The face of marketing is constantly changing, and the tempo at which these changes occur is increasing. With each update to the technologies that consumers use and nuances in the way consumers interact with brands, so must your brand and marketing tactics be updated. Ideally, your business and your marketing tactics need to remain agile to adapt and reflect these changes.
Look at a few of these game-changers and consider implementing them:
Personalised marketing
Personalised marketing is taking consumer data and using it to deliver personalised communications and message to an individual prospect. An example of this would be to communicate with the consumer using their name, addressing their specific needs, or referencing the industry in which they work - It’s about making content as personalised as possible.
Personalised marketing can help brands by drastically improving the customer experience, think about receiving cold emails, you’re more likely to respond if it’s addressed to you. Personalisation can also raise ROI on marketing efforts, increase brand loyalty, create consistency across varying channels, and a more focused marketing strategy. However, it’s not without its own challenges, it can often be hard to find the right technology for the collection of consumer data, finding time and resources to dedicate to personalisation, and finding a way to utilise smart segmentation of your target audiences.
Social listening
It isn’t new but it’s growing in popularity amongst smaller businesses. It’s the process of monitoring social media channels for mentions and conversations surrounding your brand, competitor’s brands, and products. It presents an opportunity to track, analyse, and respond to these conversations. Social listening differs from social media monitoring as it tends to look forward by analysing information and using that to guide the brand’s strategy.
By employing social listening within your business, you’ll be able to improve the customer experience, identify new opportunities, understand consumer sentiment, monitor industry influencers, and compare to how you and your products or services are being discussed by consumers.
Live content
Live content helps to keep users up to date, it enables them to join the conversation and be a part of the experience in real-time despite not being at a physical location. The trick to live content is to get people interested ahead of time, this could mean the early promotion of an ‘ask me anything’ session on Facebook Live. Before going live, also give your video a great description to capture fans’ attention. During the session always be sure to talk with your viewers by responding to and answering comments, also never forget to ask people to subscribe and follow you.
Although often overlooked, Snapchat a Tik-Tok are the kings of visual communications; audience depending, and they offer a way to round-out good approaches to visual marketing.
TikTok
This social media platform has become so big so quickly and it’s going to continue to show growth; with mainly younger users who are early seeking-out trend participation. This makes TikTok an integral platform at the forefront of the latest trends.
Brands can take advantage of TikTok in many of the same ways businesses already use other social media platforms. You can create content for your brands’ channel and upload creative videos promoting products. Make use of TikTok existing influencers to develop your audience, consider co-branded or cross-promotions with other small brands. Additionally, you could also use paid advertising to reach TikTok users.
Social conscious audiences
Consumers are increasingly becoming more aware of global issues, it’s all about how your brand tackles these issues, which is something that will affect all businesses to some degree. Consider how your brand will address important issues such as global warming, politics, equality, education, and all other potential environmental factors that will turn consumers into detractors of your brand. With that said, if you’re a small coffee shop you probably won’t feel the need to address the political climate through your social strategy; but you might only source sustainable materials, which is something you can work into your social strategy.
Micro-communities
These are small online communities made up of less than 30 members, these groups members are segments of your larger target audience but share similar values, interests, viewpoints, or lifestyles. In smaller group numbers, community members often engage for longer periods and dig deeper into topics. The communities tend to have a specific purpose, they could be a soundboard amongst some of your peers and mentors so you can talk freely and have in-depth conversations about the industry you work in.
Brands’ should be aiming to influence and connect with micro-influencers, if your brand’s in the beauty industry try reaching to and beauty influencer who is part of these micro-communities, as new products they come across which they believe are good, they will then share it with highly motivated and highly interested consumers.
Conversational marketing
Conversational marketing isn’t exactly new either, but it moves consumers through marketing and sales funnels using automation. It’s effective because it helps to grow the relationship with the consumers in a conversational way, and it makes it easier for consumers to engage with your business.
Chatbots are software programs that use artificial intelligence to help consumers through pre-programmed responses and conditional logic, which the business owners have control over. They’re budget-friendly, as they don’t require staff to respond. They’re a great way to get started for small businesses, but as your business grows it’s better to offer live chat options where consumers can send a message directly to your team in real-time.