By Tara Alvey
Most aspects of a business depend upon the success of its marketing. Without marketing, even the best company in the world with the best products and/or services would struggle to reach potential customers.
With the many ongoing changes in business, marketing tactics and technology, it’s important to make your marketing work for you and be the best that it can be. Check out this list of the top five marketing trends to take advantage of in 2018 and start revolutionizing your marketing today.
1. Integrating Marketing Activities into the Customer Lifecycle
Lifecycle marketing, as its name suggests, involves studying the whole customer journey in an integrated way, from first contact to customer relationship management, rather than focusing on a single campaign, channel or metric. This ‘always-on’ marketing (AOM) approach encompasses the customer journey from start to finish, across all devices and channels. This allows for the opportunity to optimize brand messaging throughout the marketing funnel.
2. Integrating Personalization
Personalization is key to effective customer lifecycle marketing because it recognizes each customer as an individual. This means marketing one way to prospective customers, another way to those that have already purchased a product, and yet another way to long-term, high-value customers. Personalization allows you to make your marketing messages far more compelling, effective and relevant – and who doesn’t appreciate a personal touch?
3. Integrating Video into the Customer Journey
It’s well-known by now that video marketing is a critical component of content marketing. In fact, YouTube is now the second largest search engine on the web. While video marketing is frequently an afterthought, its value demands a front-runner position in your 2018 content marketing plan. Below is a list of just some of the reasons why video content is king.
- Increased customer conversions
- Stronger emotional connections
- Better email click-through rates
- Higher retention rates
- Greater optimization opportunities
- Higher engagement
- Stronger consumer attention
- Improved SEO
4. Integrating Content Marketing Using Customer Engagement Strategies
Content can serve many goals but customer engagement is always at least an intermediate goal in developing a content plan. Content for customer engagement is about being relevant — which can mean many things but at the heart of the matter, it means providing value. It means focusing on the wants, emotions, likes and behavior of your target audience.
An engaging content marketing strategy is not about the content you think you need to have. It is about the content you need to have in order to engage the people you would love to engage by knowing what they want. It’s about enabling people to fulfill a task they have, whatever it may be at any given time.
5. Automated Marketing System
Marketing automation, when used correctly, is an amazing tool. First and foremost, marketing automation makes lead nurturing easier. No longer do you have to only connect with each lead manually, which can be time-consuming. An automated marketing solution can help you reach out to a potential lead right from the beginning of their interaction. If, for example, a customer visits your website and signs up to receive your newsletters you can connect with them right away with an automated solution. They will receive a welcome and confirmation message, and you can also tell the solution to send all new customers a discount coupon and a survey about their preferences.
Marketing automation also helps companies to build more useful and detailed customer profiles. An automated solution is always gathering information based on customers’ purchases, email opens and responses, selected preferences and more. All this data is stored for future use, to allow you (and your handy automated marketing solution) to reach out to each customer more effectively.
Finally, marketing automation provides detailed reports. Automated marketing solutions keep track of each email campaign, Facebook post, text message or whatever it is that you are doing. Having data from your campaigns automatically collected and organized makes it simple to review this essential data.
Find out how to integrate these top marketing trends into your 2018 marketing plan. Contact FORTHGEAR today.
