New trends in marketing

  Considering promotion of work from home and online transactions in addition to nowadays situation related to COVID 19 pandemic period, online activities are getting popular day by day. Several governmental activities, empowering orthodoxly way of management and forcing people to stay home, added huge value to “online way of living”. Taking into account all restrictions in several industries, implementation of self-isolation in many countries and other different restrictions, people are obliged to benefit from all types of online and distant services and products.

  At the beginning, artificial intelligence, voice search engine optimization (VSEO) and data-driven marketing were extraordinary concepts close to the craziness. Nowadays, most corporate entities prefer these innovative and digital marketing trends. They are listed among top preferred priorities. Any business having a desire to remain competitive in today’s digital environment, it has to adapt to briskly expanding changes in digital marketing.  

  Like Brian Solis states this: 

  “Each business is a victim of Digital Darwinism, the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than the ability to exploit it. Digital Darwinism does not discriminate. Every business is threatened.”

  Understand main thing: We live in an age when it is hard to predict customer interests or attitudes and technology marketing moves fast. Marketers can no longer hide behind the curtain and hope that the same old methods work eternally. If they keep the same place or stay at the same level, competitors will never forgive this and will create new competitive advantages, which will be even critical from the availability perspective.

  Among new marketing trends, we can list the next ones as general library of those enablers, which would not only help any business just to survive, but also to blossom in this age of modernization. Some of these trends are: Artificial Intelligence, Social Media Stories, Chatbots, Social Media Stories, Influencer Marketing, Conversational Marketing, Programmatic Advertising, Video Marketing, Social Messaging Apps, Browser Push notifications, Content Marketing which continues to Dominate SEO, Interactive Content, Omni channel Marketing, Augmented Reality & Immersive Technologies, User Generated Content, Personalization, Big Data & Deep Learning, Google Adds Smart Bidding, Automation, 5G Technology, etc... 

 The Increasing Popularity of new marketing trends

  With all aggressiveness of pandemic period and speed of “onlineisation”, several existing trends became popular, some new trends appeared and all together, they played an intensive role in digital marketing, which work very well with millennials and the generation Z.

  There is an interesting information from EMEA insight team at Google, where team analyses changes in consumer behavior. Here I will share what do people think during this pandemic period and will highlight search observations in three key areas where consumer needs have developed to the end of 2020. These are the areas:

1.     Actual-time information to stay updated with guidance and get new intelligence and instruction.

2.     Digital alterations to help with on time and alternated demands.

3.     Periodic searches, which are urging up the demand on production or output.

  For the first one, Real-time guidance and information, I would like to share some insights for some countries, which are an outcome of google search results analysis. We can observe boosted search interest for interim questions such as “do you have to” or “what to do when” in Netherlands, “should one” in Sweden and “how can I check” in South Africa.

  Another example of questions related to customers looking for some services close them geographically. In my next examples, I will share specific trends for some countries. These are like “where to eat” in Spain, “where to buy” in Turkey, “banking close to me” in Italy, “cleaning services near me” in U.K., “lessons near me” in South Africa and “how to remove” in France. There are also several search trends regarding financial aid in student grants, nature saving grants, energy grants and foundations related grants searches.

  Regarding the second point about how Digital innovations help people with immediate and changed needs, we can say that, people are searching not only for renewed information, but also for different ways to support themselves with their immediate demands.

  In addition I can share the outcome of Google Trends research as some examples for this showing that there is increasing investigation enthusiasm for “online bookstore” in Poland, “online returns” in Czech Republic, “online application” in South Africa, “online booking” in Kenya, “online reports” in Italy. Having summer holidays finishing, for instance, searches for “virtual school” in Belgium and “teachers online” in Kenya have elected back again. In addition, when it is about high-tech modernizations to help customers, government health tracing applications to stay secure and protected are also intensively searched in several countries.

  Talking about the last trend in search, Google Trends shows recurring pattern in searches, which are driving to meet product need. For example, during back to school period, there is an increase in searches for school supplies, school uniform, students’ discounts or student discount code in several countries. With winter coming back, we can observe increase in warmer and suitable wardrobe for the colder months ahead. As a last example, I would like to mention the final trends in seasonal search and go back to our Marketing Trends, which heavily affected by Google trends and a person can get an effective outcome using these opportunities. Finally, during the period while many long awaited movies, consumer electronics and game releases delayed since the beginning of pandemic, customers are showing inclination again for upgrading their technological needs and visiting the cinema. In many countries searchers have been rising for “release date”, “release date in games”, “release date in consumer electronics”, “phone release date” and similar requirements related to the date of release for one or another type of entertainment or electronic products.

  If businesses continuously have to react to these adjustments in consumer behavior and keep consumers “in front of their eyes” , they have to adapt some of marketing trends, especially evolving during these pandemic period after which there would never be such full of opportunities again.  

 The impact of popularity of new marketing trends

  While talking about popularity of searches and impact of new marketing trends, I would like to share facts for some of those new trends. For instance, if we talk about the Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is the biggest profitable and economic opportunity for companies, industries, governments and communities over the next few decades. It is forecasted that the global GDP is going to expand by up to 14% until 2030. Whoever stands away or gets late for implementation of AI will struggle in competitive advantage points within next several years. However, AI can analyze customer behavior and search impressions using data from social media platforms and online posts to support businesses to understand how customers find products and services meeting their needs, where they are likely to be and which segment they belong to.

  Here you are some statements and percentages of customers who strongly or somehow agree with each statement.

  Today’s technology gives us an opportunity so that AI identifies consumer’s need within conversation using natural language programming. Therefore, two out of three consumers among observations are facing AI even not catching that they are having conversation with chatbots, which improve themselves through machine learning. Marketers are adopting Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies to stay ahead of the race and remain compatible in an excessively dynamic corporate environment. These not so fantastic (anymore) technologies are laying the way for the future-generation marketing and advertising that put a consumer in the center by implementing specific and customer oriented algorithms and big data behind: an essential part of the messaging.

  We also see implementation of AI in marketing, customer journey map and sales activities, starting from reaching a consumer, tracing him during acting period, benefiting from AI during converting the consumer and using AI in future engagements. AI together with machine learning is not only adding value to the marketing lifecycle, but also is becoming an inseparable part of the marketing in nowadays boosting online world.

  Another trend is Personalization. If a business desires continue to improve in 2021, it needs to personalize its marketing. This means products, push notifications, e-mails, content and more to be personalized. The following statistics on personalization have to be considered:

·        63% of customers don’t like general advertisement blows

·        80% say that they are more enthusiast in doing business with an enterprise which is offering personalized approach

·        90% of customers claim that they find personalization engaging

  As Kevin George from Email Monks proves, “personalized, triggered emails based on behavior are three times better than batch-and-blast emails”.

  While talking about personalization, it is very hard to overlook Amazon and Netflix with their perfectly managed personalized approach and tailor made recommended products or movie titles. I can also list some other companies like EasyJet who launched an e-mail campaign which was data-driven used customer’s travel information, Cadbury who created a video campaign that bouts a Dairy Milk flavor with users considering data from their Facebook profile and Starbucks who uses a gamified mobile application which performs on data like purchase information and location to get as personal as possible.  

  The final marketing trend I would like to talk about is Influencer Marketing. This is a kind of word-of-mouth marketing which is using main directors (fen omens) to magnify the brand message of businesses to a bigger audience or potential consumers. Influencers can be famous celebrities. However, usually they are Instagram or YouTube identities, so called “phenomes” who have a huge niche of followers or fans and who can help spreading the message about your business, product or a service through their social channels.

  Because influencer marketing is broadly more convincing than corporate promoting:

·        63% of customers trust opinion of influencers’ about any product much more than brands themselves say about it.

·        58% of customers have bought a new product in the past six months because of a recommendation of an influencer.

  By time, people start to trust more ordinary people, than celebrities. For this reason, a popular British supermarket chain called Iceland, changed their way from advertisements with celebrities to campaigns that involves real-life mothers. It now works with a number of vloggers to promote its products in a more “authentic” fashion, teaming up with YouTube society Channel Mum. In addition, research brings to us that 35% of mothers trust online videos, which made in a native spirit with participation of real-life mother, caring and valuing the natural way of making products for her child.

  Because of the number of brands nnvesting and paying attention to influence marketing, influencer campaigns are growing day by day. It has conitued not only to improve, but also to transform to lead within the dimension of marketing.  

  The founder and CEO of Talent Resources, Mike Heller, said in one of his interviews with Fortune:

  “When you have an influencer that has 30 million followers, 20 million, five million—that’s more powerful than any of the other traditional media outlets out there.”

  According to Mediakix, the spend  of influencer marketing industry in global market is expected to be $5 -10 billion by the end of 2021:

  By decreasing amount of customers watching TV and hike of ad blockers the expansion of influencer marketing efficiency is growing. Thus confirming that word of mouth is a very efficient type of marketing in this digital era.  

  Influencer marketing is also supposed to be touched by artificial intelligence. With time period, AI is making improvement on finding the correct influencer to partner easier and quicker. It is helping to identify those segments with better population, better commitment, with less fake followers and a higher chance of achieving a positive return on investment.

  As a conclusion of my expamples, I would like to stress the importance of implementation of digital tools in future steps of marketing. While implementation, Artificial Intelligence, Personalization and Influence marketing trends would play significant role for the successful outcomes. In addition, these tools are more price efficient on behalf of implementation and return on investment, when we measure the scale of auditory we can reach. Big data implementation adds more accuracy in customer segmentation and gives us opportunity to create target based audience to deliver our message to the right customers.

How it may change the branding journey

  Brands must stay open minded and agile and adaptive to the changing environment, while keeping loyal to their brand values and promises. Nowadays are best time to revise if a company have a need to go and adapt their brand purpose and strategy to stay up to date with the changing customer behavior and mindset. Is a company creating the necessary experience across all customer touch points?

  Today our customers are full for choice. It does not matter what slot you are in, from a #BrandsGetReal research, we see that 66% of customers trusting their brand feel connected. To earn their trust, business have to create a stable brand.

  As in traditional way how customers perceive brand, personal touch, seeing, feeling and touching were crucial in communication stage of branding. With today’s digital environment, all previous methods are getting to the background, when new digital tools and virtual approach becomes more rigid and popular, especially with new trends. For this reason, every digital enabler has to carry out correct message of brand promise and deliver best fit to the brand performance.

  On Web page and online experience of customers, branding is very crucial, as well. The reason why branding is so important due to Google’s E.A.T. ranking factor, which stands for:

·           Expertise: The content of the page need to be written by an expert of the topic and with high quality

·           Authority: The authority on the subject has to be precise and present in the site itself

·           Trustworthiness: There should be reliable links to the site from other trusted websites and online platforms 

  Considering above-mentioned factors, if businesses take care of expertise of the content they deliver, pays attention to the authority who delivers the message and cares about trustworthiness, the branding journey would not have huge impact out of implementation of any new marketing trends listed above. Keeping the main direction in alignment to the Brand Positioning & Brand Promise, supported by Brand Performance in all communication made to direct consumer, making it in a more easy and customer oriented way can only support the branding journey and improve the brand awareness from consumer perspective.

  If Avto_kurator Blog (not a real site) gives some wrong instruction that leads to engine damage by an amateur car fan, that is not good for Avto_kurator’s brand. Not having critical meaning from which trending tool it was performed, but branding journey will be harmed. Considering those factors listed above by Google E.A.T., and aligning to the brand triangle, the way of brand communication would not be changed by implementation of new trends and even can be stronger by implementation of AI and other benefits of digital data driven approach.

   Starting from Brand Identity, continuing with Brand Meaning, Response and Relationships, new marketing trends will empower the brand engagement and recognition, while being implemented in a right way.

 The risks and opportunities

  As we mentioned above, digital marketing trends give opportunity to reach the consumer at a lower price, compared to TV-Radio and printed materials, magazines and newspapers. However, digital marketing trends have their own advantages and disadvantages, which deserve to be payed attention.

  The challenges and risks of digital marketing trends:

·        Skills and training – We have to be sure that our personnel have the right knowledge, skills and competence to carry out digital marketing with accomplishment and without abuse to existing customer base. We have to keep updated; however, instruments, platforms and tendencies are changing expeditiously.

·        Time consuming – Such tasks as preparing and improving an online advertisement campaign, defining the right segmentation of targeted customers and creating a marketing information can consume too much time. It is at the same time crucial to be able to measure, understand and analyze outcomes to be sure on return-on-investment.

·        High competition – While trying to reach out to global audience using digital marketing tools, you are also moving against global competition. It is very challenging to stand out against contestants and to attract the attention among many campaigns aimed to customers in an online world.

·        Complaints and feedback – As we know, dissatisfied customers are more likely to share their negative messages about you. Any criticism against your brand will be visible to a huge audience via social media platforms, blogs and mobile application ratings. It is very challenging to carry out an effective customer care service. Negative thoughts and comments can effectively damage your brand perception.

·        Security and privacy issues – On an online platform, you are working with huge amount of customer data. In several countries and legislations, there are specific approaches to collection and usage of customer information for digital marketing. It is very critical to take care about regulative requirements and rules regarding data confidentiality and preservation.

  Opportunities of digital marketing trends:

Main advantage of digital marketing is that a targeted audience can be reached in a cost-effective and measurable way. Other digital marketing advantages include increasing brand loyalty and driving online sales. The rest shown below:

·        Global reach – Being globally available, an online tool gives us an opportunity to find new market shares and commerce globally for only a small expense.

·        Lower cost – A convenient and well-addressed digital marketing campaign can reach the best fitting customers at a much lower cost than classic marketing approaches.

·        Trackable and measurable results – Having several online analyzing tools like web analytics and other inline methods make it easier to understand how effective your online marketing approach was. It is possible to understand the general insights of customers, how did they use your campaign, how many times they used your page and how generally did they react.

·        Personalization – You can greet your customers with specific messages and targeted offers whenever they visit your page, if your platform has linked to your customer database. As much as they interact with your page, that much you are able to enrich the customer data and address them with better offers for the next time or find them on social media platforms and offer them better suggestions.

·        Openness – By managing the social media platforms carefully and closely engaging with them, you can build more loyal, customer oriented brand and create the reputation of being easy to reach enterprise. These benefits will give you an opportunity to build transparency and adding value to trustworthiness of your company.

·        Social currency – Digital Marketing gives you an opportunity to create appealing campaigns using content marketing tactics. These contents (images, songs, videos, articles) can be viral by passing from one user to another and gaining social currency.

·        Improved conversion rates – Having and online platform means that your customers are one click away from making a purchase. Dissimilar to other traditional media channels which require customers to stand up and make a phone call or go to a shop, digital marketing can be smooth and prompt.

  All above-mentioned opportunities of digital marketing have possibility to increase more sales, implement cross-sell and up-sell moments. Paying relevant attention to mitigation of risks and improving the opportunities to better address the challenges, new marketing trends delivering more benefits and good opportunities than risks.

 Conclusion

  Considering the fact of increasing popularity and impact, new marketing trends have more opportunities when they are well managed than risks. Involving right skills and knowledge, empowered with right tools, new marketing trends will bring many new opportunities, especially during this pandemic period with growing up generation Z. By correct and precise implementation of those new trends, we will have better managed customer experience, increased brand awareness, well engaged online audience and effectively understood customer needs.

  With all above-mentioned moments, these trends would lead to more deals that are successful, efficient contributions and growth to the brand. By implementation of right AI outcomes and correct segmentation, we will be able to achieve more customer satisfaction and get better customer feedback. Of course, by understanding our customers better, we will again positively affect our brand promise and brand performance, at the same time saving costs in marketing activities and having better outcomes of return on investment.

References

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-cee/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/covid-second-wave-search-insights/?gclid=CjwKCAiAxp-ABhALEiwAXm6IyeZB0lQj_PsSf-S11-lsGpfEOUkAAYj36ZtN5vHkttPlsgpZihms4hoCEUMQAvD_BwE

https://www.singlegrain.com/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-trends-2021/

https://www.singlegrain.com/email-marketing/how-ai-helps-add-personalization-to-your-email-campaigns/

https://www.singlegrain.com/artificial-intelligence/how-ai-is-shaping-the-future-of-content-marketing-and-personalization/

https://www.singlegrain.com/influencer-marketing/how-artificial-intelligence-is-transforming-influencer-marketing/

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/social-media-connection/

https://www.singlegrain.com/content-curation/5-steps-to-becoming-an-expert-content-creator-according-to-googles-phantom-update/

https://www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk/content/advantages-and-disadvantages-digital-marketing

https://www.nibusinessinfo.co.uk/content/content-marketing

Edgar F. Abdullayev                                                    February 2021