Tips and best practices on how to use marketing blogs to stay ahead of the competition
In today’s digital age, businesses are constantly searching for new and effective ways to reach their target audience and stay ahead of the competition. One of the most effective tools available in this pursuit is the marketing blog. Marketing blogs provide a wealth of information, insight, and tips to help businesses improve their marketing strategies, attract more customers, and ultimately grow their revenue.Read more
5 Small Business Marketing Trends You Need To Know About
Small businesses are faced with limited resources and are often up against significantly larger competitors. In order to reach your audience at the right time, it is very important to regularly keep your finger on the pulse of fluctuating marketing trends. In fact, regularly researching marketing trends should be a big part of the overall market strategy of your small business! Here are some of the most important trends influencing the market for small businesses currently.
4 Marketing Trends to Outrank the Competition in 2021
Marketing dynamics have changed dramatically in the past year, in the wake of a global pandemic, providing an ever-growing reason to be aggressive in your marketing strategy and find the pockets of opportunity dotted across the new terrain. With a reduction in the size of the global economy and the number of entrants remaining high due to government support, competition within the global economy has never been higher. Thus, providing evermore reason to consider an overhaul on your current marketing strategy. Here are some of the biggest marketing trends to look out for in 2021 and capitalize on the upcoming opportunity.
The Year of the Chatbot
The explosive growth of the eCommerce market has seen the need for online support grow ten-fold. Chatbots’ use has become ever-growingly popular, with companies who use Chatbots saying they saw a 50% growth in sales.
Since an automated system can handle common customer questions and basic tasks, the use of Chatbots can cut costs by up to 30%, allowing companies to produce higher profit margins and maintain a high level of customer satisfaction. Using an automated system allows more questions to be answered within a given time, whilst delegating the more complicated tasks to support professionals. IBM says that superior software development has seen that Chatbots can answer 80% of standard questions. The increasing use of Chatbots sees the enhanced utilization of professionals whilst still speeding up customer response times.
A recent survey by Drift shows that of respondents, 37% of people chose to use a Chatbot to gain an answer in an emergency because the service provided a quicker response time than their human counterparts. It’s becoming clear that people are becoming more time-pressed to get answers to questions, hence diversifying the range of communication tools to increase customer satisfaction.
The Popularity of Short-Video Content
With more people confined to the four walls of their own home, people were looking for new and creative ways to stimulate themselves, to cope with the ‘new normal’. A new trend that became dramatically popular overnight was the use of short video content.
A survey by HubSpot shows that of survey respondents, 80% of video marketers claim that video has “directly increased sales”, indicating that short videos are becoming widely popular. The curation of short videos published across a wide range of media could see the acquiring of customers from different areas beyond the traditional.
Now that videos also show up on Google and other search engines on the results page, this is a great time to incorporate your video marketing content into your SEO optimization program.
For instance, watching the rapid uptake of TikTok has provided invaluable evidence that this trend is increasing amongst the younger generation. TikTok’s global penetration is currently standing at 18% of global internet users. With 32.5% of those aged between 10 and 19, incorporating video content into your marketing campaigns could be crucial if your brand’s target audience sits at a younger demographic.
Statistics show that people’s attention span for irrelevant content is shrinking with the average Facebook video watch time to be 10 seconds. Effectively meaning that if you are looking to gain new customers or get a message across to a disinterested or new audience, doing so in under 10 seconds is your best way to do so.
The curation of Instagram reels supports evidence that short-length video content is viral and is here to stay. Currently, many of the content is individually created and was initially designed to express themselves during the pandemic. Still, the whole market is yet to be capitalized fully by the commercial industry.
Virtual Life is here to stay!
The explosion of Zoom and other virtual event hosting platforms seems like it is here to stay. The new way of connecting with friends, family, and co-workers has tapped into a completely new market, bringing about a whole new level of convenience to those who prefer their ‘at-home’ comfort and convenience.
With virtual events lacking the need for transportation to and from, no lodging and being much more affordable for smaller businesses, the appeal in virtual events has never been higher to both the company and the customer.
A new market has been discovered, and it looks like it’s here to stay. Although it might not tap the same type of audience, 52% of organisations say they see the same or more attendance than expected to see at an in-person counterpart.
By incorporating both in-person and virtual events into your marketing strategy, you are diversifying and expanding your hosted events’ reach.
Shoppable Social Media
If 2020 has taught the world anything, it’s that online shopping is the future; expecting consistent growth over the coming years. The pandemic has seen the rise of shoppable posts where content is posted to social media with a direct link or opening a pop-up window for purchase within the same app. The process of scrolling your social media to purchasing a liked product has never been more straightforward.
This trend has seen the extensive use of social media influencers, who are the main subject of this marketing trend. For instance, the growth of eCommerce has increased by 44.5% year-over-year due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Popular platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Pinterest all uphold colossal power when capitalizing on influencer marketing and social media marketing. Businesses effectively now can create their entire physical store into a social media account, heightening the convenience to the customer again.
To stay ahead of your competition, creating a digital presence is essential for building customer relationships and adding to the ease of online shopping.
The marketing world will never sit still, especially in such volatility. If there was ever a time to capitalize on the opportunities available, attracting new customers and expanding revenue – then now is a perfect time.
Creating the perfect marketing strategy encompassing the latest and upcoming trends can be complex. Robotic Marketer represents the pinnacle of marketing strategy development and can help businesses of any size encompass these new and upcoming trends of 2021 to stay ahead of the crowd.
The Benefits of Marketing Automation
Executing a marketing strategy can be a tedious and overwhelming process, that is why marketing automation can be a marketer’s best friend!
Marketing automation software automates and streamlines marketing activities and is most beneficial in areas such as email marketing, social media, and lead generation.
It provides personalized experiences for clients, which results in an average of 50% increase in email open rates. It is also an efficient use of a business’ time as it minimizes repetitive tasks through automation, allowing employees to focus on the core business, whilst minimizing the risk of human error.
Whether you want to optimize your employees’ time or define your target audience profiles, an automated marketing system is beneficial for leveling up your marketing efforts. So, let’s take a look at how it can help your business.
Benefits of marketing automation:
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It helps with reducing costs
Through a streamlined marketing process, you can reduce costs by using time more efficiently. It is seen that marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead costs. It also allows you to improve your analysis of big data, saving on the time it takes to have to manually analyze and sort big data.
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It helps in generating better leads
With marketing automation, implemented organizations can experience a 10% increase in their sales pipeline contribution. This is because it can target segments through landing pages, provide A/B testing by creating two versions of an ad, email or landing page determining which provides a better outcome, and helps to build your contact list.
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It improves accountability
It allows you to see where your strengths and weaknesses lie in the business in terms of staff and efforts in both sales and marketing.
Through data reporting, analysis and most importantly feedback you can align and unify the sales and marketing goals of each team by setting benchmarks and qualifiers, while also receiving reports on the successes or failures of these goals. In addition to this, it can also determine where and what leads need to be nurtured to become sales qualified leads (SQL).
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It increases efficiency
Automation can provide efficiency through a reduction in repetitive manual tasks to optimize productivity.
The software can provide marketing campaign calendars, target multichannel campaigns such as SMS or push notifications, provide seamless customer personalization (which would normally take days) and provide powerful customer retention programs such as abandoned cart or win-back campaigns.
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It helps refine the marketing process
These systems can work effectively to align with your marketing strategy and adapting communication tactics relating to the customer journey. Marketing automated software provides clarity on a buyer’s behavior. They also provide a seamless alignment to your marketing strategy and can effectively market through multiple channels such as mobile, PC, SMS and email.
An important factor in automation is the ability to test different campaigns. This allows for analyses of better-suited campaigns that can be altered or optimized to the various segments and generate more lead conversions.
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It helps with effectively targeting customers
Automated systems can segment your customers by demographic, location, interests and behaviors, allowing for accurate communication with leads, which can generate sales.
By understanding your buyer’s persona, you are able to deliver relevant content to prospects instead of just generating useless noise.
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It boosts customer lifetime value
This can be accomplished through upselling and cross-selling features in automation. Meaning you don’t miss out on this potential to increase revenue. This can effectively be implemented through personalized up-sells at the end of a transaction or sending birthday SMS/ emails generated automatically through the system.
Automated marketing systems can allow businesses to run more efficiently and effectively, saving time and costs on the overall budget. They allow for campaigns to be executed and operate with maximum impact, by providing in-depth analysis of campaigns, leads and customers.
The great thing about them is you can tailor to make them meet the needs of your business and better service your client base.
Marketing Strategy Technology, Predicting Trends in 2019
The last decade witnessed a sharp transition—digital platforms rose to an imminent position as traditional print media cowered in the shadow of this new wave. We shouldn’t be surprised when new trends occur, but rather, attempt to predict them. We’ll give you glimpse into the future—artificial intelligence infrastructure is going to dominate the field of marketing.