While we always promote the benefit of formulating your marketing strategy around personas, segmentation, and the customer journey, it is also helpful to have an awareness of evolving marketing trends to evaluate whether they open opportunities to connect with customers and increase product visibility.
Start with a marketing trend analysis to review your customer data. This will identify consistent trends that align with your business strategy. Adapting to change and having an agile marketing approach ensures you continue to evolve and puts you one step ahead of the curve.
The analysis will identify the marketing channels and strategies needed to market to your customers successfully. These steps could include the following:
- Swot analysis
- Segmentation, targeting and positioning framework (STP)
- Customer research
3 Marketing Trends to look out for in 2023
- Creating the perfect customer experience
With digital marketing on the rise, it is very important to keep your customers in mind when making marketing decisions. Customers are what keeps your business going so making sure you offer the perfect experience is key. One way to do this is to make sure that all your employees are up to date with training so they can offer your customers the best advice and information. Customers will be able to benefit more from engaging with highly trained employees and will be more satisfied in their experience.
A recent report by Marketing Week proved companies that focus on customer experience enjoy more benefits than companies who do not. This can include higher customer lifetime value and lower customer service costs. Having customers at the forefront of your business plans will add a higher value to your business and potentially set you apart from competitors. Improving employee skills and satisfaction will help to improve customer satisfaction and improve creativity and innovation within your organisation. By starting with employee retention, customers will begin to build a trusting relationship with your brand.
- Visual Content
The rise of social media has changed the way users want to consume advertisements. Users are used to seeing short attention-grabbing content due to platforms like Tiktok and Twitter. If a post does not interest them in the first few seconds, they will scroll away. Consumers are more accustomed to visual content, so it is important that your business keeps up with the shift in how content is being consumed.
Due to the rise of Tiktok over the last few years, video-based content is increasing. Tiktok has also seen the rise of user generated content due to the nature of the site. User generated content on social media has become the most effective word of mouth tool with 92% of consumers turning to people they know for referrals above any other source. Consumers trust user generated content as the message is not coming directly from the brand or a paid partner. The content is a genuine recommendation from someone who loves the product or service and wants to share that. Additionally, sharing user generated content on your platforms shows authenticity and creates a niche for your brand.
Having more visual content will also make your website and social media more accessible. It can help to drive user engagement and brand awareness. The rise of visual content also has a psychological side to it as visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text. People retain 95% of messages from a video compared to 10% from text. Therefore, having more visual content will make your digital platforms more interactive and memorable.
- Search Engine Optimisation
Recently, there has been an increase in voice search due to the rise of smart speakers such as Alexa, Google Home, and Amazon Echo. Owners of these smart speakers want easy relevant responses when they search online using their smart speakers. Voice search is only going to become more popular with 61% of 25-64 year olds who own a smart speaker planning to use the voice search more in the future.
Due to this rise of voice search, SEO has become an even more important tool to optimise for your website. Voice searchers search a lot differently than those doing a quick Google on your phone. The digital assistants attached to the smart speakers are designed to answer short questions such as ‘What’s the weather like in London?’ and customised questions such as ‘What coffee shops are near me?’. Whereas users on their phones use more simple phrases and would search ‘London weather’ or ‘coffee shop near me’.
SEO has always been a very important tool to optimise your website and increase web traffic, and with the rise of voice search it has only become more important. Adapting your keyword phrases to suit voice searches will make your website more accessible to all users.
So, to maintain a competitive edge, it is important to develop a strategy for 2023 that includes a focus on: customer experience, visual content, and SEO. With these three at the focus of marketing for the next 12 months, we are in for an interesting year.
If you are looking to develop a new marketing strategy, get in touch with our team today by emailing customerservice@mackmangroup.co.uk or calling 01787 388038.