Digital marketing trends change fast. What works today may not work tomorrow. The technology is constantly updating.
To maintain and expand your customer base, by all means, you need to do everything it takes to keep up with the latest marketing trends, or else your competitors will win the audience.
Here are a few examples affecting technological change:
- Google algorithm ranking update for SEO
- Facebook is eliminating the 20% text rule for ad images
- Facebook, Messenger, Instagram & WhatsApp come out with story features
To make it easier for you to understand, we’ve compiled a list of digital marketing trends that every marketer should be following in 2017.
Trend 1: Influencer Marketing
With newer types of marketing methods being introduced each day, influencer marketing is likely to stay untouched and remain in the limelight.
Simply put, influencer marketing is a type of marketing, that focuses on using the key leads to drive an organization’s brand message to their pool of audience or, in simple terms, “followers”.
It could potentially help you to concentrate on your target audience, rather than going too generic.
To use “Influencer marketing”, first, you need to identify individuals that have influence within your target market.
To sum this up, these individuals basically have a large pool of followers on their respective social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube).
By partnering up with these influencers, you may use their network of followers to appeal to the audiences that before were unreached or difficult to reach.
There is no doubt that traditional ads are no longer effective and do not look as appealing to consumers as before.
With so many ads outside there, be it in newspapers, electronic gadgets, social media, or radio, now consumers are left with no choice but to choose to ignore or block them.
With the advancement of technology, even internet browsers are no longer effective, because users can now install ad blockers to block the ads.
The same applies to social media ads. However, influencer marketing leaves an impression on the customers.
Let’s say you saw your favourite artist/celebrity sharing a post on social media, where he or she mentioned buying his or her favourite clothes and affiliation to a particular brand, I am sure, the same instance you would either search online or go out to buy the same brand the next day.
On a more negative side, influencer marketing requires a lot of research and may be pricey, however, it surely has its advantage in contemporary branding and sales.
Trend 2: Content marketing
Content marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online materials such as blog posts, social media posts, and videos that do not directly promote your brand, but are intended to trigger the interest in your products or services.
You can now provide relevant and informative content to your target customers with your solutions.
Informative contents like blog posts and infographics do help your organisation at early-stage brand awareness.
Let’s say if your potential customers are ready to purchase your products or services, they will obviously search online to get more general knowledge about your company.
Product videos and blog posts, will give them useful information about the general idea. By providing these contents, you will set yourself apart from your competitors.
3 main reasons to use content marketing:
- Generate sales leads
- Save costs
- Customer loyalty
Let me share with you a very good example. iPay88 has been constantly updating its blog section on the website. The blog consists of e-commerce-industry-related news and topics differ every time.
Merchants who are new to e-Commerce or existing e-Commerce players will definitely have an advantage of reading content of their interest
By producing regular content, you will attract your readers to come back and check your content out. This boosts your customer loyalty and potential clients of yours will gain more trust in you as an industry expert and will eventually seek to work together with you.
And why does content marketing save costs? Because it takes no or very minimal costs to update your blog.
Trend 3: Live videos on social media platforms
Whether your business is small, a brick-and-mortar store, or an e-Commerce company, you will need to reduce the distance between yourself and your customer.
Live video is much more than a marketing play, because it reduces the distance by showing a more humanised side of your brand and business.
With live videos, now you can share an experience moment-by-moments with a large pool of target audiences from all over the world.
Those viewers can engage by commenting, liking or sharing your live videos which would lead to raising awareness of your brand. There are many different ways to expose yourself in live videos.
For example, if you’re a beauty shop, you could display your beauty products, features and usage; if you’re in IT service, you could do live reviews of IT gadgets or simply give tips on various “how-to” situations.
When you are doing a live video, all your users who follow/connect to you will get an instant pop-up notification showing that you are currently doing a live-video.
Trend 4: Stories on social media platforms
If you noticed, Instagram, WhatsApp are owned by Facebook. Last year, Instagram adopted the Instagram story feature, which is similar to Snapchat’s.
This year, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have rolled out their stories as well. Stories are an engaging and very personal way to connect with your followers and potential customers. They will disappear 24 hours after publication, thus do not publish materials that you wish to be seen for a longer time.
Stories feature is useful when you share the behind-the-scenes stories. People often see the great things about the company, but have they seen the people behind it?
People generally love to see behind the scenes and see how, what they love about your brand, has been created. Let’s say you attend an important event, that has limited access to the public, you record a few moments from the event and share them with your social media fans.
In this way, you will be able to engage them and show some interesting peeks from the event.
Conclusion
Now, with the examples above, I hope you get an overview of the marketing trends that you should not miss out on.
We’re living in a digital world and it is important for marketers to stay up-to-date with the trends. Technology has been constantly changing every day, and if you do not adapt to it, you will fall behind. It’s the same with your business.
If your business is still focusing more on the brick-and-mortar model, you should take a huge step forward and move online.
Contact iPay88 for a consultation with our team of professionals and explore further opportunities for your business.
