What’s Hot In Digital Marketing Today
Before, digital marketing was only about advertising the product that we were selling, without thinking of the consumer’s needs or about educating them to make the right decision. Everything was about showing banners or sending emails presenting the product everywhere, every time, and to every one!
Today, helping the right audience to do their research about the product they want to buy is the best way to get them to trust you. And when you build trust, you sell.
This graph shows the results of a survey done by Smart Insights, in which readers were asked to give their views on which digital marketing techniques will matter most to their businesses in 2016. As of 8 February 2016, the poll received over 1500 answers.
Taking a quick look at the results, we can easily determine the Top 3 trends for this year:
A big #1 for Content Marketing
The Content Marketing Institute, an online resource for information on all content marketing related, defines
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
There are 3 keywords in this definition: valuable, relevant and consistent. Manage your messages by sending relevant content to the right audiences, at the right time, across all your marketing channels. This will help you to effectively tell your company’s story.
Content, particularly visual content, will rule the online marketing world, evolving into various forms and disrupting the conventional marketing models. Moreover, the speed at which a brand can create amazing content will play a part in their success.
Why content marketing is important to your business?
First we need to understand the four steps of the buying cycle:
- Awareness. Prior to awareness a customer may have a need, but they are not aware there is a solution.
- Research. Once a customer is aware there is a solution, they will perform research to educate themselves.
- Consideration. At this point the customer starts comparing different products from different vendors to make sure they’re getting a high quality product at a fair price.
- Buy. Finally, the customer makes their decision and moves forward with the transaction.
Traditional advertising and marketing is great when it comes to the second two steps. Content marketing taps into the first two stages of the buying process by raising awareness of solutions and educating consumers about a product they may have never considered before.
You need to deliver information that makes your buyer more intelligent. Good content marketing makes a person stop…read… think… behave… differently.
#2 Big Data
Basically, Big Data is about market insight and predictive analytics and it can be characterized by 3Vs: the extreme volume of data, the wide variety of types of data and the velocity at which the data must be must processed.
Predictive analytics allows you to discover, analyse and act on data. It’s about learning from the past to uncover trends and predict likely outcomes. But that’s not all. Predictive analytics gives you a framework to analyse data over time, leading to more refined outcomes and corrective actions.
But don’t forget about the Little Data, without good Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) it is impossible to have good big data initiatives. These KPIs are what measure the success of any given company. They might include customer retention rate, conversion rate, market share, or any of dozens of other metrics that determine how well your company is doing.
Data, on its own, is practically useless. It’s just a huge set of numbers with no context. Its value is only realised when it is used in conjunction with KPIs to deliver insights that improve decision making and improve performance.
#3 Marketing Automation
We went to Basic Bananas’ Marketing Blast-Off workshop (which we strongly recommend you to go, if you haven’t yet) and we learned that although it takes time to set up your marketing automation, once you’ve done it, it’s done! In the end, not only saves you time, but also, it helps you to have a plan and to make sure that your leads follow the step by step sequence that you planned to end up in a conversion, and further on a relationship.
The use of marketing automation makes processes that would have otherwise been performed manually much more efficient, for example, when you automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions.
Marketing automation is an integral component of customer relationship management, and is one of the most valuable tools the modern day marketer can employ and yet it’s been adopted by less than 10% of companies. So let’s grow this percentage, be brave and get started today!
You can check our work on Marketing to get some ideas or get in touch so we can talk about which digital marketing trend better suits your business and how we can make it work.
The Spicy Broccoli Team
You can get in touch with us by calling us on +61 2 8084 5554.
Email us on info@spicybroccoli.com
Or you can show up… our doors are always open at:
1/71 Kenneth Rd
Balgowlah, NSW 2093
Australia
