Mar 22 in Marketing
7 digital marketing trends you want to know about
Great article to help get creative with marketing trends in 2024 (From: SimliarWeb.com)
1) User-generated content marketing
User-generated content is only going one direction, and that direction is UP. ⬆️
And rightly so. With around 62% of the population using social media, there’s definitely ‘homemade’ content floating around that can promote your business. And with consumers being 88% more likely to trust peers over brands (sorry guys, we’ll blame that trust-issue-triggering history of salesplaining), user-generated content or UGC is the best way to market – and profit quicker from – word of mouth.
User-generated content can look like a bunch of things, including:
- Images and photos
- Videos
- Reviews
- Testimonials
- Podcasts
The reason people go crazy for user-generated content? A u t h e n t i c i t y.
Real people in real life giving their real opinion about your product. Relatability is a huge persuasion tactic and UGC provides content that levels with your target audience, and entices them in as a result.
Your customers will trust the lack of Photoshop in the image or video, hearing both the pros and the cons, hearing the conversational tone that is oh-so-reminscent of your group chats at the weeks, and the fact there’s no real incentive for these people to tell you anything but the truth.
User-generated content making it to Zara’s homepage, but is also scattered throughout various product images.
So, how do you go about getting this content? You might be lucky enough to feel the love on social media already, meaning you frequently get tagged or mentioned in photos, videos and comments – from there, you just need the permission to repost or use the content from the creator.
If you’re not getting this sort of traction just yet, incentivize your audience to do so. The incentive can anything from a simple “We will repost” (more views, more engagement for the creator), to a competition to win $$$ to spend on your website, for example.
The rise of user-generated content has also inspired more ‘behind the scenes’ or ’employee-generated’ content for businesses too, showing the people and processes behind your product.
2) Hyper-personalization
Personalization isn’t exactly a new digital marketing trend.In fact, the standard types of personalization in marketing have gotten a bit boring and a bit predictable.
People have started to understand targeted ads and comms, and how they work. They see through it and see how little effort adding %%FIRST_NAME%% to your email cadences takes. And this can quickly take away from the authenticity of your brand.
So, our quick tips for *good* personalization in your marketing:
- Don’t overdo personalization in a single channel
- Get creative with your personalization
These days, it’s less about calling your customers by their first name. It’s more about delivering timely and relevant content that considers where they are in their user journey, as well as the customer persona.
To get this information and to get your personalized marketing right, you need three things: 1) buyer personas, 2) a well-thought-out content strategy and 3) DATA, DATA, DATA.
Some well-known examples of personalized marketing include Amazon and its list of product recommendations based on your purchase history, Spotify creating you a ‘taste profile’ to deliver Discover Weekly, Spotify Wrapped and other personalized playlists, and Netflix’s ever-changing viewing recommendations based on your recent viewings.
These three examples are constantly underdevelopment and improving, and so should your personalization strategies.The more data and insights you get, the more you can improve your personalized marketing.The fun never stops. 🤪
3) AI (we can’t *not* mention it, sorry)
Marketers have come to understand that ChatGPT and other AI tools aren’t the all-knowing, all-powerful things we believed they once were.They have their flaws and their limitations – but where they fall short, we come to the rescue. Yay, humans.
Well-known AI tools like ChatGPT have had a huge decrease in traffic over recent months, and that’s not down to guilt from us complaining that artificial intelligence was stealing our jobs. Instead, marketing roles have learnt how to adopt AI to help them work more efficiently – and that isn’t letting it do the whole job for you.That, plus a lot of companies are creating their own versions of AI and chatbots.(Guilty – say hello to SimilarAsk).
AI can power marketing, helping us achieve more in less time. You just need to understand AI and its limitations correctly, provide it with all the information, insights and data you can, and – please, we beg you – read and edit the results.
AI can’t do human the way you do human, but it can inform, inspire and increase speed for your digital marketing efforts, including:
- Content generation
- Sentiment analysis
- Audience segmentation
- Frequently asked questions
- Marketing best practices
- Customer engagement and help via AI chatbots
4) Human content and storytelling
Speaking of robots…
Now, more than ever, your target audience – and beyond – appreciate real, proper, and authentic human conversation.
We’ve always had a separation between B2B and B2C, but really it’s all business-to-human (B2H), so make your content that way with storytelling.
Since we were children, we have loved stories – and whilst we’re less thrilled about witches, wizards and hungry caterpillars now we’re adults, we still love to tell, hear, read and repeat stories. So, apply this to your marketing!
Create content that engages your audience and speaks to them on a human-level. That doesn’t mean ditching the SEO briefs and target keywords.
Instead, you want to think about tone of voice, conversational and colloquial language, simplifying complex topics and themes as if you were talking to your friend at the bar, and reel them in with a story where people need to hear the ending.
5) Immersive and interactive marketing
We’ve spoken before about the popularity and success of gamification marketing for engagement.So, it’s no wonder why immersive and interactive experiences are booming too.
Take a look at the traffic increase in 2023 for “immersive experiences”.
When it comes to big increases in traffic, it’s interesting to compare the traffic share before and after the boom. Here, we move from statistics and tech earlier in the year, to more educational and informational intent that leads to websites such as Marketing Tutor, Amazon (Guides) and HubSpot.
So, with that in mind, here are some of our ways to make your marketing more interactive, more immersive, and therefore, more engaging for your customers and prospects:
a) Interactive videos
Giving users control (albeit, limited control) of what they see is a surefire way to boost interaction and engagement – and they can be trackable. For example, websites in the real estate, hospitality and travel industries see huge benefit in providing 3D tours where the user can wander a virtual space, in whatever direction they want.
b) Calculators and other tools
Some of the most popular pages on the web include interactive tools like calculators (eg. for mortgage or taxes), and that’s because it provides value to users – and saves them from doing complicated math themselves – so they refer it to friends, and come back time and time again.
c) Quizzes and polls
People love being understood and people love being heard, which is why quizzes and polls work so well. It’s a great way to get contact information for email sign-ups and more.
d) Email and ad personalization
Addressing your customers by name in your email marketing or ad targeting adds a real personal touch that is hard to ignore.
e) Content repurposing
People enjoy taking in content in different ways – by repurposing content and creating blogs, videos, short tweets, or (/and) infographics, you appeal to a wider audience and boost your engagement by making it more digestible for them.
6) Keeping your friends close, and your competitors closer
Spying on what our competitors are up to has always been on our marketing to-do lists. Why? Because competitive intelligence gets you places; ‘places’ meaning on the screens of your target audience’s desktop or mobile devices.
With the digital world being more competitive than ever (seriously, over 250,000 new websites are created every single day), your level of competitive research needs to be switched UP. And Similarweb (hi) has got all the tools and features you need for effective and oh-so-powerful competitor analysis, in one easy-to-use platform.
A complete toolkit for competitor research looks something like:
- Website analysis: Get the lowdown on your competitors’ website traffic and engagement.
- Marketing channels: See what marketing channels perform well, and where their strategy might be focusing on and see how your business compares.
- Keyword analysis: Gain insight into your competitors’ keyword strategies, and which keywords perform well for them.
- Keyword Gap: Analyze competitive keyword gaps. Understand the keywords you share, as well as the ones you’re missing out on.
- Paid activities: Have full visibility into competitors’ paid keywords, ad copy, creatives and CPC.
- Popular pages: Analyze your competitors’ best-performing pages to understand why they perform so well, and what you can adopt in your own strategy.
- Segments: Compare specific niches in your competitor research, for example if a company isn’t a direct competitor but one of their specific products is.
- Competitive Trackers: Track your competitors online. Get monthly highlights into anything that changes in your competitors’ digital performances and engagement rates.
- Search monitoring tools: Keep your eyes on the (search) ball, with search monitoring tools like our Rank Tracker and Brand Protection alerts.
Oh, and what a surprise – Similarweb has all of those things. Here’s the Competitive Tracker, giving you monthly highlights (and lowlights) into your competitors’ performance against your own.
So, less of the superlative slamming with a “mine’s better than yours” style marketing, that has absolutely no – or very little – evidence behind it. Instead, more of the smug strategizing, which is exactly what this kind of competitive analysis and competitive intelligence gives you the opportunity (and the evidence) to act on and knock it out the park. ⚾
Competitor research is way less petty, and way more informative than old-school marketing tactics. And this way, they don’t even have to know that you know what they know – IYKYK.
That said, the Cognism versus Lusha rivalry is still iconic… Thank goodness for Brand Protection alerts on those branded keywords, eh Lusha?
7) Social media as a search engine
The development of social media from when it began to now cannot go unnoticed.4.80 billion people around the world use social media, with a huge 150 million coming online in the last 12 months.
It’s not only the number of social media platforms that have been introduced over time – with the average person using an average of 6.6 social media apps each month – but how we use these platforms. The days of writing on each others’ Facebook walls are (mostly) gone, and we see much more video content, influencer sponsorships, and targeted ads on our newsfeeds than ever before.
Businesses and people have learned how to capitalize on social media – and it’s working.In fact, 67% of TikTok users use the app for brand discovery and new places to shop, and 63% of consumers use social media to find new restaurants or explore new menu items.
Move over Google, social media has got the content we want, in the way we want it: short and sassy videos. 🍔
This is just one example of a trend that is entirely consumer-led, rather than company-led. Like remember when Google tried to make voice search the next big thing? It didn’t work because it wasn’t how consumers like you and me worked. Videos about food? That’s how we work.
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7 digital marketing trends you want to know about
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