Keeping up with marketing trends and digital marketing trends is a real challenge for companies and marketers. Almost every day there are new developments, new trends, and a new algorithm that confuses everything. Sometimes it can feel as if you can't make it if you think you've finally got your marketing strategy under control. It is imperative to update trends before they become old news.
The marketing industry is constantly evolving and so should every marketer if they want their business to succeed. To keep up with these changes, organizations should be aware of the ever-changing market trends along with the advancement of new tools and platforms to increase return on investment. It's one thing to know what trends are in play, but it's another to adjust your business to make progress through change.
When new trends emerge in the market, it can be difficult for marketing managers to estimate the potential impact of these changes and implement them in their own strategies. Transitions are inevitable in any industry, so you need to implement agile management and operational structure to keep up with new trends before your competition takes advantage. Even if you feel you are on the right track, you should regularly review your strategy by creating a strategic marketing plan.
A strategic marketing plan defines your goals and outlines all the marketing tactics you will use to reach your customers, including digital marketing, social media, advertising, and other forms of marketing. Make sure you make your marketing strategy an integrated part of your business strategy, not a separate part of it used by one department. Everyone should be aware of how marketing plans on supporting the business so that they can also work on integrated and coordinated campaign support. Once you have created your strategic marketing plan, here are our top 5 tips for keeping it inline with market changes.
Leverage Campaign Data and Revenue Outcomes
Leverage Campaign Data and Revenue Outcomes
Let's talk about how important data-driven strategy is in modern marketing. The use of business data in your marketing efforts begins with a clear understanding of what data your business needs to have to answer the questions and gain necessary insights into solutions. Data analysis can help you create customer personas used in various strategies to generate more revenue and drive more personalized marketing efforts.
By using today’s software to search for patterns in large amounts of data, marketers can utilize the insights gained from that data to develop a more effective marketing strategy. Data helps marketers gain a better understanding of their customer base and how their product or service offerings are being received. We’ll start with a look at the types of data most marketers collect, how they collect data, and how they improve marketing efforts by examining the planned strategy against the results the data returns.
Market analysis helps optimize the effectiveness of your marketing by adjusting strategies, delivering data-driven and actionable insights, and scaling your marketing efforts with market changes. Data-driven marketing can be used effectively to influence your business strategy, as well as customer loyalty and customer acquisition strategies. Market analysis can be done through data analysis tools such as website analytics platforms, social media analytics and insights, marketing automation platforms, and search engine optimization tools.
However, many of those tools will only support a portion of the insights you need to make the right decisions. Integrating those tools with a CRM and connecting marketing campaigns through the full customer journey from interests and awareness to revenue is the only way to gain a complete understanding of your ROI. Having the complete picture will help you formulate a better marketing channel strategy. When your marketing team is monitoring every aspect of the marketing and sales funnel you can use data to quickly change direction as needed with guaranteed outcomes.
Implementing a data-driven marketing strategy requires time and resources. Your marketing team must ensure that the right policies and controls are in place. Data is only meaningful if you implement changes to improve processes and see an increase in the effectiveness of your marketing strategy reflected back in that data.
Modern marketing data tools such as marketing automation platforms give marketers greater insight into the results and actual revenue created from campaigns with multi-touch attribution modeling without spending too many hours analyzing data. They allow you to dedicate ample time to building effective marketing campaigns which drive more opportunities for your sales team. However, there’s more to adjusting a marketing strategy than just the data.
Reevaluate Your Marketing Strategy with Integrated Marketing
Reevaluate Your Marketing Strategy with Integrated Marketing
Integrated marketing is the process of selecting a combination of marketing channels with the best strategies for each platform to ensure the desired outcome from your target market. It is a strategy that aims to unify the marketing activities of your company, brand, and customer base, including your product and service offering messaging. By creating a cohesive story and ensuring that message is everywhere your customers spend their attention, you can leverage the uplift it provides to your return on investment.
If you haven’t started already, merging a variety of demand generation, brand awareness, and owned/earned marketing to your mix should be part of your next marketing strategy. Building influencer relationships and adding earned media to your content marketing strategy can have a huge impact on brand awareness. Data-driven marketing, led by analytics tools, allows your marketing team to determine which part of your advertising budget has the biggest impact on conversions and revenue. When working in concert with your integrated marketing strategy, your sales team should be able to reach leads at the right time and transform them into paying customers.
Diversify Your Marketing Channels
Diversify Your Marketing Channels
As you already know, a diversification strategy is a growth strategy for companies, in which you identify companies that are developing new products for new markets. Diversification generally means entering multiple geographical markets through geographical market diversification or creating new companies in the same sector. It also means launching brand new products and services that are adjacent to the company's current product offering, that is, opening up new market share and reaching out to customers who haven’t previously known your company for these solutions.
If you want to diversify into completely new markets with independent products in order to reach new brand and customer groups, you are talking about conglomerate diversification. This is a strategy to tap into new market segments and operate in multiple industries at the same time, allowing your companies to expand their presence and occupy entirely new spaces. However, that is generally a much more complex process than simply reviewing existing offerings and finding adjacent solutions that have some market share available.
You can follow a similar process to diversifying your marketing channels, whether you are simply adjusting existing campaigns or looking to support those new offerings. If your team has a well-developed process that works on one social channel, try adapting it to another to see if you can have a similar or greater impact. Research and expand the keywords you use and intend to rank for around your products and services. Utilize new types of content that you weren’t previously engaging customers with.
You should always leave a percentage of your marketing budget available to test out advertising and content creation for new channels each year. Track the results of those tests against your expected results and benchmarks set by other channels. See how they work together for a net gain to get a better understanding of likely outcomes from planned changes. No single channel will support your organization forever so don’t let your business drop simply because trying something new is too difficult or you aren’t certain of the outcomes.
Embrace Change
Embrace Change
Surviving and thriving in a time of digital transformation calls for the need to stay up to date on critical digital marketing trends and keep up with the latest trends. Assess how you respond to the changing business environment, see how consumer behavior changes, find out what motivates your employees, and stay up to date with the latest trends in digital marketing and business development. Businesses are defined by more than revenue, so we look at how companies adapt and which thrive.
Failing to update your existing business plan with the latest digital marketing trends can also affect your success. Those who follow last year's marketing game plan will fall behind competitors who follow trends closely and are ahead of their competitors. Organizations and companies most often fail to keep pace with changing trends and are left behind and swallowed up by the competition. Adopting marketing trends will not only bring you closer to your customers but will also allow you to predict their future behavior.
Technology and ideas are changing, and companies need to evolve to meet the changes in their markets, which will involve changes in their marketing strategy and, at times, their business models. The success of social media and advertising management depends on adapting to change and evolving with new trends to be where the customers are. To stay ahead of market trends, customer needs, and technological development, your company needs to evolve to meet market changes and incorporate changes regularly.
Create a Competitive Advantage & Get the Word Out
Create a Competitive Advantage & Get the Word Out
When you are trying to create a competitive advantage for your business, it is crucial to stay up to date with marketing trends. Business growth and digital marketing are closely related, so it is critical to keep up with the latest trends in digital marketing to grow your business and remain competitive as the advertising landscape changes. As your organization plans and develops new solutions for the market, it’s vital that marketing is brought in early to plan for the initial campaign launch.
When business development and marketing work in coordination with each other, the outcomes are much greater than a handoff from one to the other. Using the sales and marketing teams to verify the market need and sizing before developing new solutions can mean the difference between success and failure. Make sure your marketing team is staying competitive by keeping up with changes in marketing and providing your competitive advantage all the support it needs.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Trends in digital marketing are not only shaped by industry leaders, but also by customer wishes and needs. Marketing trends come and go, but the basic success remains the same: understanding the needs of your audience and communicating with them clearly and consistently wherever they are. If you want to help your company develop modern marketing strategies and achieve its absolute optimized ROI potential, we can help you achieve your marketing goals. If you have questions about what digital marketing can do for you or how you can modernize your marketing strategy to keep up with the new decade, write us a message for a free evaluation and consultation.
