To keep up with the shift in customer perspective, marketing professionals need to make some sweeping changes in their strategies. They need to implement fresh tactics to bolster their current strategy and keep up with consumer trends and preferences in 2019.
Customers prefer to go online to know more about a product using a search engine or visit the company's official website. Using inbound marketing strategies combined with content marketing and other strategies to build their leads are highly successful than traditional strategies.
Integrating machine learning into marketing automation
Email marketing automation is a technique where artificial intelligence and machine learning are applied to automate targeting and web personalization.
One such example is how New Balance doubled Chicago in-store sales at half the cost with mobile conversion rate optimization (CRO) campaign. Using the three-pronged strategy of optimizing Facebook ads, landing pages and implementing email marketing automation, it converted leads to in-store sales by offering special discounts in exchange for customer's email ids.
Integrating social messaging apps
The increasing use of messaging apps like Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat mobile app adds to more than half of the total mobile audience. Monitoring and measuring social media effectiveness using analytics like A/B testing and heat mapping to determine user behavior and comparing performances of two webpages or apps are valuable metrics. Using 'Voice Search' changes the way consumers interact and thus marketers should ensure relevant facts about their businesses are provided to the main voice providers (Google, Apple, Microsoft). You can capture further consumer attention by using Pinterest Lens and its functionality to put your products and services in front of consumers.
Marketers can push beyond traditional social media and leverage community-based platforms like Quora and Reddit to participate and interact with target customers. You can also widen your social reach with other alternatives to Reddit such as Voat, Product Hunt and Hacker News, which like Reddit, give updated technology news, best website designs related information and where one can debate on hot rated topics.
Integrating content marketing
Big Data and analytics and Content Marketing have continued to grow in importance and will be used by many businesses in the coming years.
Creating personas of website visitors with respect to customer types and consumer behavior is a powerful analysis technique that helps to increase the usability and customer centricity of a website as part of a user-centered design (UCD) process. Use of Native advertising through seamless paid ads on your content to promote new products and services is another interesting technique. Focusing on video streaming (live or recorded) in your marketing campaign can pull huge internet traffic worldwide, making it an important part of your marketing strategy.
Integrating search marketing into content marketing
Search marketing includes techniques such as Knowledge Panels, related questions, featured snippets and reviews. Apart from AdWords, Google's list of new features such as Enhanced CPC (ECPC) bidding and Smart Display campaigns show innovative examples of Google deploying machine learning. ECPC can get you more conversions by automatically adjusting your manual bids for clicks leading to a conversion on your website. Smart Display campaigns automate and optimize new and existing clienteles, set the right bids and create engaging ads across the web and apps.
Integrating digital marketing insights sources
The digital marketing tools library contains many free and paid sources of insight about your digital marketing elements namely Feedly, Podcasts, YouTube, Twitter Lists, Twitter saved searches and Google alerts. You can integrate Feedly into Buffer or Hootsuite for which using Twitter lists is useful. You can also check out the well-curated Zest which is a Google Chrome extension.
Integrating Artificial Intelligence
Integrating AI with a site's chat box or Facebook messenger increases user engagement and understanding of the brand's target market. Chatbots are popping up everywhere, both in Facebook and other live chat solutions- answering FAQs, placing orders and getting in touch with customer service.
These are some of the many trends summarizing how companies manage the opportunity of digital media, content, technology and data by integrating it into their marketing strategies.
