The lifeblood of any business are the customers who buy the product or service that the business offers, without these customers, there is no business and there will be either a shrinkage in the business or it will go out of business. There are lots of ways to bring in customers to buy from you, and this is what is defined as “marketing”. Marketing used to be simply by word of mouth and social proof. Because the technology was less advanced than today, people had to rely on their friends telling them about a product or service for them to even think about buying it.
For these reasons, in this article, we will be discussing six different marketing trends that you can follow right away in order to stay on top of the competition.
Futuristic Digital Marketing Trends
So what is digital marketing? As defined by Wikipedia, it is the marketing of your business’ services and products by methods of using technologies such as the internet, which may also include cell phones, online ads, and other digital methods. Because the majority of people are now connected on the internet and understand how to use different websites and social media, not only to gather information and connect with others but to shop for their necessities, advertisers and businesses have begun to create digital advertising trends. With that being said, if you want to be on the leading edge of digital marketing, here are the six trends to follow:
- Social Media Advertising
- Chat Boxes on your website
- Artificial Intelligence Algorithms
- Code scanning & Apps
- Virtual Reality
- Retargeting Ads
Now that we’ve listed them, let’s review each, one by one.
Social Media Advertising
Social media is not only a place for people to connect with each other or post silly videos of their cats eating a peanut butter sandwich. They are also a much more powerful tool to sell your products or services for the following reasons:
- Instant exposure to millions of people
- Social validation through video and photography
- Paid advertisements through Facebook
- Ability to tag products directly to a photo
- Hashtags and trending topics connected to your business
One of the best aspects of social media pages like Facebook is that they not only track every user’s behaviour, they also sell it to business owners and influences via ads. With the Facebook Ads Manager platform, you can pinpoint EXACTLY who it is that you want to put your advertisements in front of.
Chat Boxes on Your Website
Long gone are the days in which you had to fill out a contact form in order to speak with the business owner or manager. As of 2018, if your website does not have a chat box where people can INSTANTLY connect with a live person and ask the questions that they need answers for, they will be gone forever. We live in an era of instant gratification and it pertains to everything. There’s a reason why the biggest service providers such as AT&T use a chat box; they know that people have questions and don’t want to be on the phone for two hours to find an answer they could have googled. So, make sure you have a chat box and that whoever runs it can answer it right away.
Artificial Intelligence
This topic should not be taken lightly, and is not a trend, it is an inevitability. The age of artificial intelligence will come, and most people will have wished that they at least took the time to understand this phenomenon. For now, you should understand that artificial intelligence has been used for many years and companies like Amazon, Facebook, among others, use it to improve their customer usage and influence the way in which people shop. It’s nothing to be scared of, but you should start implementing it in your business as well. If your business, for example, is one where you have to set a lot of meetings and don’t have the time to do so, nor the money to hire an assistant there’s an artificial intelligence (AI) solution for you. It is called x.ai and it will schedule your meetings for you by taking over the conversation as soon as you CC “Amy”, the artificial intelligence algorithm. It will then go into your calendar and find a spot to create the meeting for you. You’re welcome.
Cash Free Transactions
One such trend that is logical, convenient and advisable is going cash free in all of your business transactions. You can take advantage of firms who provide such services and leave the hassles behind. One more added advantage of going cash free is to have digital copies of all the transactions made in the form of e-invoices.
Paid Ads, Product Tagging, & Trending Topics
To save space, and because they go hand-in-hand, we will describe the aforementioned ideas in this section. We sort of already described paid advertisements through Facebook, but there are other venues in which you can pay for ads. These are called pay-per-click, and the basic idea is that you create your advertisements, select your target audience(s), and set a budget for your ads. Every time someone “clicks” on it, you pay the amount that was set. So, for instance, if you have a pay-per-click (PPC) ad at $0.15 per click, and 300 people click on it, you would have spent $45, and if your budget was set at $50 for that day, then you would have $5 left or 33.33 clicks.
Conclusion
In conclusion, in this article, we discussed six of the digital marketing trends to implement or keep an eye on. If you want your business to be aligned with the shifts happening market-wide, you need to do more research and find a way to benefit from these trends because they WILL shift, and you will have to adapt. If you don’t have a chat box on your website, your users will be less engaged, and if you don’t even have a website, we don’t know what planet you live on.
