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For each article that states a golden marketing rule, you’ll see another article disapproving of that theory and claiming that it’s a thing of the past.
The truth is, oftentimes, somewhere in between.
As marketing has shifted from its traditional concept to a digital one, its concepts, techniques, and tools have also evolved.
Some have become redundant. Others have continued to produce results, with varying success rates depending on the industry, target audience, and other circumstances.
However, this article wasn’t written to focus on the history of marketing and the things it has taught us.
As valuable as history is, today we’re here to talk to you about seven things marketing evolution is expected to bring in the near future. This article aims to prepare you for these changes and have you adapt your marketing strategy accordingly.
1. Abandoning traditional customer segmentation
When doing customer segmentation, companies tend to create focus groups based on the socioeconomic status of their customers.
These focus groups are then asked specific questions, which are supposed to help a brand understand its buying behaviors.
Except that things don’t work in such a linear way anymore.
Why? For starters, in these questionaries, customers tend to give logic-driven answers.
In practice, however, customers are often led by impulse when making purchase decisions.
On the one hand, you may have high-end customers that are incredibly stingy with one type of product, whereas low-end customers are willing to splurge on that same product.
As customer behavior gets harder to understand, marketers are expected to struggle with segmenting customers into large categories.
A better, more flexible alternative might be attempting to understand:
- What motivates your customers?
- What are they willing to spend more money on – and why?
- What were they doing when they decided to look for or buy a specific product?
2. Making use of Big Data to reach a specific audience
To reach your target audience, you first have to understand who they are.
With the help of Big Data, you can collect and analyze information such as:
- The number and location of your website visitors
- Your target audience’s demographic
- How long do users stay on your website? Which pages do they stay the longest on? Which pages do they leave quickly?
- Did they find you through Google, social media, or some other webpage?
The analysis of this information will reveal your target audience and their buying patterns.
Understanding these patterns will help you not only attract more customers from your target market but also improve your content, making your ad targeting campaign a success.
If you need help driving targeted traffic to your website, you can partner up with one of the top social media marketing agencies in Miami.
3. Switch to more purposeful, easier-to-consume content
In the eyes of consumers, your content is the way to answer their questions and help them achieve their goals.
That means that SEO-optimized content that pitches a product, which:
- Doesn’t cater to their interests and needs
- Has no advantages over others on the market
- Fails to provide significant value
To make things even more challenging, aside from being helpful and informative, your content also needs to be entertaining and easy to consume.
With the attention span of consumers reaching an all-time low, video content is emerging as the best way to convince consumers to purchase in as little time as possible.
Of course, not all products and services can be sold in under 60 seconds, and certain types of consumers take more convincing.
To keep them interesting, you could make your videos interactive in which:
- A customer gets to choose their journey and ends up with a personalized product or a service
- A customer gets to participate in a quiz, learn something, and maybe even win a prize
- A customer gets to see how your product is made
- A customer gets to see how your company culture works
Aside from making interactive videos, make sure to keep diversifying your content and supplementing video content with blog posts, as Digital Silk’s Head of Content explains in the video below:
4. The rise of permission marketing
We’re not going to make a big, bold claim that telemarketing’s days are over because there’s still a purpose for them, and they do work.
However, we see a significant shift in the consumer’s mindset. A shift in which they want to have more control over their relationship with a brand.
Instead of being bothered by unwanted email spam, calls and messages from unknown numbers, and website pop-ups that are hard to opt out of, consumers nowadays prefer to be asked for permission:
Permission to receive content and promotions from brands at each step of the buyer’s journey.
We understand that this may sound challenging for companies that have been doing things differently for ages. However, permission marketing makes space for customers to reach out to companies they genuinely want to build a relationship with.
In essence, this sort of approach enables building brand awareness organically.
5. Offering customer-driven products
A way for your business to stand out is to shift to a customer-first marketing strategy. That means investing in taking customer experience to the next level.
In the future, marketers should put more effort into learning about the products that appeal to consumers.
A personalized product or service is one of the best ways to attract new customers, retain old ones, and have them spread the good word about your business by writing positive reviews.
This approach works because consumers like to know that their voices are heard and that their feedback is valuable.
6. Making vanity metrics a thing of the past
If you’ve been in this business for a while, you’ve probably figured out that a lot of social media metrics are, unfortunately, vanity metrics. We mean, let’s just take influencers who buy Instagram followers as an example.
It can be pretty discouraging to learn that a great number of page views, unique visitors, followers, and likes doesn’t guarantee a lot of conversions. It’s not the end of the world, though.
The truth is that more accurate and relevant metrics are bound to appear. Some already exist.
Instead of focusing on social media vanity metrics, your business could measure success against:
- Revenue that comes from recurring sources and repeats customers
- The number of active subscriptions
- Number of units sold
- Customer retention rate
7. Bridging the gap between digital marketing and other departments within a company
Instead of having teams working in silos, a business should ensure that all of its teams are aligned on targets and goals.
Each team has a different level of knowledge about the customer, the product, and the way the business operates. Having them all come together is the ultimate way to tackle problem-solving.
This means, firstly, that the war between your marketing and sales teams needs to end, once and for all.
Have your departments get to know each other, find a common language, and come up with collaborative solutions that cater to buyers’ needs.
Next, have your marketing team involved in supporting customers with their issues.
Where the support team has the necessary technical knowledge, the marketing team knows how to craft the most empathetic and professional response.
Finally, involve your marketers in the work of graphic designers and product developers.
This way, you’ll ensure consistency across different stages of product launch and provide much-needed feedback for improvement.