We are living in the era of the Industrial Revolution 4.0 where technological advancements have led to disruptive trends in almost all industries, including marketing. Companies- both big and small- are reinventing their strategies to get ahead in the marketing game.
Using Social Media to Reach out to a Broader Audience
While social media may not exactly be completely new on the marketing scene, it’s still a relevant tool that should be used to its full potential; unfortunately, not everyone knows the best way to integrate it into their strategy. While there are dozens of social media platforms to choose from, the key is picking the ones that make the most sense for your target audience and marketing goals. For example, Instagram might be all the rage, but it’s only really suitable for marketing if you have a lot of great visual content to share – if you don’t, you should probably focus your efforts elsewhere. You might be running a B2B enterprise where something like LinkedIn is much more likely to generate new business. By working on the right platforms, you can easily reach your target audience and make the most of their targeted advertising services.
Content is King
Ever since the digital marketing powerhouse, Hubspot, introduced the industry to inbound marketing, more and more businesses have come to realize the importance of producing regular, high-quality content. This could be blogs, whitepapers, e-books and guides, digital reports or infographics – the main takeaway is that providing great content portrays you as an expert in your field to potential customers while giving them a reason to continue engaging with you. By monitoring who engages with what, it can make it a lot easier for your sales team to qualify leads and target them with specific products and services – not only does this increase your conversion rate and revenue, but it also gives the customer a much more enjoyable buying experience, increasing the chances of them buying from you again.
Using Chatbots to Engage Customers and Provide Efficient Customer Support – AI and Machine Learning
While Artificial Intelligence and machine learning still have a long way to go before they catch up with Hollywood’s imagination, they’re already being utilized to great effect as a 21st-century marketing tool. While it’s always beneficial to have a real person available in the form of customer support, this isn’t always possible – you might be a one-person operation without enough time to field every customer inquiry immediately, or you could have so many clients that it’s just not cost-effective to employ enough staff for the role. This is where chatbots come in, with their ability to emulate conversation and guide customers in the right direction based on the keywords and phrases they recognize. The capabilities of today’s chatbots are varied, ranging from those that simply point customers to the right troubleshooting guide or help section to those that provide an eerily human interaction. What’s for sure is that this technology and its application as a marketing tool is only going to grow in the years to come, so it’s worth taking a look at how you could benefit from it.
Utilizing Big Data for Predictive Analysis and Insight into Market and Customer Behavior
Today, we have access to more data than ever before, but the more we have, the harder it can be to process it into something useful. This is why the field of big data has emerged – because we needed better ways to analyze the vast amount of information available to us and turn it into something we can act upon and use to generate more profits. Using big data to your advantage means allocating resources to finding out what data you should be gathering, which analytical tools you should use, and how to turn that data from raw information into insights, and from insights into impactful, measurable marketing strategies. But what sort of insights do we hope to gain from pursuing big data?
Firstly, big data will boost our ability to successfully engage with customers; we won’t just know who they are, but also what they want, where they are, and how they’d prefer to be contacted. We can also discover what it is that influences our customers’ loyalty, building on it to ensure repeat business time and time again. Lastly, big data can help us figure out how to spend our marketing budget across different channels to maximize our ROI and consistently target the right people, as well as allowing us to continuously optimize our marketing strategy based on testing and analysis.
Marketing Automation
As with almost every industry, automation is viewed as the key to increasing productivity and accuracy while reducing costs, and many insiders see marketing automation as the next big piece of technology to really change the game. CRO (conversion rate optimization) and SEO (search engine optimization) are both processes that can be streamlined with automation and, when combined with AI and machine learning, will see new tools that only become more powerful in the future. On a more fundamental level, you can automate almost every part of your marketing campaigns to your own specifications – sending emails automatically when potential customers engage with you in a certain way or presenting customers with specific deals or posts based on their purchase or browsing history. For smaller businesses that don’t have the money to invest in all-in-one CRM and marketing systems, automated integrations make it easier than ever to utilize various business software, giving you high functionality and flexibility without the massive price tag.
The 4.0 era is upon us and, when it comes to technology-driven marketing strategies, it’s adapt or die; while not every one of these will be an all-in-one solution to your business’ needs, they’re all worth spending the time researching to see how they can help you compete and grow in the future.
