Whether you are a startup or an established brand, marketing never stops evolving. Today, more so than ever, in the age of digital, marketing trends move extremely quickly and businesses have to adapt. Whether you are a small, local business, a leading FMCG brand or you sell software as a service (SaaS), every business needs a digital marketing strategy that is flexible and can be readily adapted to changing trends.
That being said, there are certain things you need to do that should underpin your digital marketing strategy. Things that will be an important element of your digital marketing activity, no matter the platform or channel.
Data should be at the heart of everything you do online – gone are the days when it would be impossible to measure the effectiveness of your marketing activity through channels like billboard advertising or radio ads – now, everything we do online can be tracked, measured and analyzed to provide you with accurate data and insights into customer behavior.
The data you collect should then be used to drive other important aspects of your digital marketing activity. Here are some of the digital marketing tactics that your business should be using.
1) The power of data
We’ve touched on the importance of data and it is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. Based on customers’ data, digital marketers can develop a user experience that is more fluid, more engaging, and, therefore, more profitable. The more individualized the experience is, the more satisfied the customer will be.
Data is the driving force behind understanding your customers. Data helps you to know who you are talking to and who you should be targeting with your campaigns. You can also use data to determine the channels your audience is using. Data can be collected from all your channels – website, social media, email, online advertising – and this helps you to create a more complete picture of your audience and the way they engage with your brand.
Starbucks, for example, collects data from their App to understand when their busiest times are, what drinks people are ordering most frequently, seasonal trends, preferences, and much more. This data is used to build comprehensive customer profiles which helps them to deliver personalized campaigns and promotions that are much more likely to convert.
2) Storytelling
Storytelling is a really powerful tactic that makes your product or service feel more authentic and helps to create a more positive experience with your brand. There are many ways for you to tell your story and these tactics can help you not only improve your brand awareness by driving more traffic to your business but also to create a much more positive impression of your brand through transparency and openness.
Storytelling can come in a variety of forms – from customer testimonials where your customers tell your story for you through to visual content like graphics and videos that help to tell your story in a different way – telling your story is about being open, honest, and transparent about your brand and the products or services that you sell.
Data can also be a driver behind your stories. Internally, most businesses collect a lot of data, and instead of storing this away internally, look for creative ways to share the data with your audience in a way that helps to build the brand in thought-provoking ways.
Airbnb captures this perfectly in this video that tells the story of their “Belo” – it’s more than just a logo recognized by millions of people around the world:
3. Personalised content
A study conducted by Salesforce found that 66 percent of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
Customers don’t want to feel like they are simply a number. Gone are the days when people were happy to be part of the crowd. Instead, people crave personalized interactions and connected experiences. They are the experiences that make us feel good about ourselves and make us feel part of something bigger. They are also the experiences that make us fall in love with brands.
Again, data is at the heart of personalization. Capturing demographic, behavioral, or contextual data enables brands to provide customers with relatable, personalized messaging that drives brand loyalty.
Personalization doesn’t have to be complicated. By learning more about your customers, and what they want and expect from your products and services, you are better able to meet those needs. Personalization demonstrates that you are there to listen to your customers and a tailored experience will help with brand loyalty and customer retention.
Learn from the best
Starbucks is just one of the world’s biggest brands that are turning to data to help them to personalize the content they deliver to their customers. Whilst you might not have an app through which you can collect a huge amount of personalized data, this doesn’t mean you can’t reach out to your customers to generate personalized data.
Aveda is a great example of a brand that is proactive in creating personalized experiences. On their website, you can take a hair quiz that helps them to discover more about your personal preferences. From the results, they make personalized recommendations about the hair care products that will be the best fit for you based on your answers. A simple yet highly effective way of delivering a personalized experience. By collating all that data, they can also get a sense of the most common hair types as well as the products most selected from the recommendations which can help to tailor future promotional activities.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also being used to analyze customer behavior and search patterns. Big data analytics is made possible through AI which enables huge amounts of data to be analyzed in seconds. This helps to identify search patterns, allowing businesses to understand more about how people find their products and services, allowing them to deliver a personalized experience.
Google is a prime example of a company that has embraced the power of AI and it is now central to the search engine’s algorithm, helping to return more relevant (and personalised) results for people searching on their engine.
Businesses like Betway Casino are already using the power of AI to unlock the power of their data by finding innovative ways to analyse, organise, integrate and visualise information. This data is then used to deliver personalised experiences for people interacting on their website as well as being used in marketing and promotional campaigns.
The digital marketing landscape is constantly shifting, however, some things are here to stay. The use of data will help you to keep on top of emerging trends and continue to deliver personalised interactions with your customers.
