Three major marketing trends have emerged over the past two years — and customers expect you to be keeping up with them. Are you? If not, you’re falling short of meeting their growing expectations for your business.
The trends that should be reshaping your marketing efforts:
1. Melding of social media and business
While it’s true customers haven’t yet come around to the idea of being marketed to in the traditional sense on social media, they have grown an affinity for going to companies’ social pages to:
- find solutions to their problems
- pose questions, and
- provide feedback.
The more responsive your company is to these interactions, the more loyalty it’ll gain — and the more your fans will be worth in the long run.
A recent study from social intelligence company Syncapse found that Facebook fans are worth $174.17 over their lifetime on average — if you’re giving them a reason to return to your page.
A good first step is to ensure someone’s monitoring your social pages and responding to queries on a daily basis. Once you’ve got that down, then it’s time to start trying to engage fans with original content.
One thing to always keep in mind: Abide by the 80/20 rule — 80% of your content should be educational or informative in some way, and no more than 20% of it should be promotional.
2. Emergence of mobile technology
There’s no shortage of research out there showing that more email is read on mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) today than on personal computers.
And within the next two years, tablets are expected to begin outselling personal computers.
That means your marketing materials — website, email, white papers, digital brochures, etc. — need to be optimized for viewing on a mobile device.
Some revealing stats from a recent Google study:
- 64% of mobile users said when they visit a mobile-friendly site, they’re more likely to buy a product or service
- 61% said if they can’t find what they want right away on a site they’ve accessed with a mobile device, they’ll quickly move on to another site, and
- 50% said even if they like a business, they’ll use it less often if its website isn’t mobile friendly.
3. Rise of big data
More and more companies are keeping track of what their customers are doing, what they’re buying, which company web pages they’re visiting, how much time they’re spending on company sites and which links they’re clicking on in company email.
The reason is because more data leads to a higher level of personalization for marketing communications.
Companies are storing customer interaction data in CRM systems and using it to send personalized messages to customers, which — in turn — is increasing sales.
By looking at sales data and surveying more than 1,100 adults, the e-tailing group, an e-commerce consulting company, and MyBuys, a marketing firm, found:
- 40% of customers said they buy more from retailers that send them personalized messages
- 39% said they buy more often when given personalized web recommendations
- personalization increases online sales by 25%, and
- personalization generates a 300% improvement in customer lifetime value.
