4 Trends That Shape the World of Digital Marketing (and how to apply them)

To keep ahead of your competition, you need knowledge of cutting-edge marketing techniques. In this blogpost, I describe the hottest trends, and how to use them to your advantage.

The field of marketing continues to develop rapidly. The age of Digital Transformation, Big Data and artificial intelligence guarantees exciting changes in the way that products are made, sold, and marketed. It is important to transform these developments into business opportunities, because if you don’t, your competition will!

I want to share some amazing new marketing trends for the Digital Transformation age. I will also predict how these trends will develop in the near future. Finally, I will explain how you can use them to your advantage.

Personalization is no longer “nice to have”, but a conditio sine qua non for companies. Consumers don’t like “spammy” and irrelevant messages. They prefer the experience that trailblazers like TripAdvisor can offer. This app’s algorithm uses data from a user’s previous actions and sends a custom-tailored message. These notifications are relevant for the customer and result in higher conversions.

In the near future, brands and retailers will take a page out of the TripAdvisor playbook and go even further. They will address their customers through all channels (from e-mail to Augmented Reality) based on one, detailed, customer profile. State-of-the-art CRM solutions will be used to accomplish this.

In the future, companies that don’t know how to personalize their messages, will be seen as relics of an older era. They will eventually go out of business.

Therefore, in order to stay ahead of the curve, you should invest in a sophisticated CRM solution.  You must find ways to convert knowledge about your users into messages that will appeal to them. Depending on your line of business and your circumstances, this will be either a simple or complex task. At RevelX, we would be glad to help you to develop an appropriate strategy.

As you undoubtedly know, the customer life cycle is the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service. In each phase of this lifecycle you try to keep the customer interested in your brand and to optimize conversion. This is where so-called “lifecycle marketing” activities come into play, through email, social media and more traditional channels.

The newest trend in lifecycle marketing is the complete data-driven approach of customers, to improve the effectiveness of each interaction. It is not about optimizing individual “touch points” anymore, it is about looking at the complete lifecycle in which the customer has contact with the organization.

I predict huge developments in the lifecycle marketing field in the coming years. Smart algorithms will adjust messages depending on the previous interactions with a user. A better integration of customer data streams will prevent messages that are not relevant; this will be the end of those annoying, retargeting advertisements for products consumers have already purchased.

But before Artificial Intelligence reaches this awesome state, let’s see what you can do today. You need to integrate the different data streams your customers create. Have a look at products such as HubSpot and Salesforce CRM to create an integrated solution for your business.

There is a new type of celebrity: people who are famous through social media. Take the example of beauty blogger Huda Kattan. She has a whopping 24.8 million Instagram followers! That is an enormous number for someone without a singing, acting or TV career, but it is the shape of things to come.

Social media stars, such as Huda, earn their money by endorsing a product in their timeline or in a video. Earnings for one endorsement can be as high as 10,000 dollars. Because so-called “influencers” have both a large and clearly defined following, influencer marketing is one of the best ways to reach a target audience. The budget for this type of marketing will undoubtedly continue to increase in years to come.

At the same time, it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, when we are talking about influencers. Some influencers buy fake Instagram followers. Furthermore, I know an agency that sells the services of influencers. Well, “influencers”… Some of them hardly generate engagement or views.

Therefore, be careful not to believe everything that social media personalities tell you. You should also only hire influencers who really reach your target audience. It is important not to overlook including KPIs in your contract.

Direct contact with the customer has always been an important way to keep him/her satisfied. In our digital age, this contact can be automated through chatbots. Through artificial intelligence, these dialog systems are becoming smarter and smarter, resulting in customers that get quicker and better answers to their questions.

Customers love the low-threshold service of a talkbot. I would, therefore, recommend that you take a look at these intelligent computer programs.

The chatbots at RevelX are based on my colleagues Rochelle and Folkert. (Full disclosure: human beings send the answers.) This makes the experience much more personal, since customers get to know the RevelX folks at the beginning of their customer journey.