With social media usage soaring and marketers focused on their digital touchpoints, it’s imperative to keep pace with the latest trends and news in this space.
Here, we’ll briefly highlight the major buzzwords, news stories, and tendencies that marketers should know about.
Customer Experience (CRM, ERP, and Marketing Automation)
In a world where customers have an ever-expanding array of choices, creating an excellent customer experience is essential if you want to win them over for life. And since the majority of customers now research and interact using digital devices, your digital touchpoints – websites, emails, and social media – drive customer experience. As a result, customer experience management (CXM) has become a critical marketing priority.
The most efficient way to guarantee a good customer experience is through effective marketing automation. Marketers should look to tools like HubSpot to ensure that every interaction a customer has with your business is streamlined and easy to follow.
In addition to driving customer experience, marketing automation improves campaign efficiency and effectiveness. And since 86% of people in a customer journey prefer simpler and fewer interactions, using tools like HubSpot can result in better conversion and lower customer churn.
Customer Knowledge (Product, Pricing, and Contract)
As marketing executives focus more on gaining deeper insights into their customers, customer knowledge has emerged as a key marketing metric.
When a customer knows more about your business, product, and services, you can be confident that they’re better positioned to make a purchase. Therefore, knowing more about your customers, potential customers, and existing customers is a great way to increase marketing efficiency and drive action.
Marketing automation can help you collect customer knowledge effortlessly. For example, HubSpot allows you to create surveys and polls to gain deeper insights into your customers’ mindsets and behaviors. You can ask questions about their motivations, pain points, and more. The information you gather provides you with an opportunity to present your customers with content that’s tailored to their needs and to position your products and services as a solution to their problems.
In addition, you can connect your database of customers and potential customers to your marketing automation tool. Doing this ensures that you have a single source of truth for client information and can make it much easier to target relevant content to specific individuals.
Digital Marketing In Real Life
While we’ve always known of the virtual world of social media, it’s only in the last few years that we’ve seen this space blossom into something more tangible and present in our everyday lives. And what’s more, people aren’t just engaging with content via their phones anymore. They’re also doing so in person.
According to HubSpot research, 20% of customers have bought a product or service after watching a PSA (public service announcement) or seeing a business owner using the product or service in real life. Similarly, 72% of respondents said that in-person demonstrations and words of encouragement from a trusted source are the most effective ways to convince them to purchase an item.
Simply put, marketers need to be present in the online world and the real world to effectively engage with customers. And since face-to-face interactions are still the most efficient way to establish trust, it’s no surprise that people are responding positively to in-person marketing efforts.
So, what does this all mean for marketers? It means that marketing is no longer a siloed discipline. Instead, marketers need to be deeply involved in the entire customer experience, from awareness to nurturing to converting.
We’re already seeing the benefits of integrating marketing with other departments such as sales and support. With the rise of bots and artificial intelligence (AI) powering marketing automation, customers are able to reach out to businesses via chat or email without having to go through a traditional phone call. This level of convenience enables customers to become brand advocates and drive more business.
Innovating For The Future
While older generations may have seen marketing as something that existed solely in print form –– think magazine articles, TV commercials, and radio spots –– today’s marketers need to be adaptive and innovative to stay relevant and successful.
According to HubSpot research, 17% of marketers say that being innovative is the most important attribute to possess, followed by 15% who cited being data-driven and 7% who listed being able to perform at a high level.
With digital marketing changing at such a rapid pace, staying ahead of the curve is essential if you want to continue doing effective marketing.
Luckily, we live in a world full of innovators. Those who are able to conceive new ideas and concepts and see them through to completion. So, regardless of your role in the marketing department, you have something to offer the team.
Evolving With The Times
One of the things that makes marketing such a fascinating space is that trends and fads emerge seemingly out of nowhere and then become impossible to ignore. So much so that it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed, especially as a marketer who is likely drowning in a sea of ever-changing data.
While the pace of innovation is increasing, it’s also becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with. That’s why it’s so important to establish a working relationship with a marketing analytics company that can provide you with meaningful insights into your digital marketing efforts.