Marketers are faced with an increasingly difficult challenge: how can they get their message across to a public whose attention span has fallen to eight seconds—a second shorter than that of goldfish? The answer lies in understanding that consumers want customized products and personal experiences on their devices or platforms of choice.
Of course, this means knowing your target audience better than anyone. Adapting to trends is the most important thing for both marketers and consumers because the latter are becoming more selective about how they spend their time, attention, and money.
The future of digital marketing will be about integrating key trends over the next few years. There’s no question that a personalized digital marketing campaign will be more successful than the traditional one-size-fits-all method, especially for businesses that have yet to grow in the digital age.
As far as humanizing a brand is concerned, companies must go beyond social listening and get to know their target customers. They need to understand how their consumers want to engage with their brand. That said, here are three major digital trends that marketers have to keep a close eye on in the next few years:
1. Innovative Digital Advertising
Advertising will continue to evolve as marketers look for innovative strategies to engage audiences, especially younger consumers who spend more time on digital devices. Marketers strive to be where their customers are and deliver ads that represent relevant experiences.
In this constantly changing advertising world, marketers should look for new ways to create consumer engagement through formats such as video and social media ads. By using alternative digital formats, marketers can get more data on consumers to develop better-targeted content.
There is also a significant rise in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising because it enables marketers to drive traffic, generate leads, and convert sales more effectively. Various PPC platforms can also be used for different marketing tactics, including social media advertising. Marketers should strive to create a focused PPC campaign that targets specific consumer groups through their engaging content.
If you’re not that familiar with the nitty-gritty of this digital marketing strategy, you can always depend on credible PPC services to handle your campaigns for you. All you’ll have to do is to sit back and watch the gradual increase of acquired customers in your growing business.
2. Integration into Social Media Platforms
As marketers devote more resources to social media, they are looking for ways to tie it into other marketing efforts, especially email and search engine marketing. By doing so, marketers create a more cohesive experience for their customers, increasing their customer engagement.
Social media has helped marketers identify the best content across various platforms to engage their target audience. From there, they can incorporate the content into campaigns or use it as inspiration for new initiatives. Content curation plays a vital role in social media because it helps marketers identify trending content to use in their strategies.
Integrating social media with other types of marketing enables marketers to generate leads and drive traffic and gives them the ability to track which campaigns are producing results. As such, marketers will know when to expand an effective campaign or abandon them in the long run.
Knowing the right social media platforms to use for a particular target group can make or break your campaign. That’s why you need to pick the social media platform that best suits your brand image and stick with it for as long as possible. That way, you’ll be able to see the ROI from the get-go.
3. Personalized Web Experiences for Customers
Customization is the name of the game as consumers seek customized products and experiences across devices, platforms, and interfaces. Marketers should look to provide personalized web experiences based on customers’ location, age, or preferences. As customers move between devices and platforms, marketers must develop plans that address the unique behavior of every device type.
For example, most people are beginning to prefer using their mobile phones over other devices for shopping because they can complete transactions wherever they are. If marketers can’t be found on the device their customers are using, they risk losing sales to competitors that can satisfy customer needs.
As this trend continues to become more prevalent, marketers strive to create personalized experiences for their customers by collecting data that helps them personalize the shopping experience. This will not only produce excellent customer engagement but also convince customers to return and buy from the brand again.
As digital marketing continues to evolve, marketers and business owners alike need to keep up with the developing trends in their industry. By doing so, they can stay ahead of the curve in this ever-changing landscape while also increasing their customer engagement and revenue growth.
