content tailored to individual customers' preferences and personality is on the rise. Interactivity reduces the annoyance potential customers feel when faced with traditional ads. Personalization delivers solutions that are immediately relevant to each customer's specific situation, which translates to better retention and higher conversion rates. These days, interactive marketing is most commonly practiced in the form of contests , giveaways, quizzes, and surveys. There is plenty of room for improvement here. You can amp up the interactivity of contests and giveaways by developing your own proprietary gaming app. Or you can grab attention with novel, captivating content such as 360-degree videos or interactive visual presentations.
Personalized marketing, on the other hand, can take the form of offering individual customers plenty of options to tailor your offerings to their specifications. Think of it as the counterpart to search engine optimization. SEO hooks in customers to your site, while personalization lets them access exactly what they're looking for as quickly as possible. As much as possible, you should give the customer the means to craft their own experience using your resources, instead of defining your product for them.
The internet can be fickle at the best of times, but you can be sure that these trends will have a lasting effect on the online market, simply because they focus on things that all human beings share. We all want to be entertained, engage in things we find worthwhile, and be in control of the content we get exposed to. If you deliver this to your client base, you can be sure that you've made an impression on enough of them to provide a net benefit to your brand image.
