Marketing in the online world has evolved a lot over the last few years. The parameters to measure success have changed and what worked a year ago is unlikely to work now. What got you to where you are now, won’t get you to where the want to be next year. It’s your job to keep up with changes to digital marketing practice.
The lifeblood of any business is the leads that you bring in and the customers you attract. It is no longer enough to simply create a single marketing funnel and expect it to bring all the leads you need to make a profit and returns on your marketing investment.
In today's digital space, the ability to create and maintain lead generation comes down to building trust and intimacy with potential customers. You then need to convince those red hot leads that you are the most relevant choice for them to go with in regard to the product or service you are trying to sell them. Becoming omnipresent and at the forefront of their mind is the key and the following five marketing trends can help you achieve that.
Relevancy is King
Online marketing is no longer about collecting as many emails and leads as possible. There was a time where the businesses with the biggest list would dominate their niche, but in 2018 people crave a greater sense of intimacy and relevance.
Relevancy is king in the modern marketing landscape. In order to increase your profits in 2018, it isn’t about fostering more leads, it’s about building and maintaining a greater and intimacy with the leads you already have. This means providing the perfect solution to the right people at the most relevant time.
Attention Costs More
Something to consider is that if you’re not capturing the right people’s attention in 2018, you lose your ability to compete within your industry without investing heavily in advertising and other forms of online marketing.
The cost of attention is ever increasing as the internet makes it easier for more businesses to have access to it. This makes it important to make the most of the attention you capture. Most people are so overwhelmed with messages that they struggle to make out what is significant. This provides an opportunity for your business because as soon as you manage to capture their attention from the sea of messages, you capture their loyalty and their wallet.
Spreading your marketing to more and more people for the sake of it, no longer works. You have to spread your marketing to the right people at the perfect time and make the most of their attention once you have peaked their interest.
Dominating One Platform Isn’t Enough
There was a time when dominating one platform was enough to create the leads required but that is no longer the case.
The leads you acquire on Facebook are not on YouTube, and the ones you have on YouTube aren’t on Twitter and so on. Therefore, the key to marketing content is to repurpose it for different platforms, while ensuring they are relevant and meeting your target audience.
There was a time when this would be expensive and very time-consuming, but in 2018 it is easier than ever to repurpose a single video into a blog post, an in-depth article, a podcast episode and a wide variety of other resources. In turn, this new content you’ve made from just one video can be turned into a newsletter, social media posts and micro videos to be shared across multiple platforms.
Marketing Funnels Have Evolved
Gone are the days where you could create a single marketing funnel to take your visitors on a step-by-step process to get their information. Consumers are onto these tactics after being duped into hundreds of funnels like this already. For a marketing tunnel to effective in 2018, your brand needs to stand out and turning your marketing funnel into an experience that they want to go on. In turn, this will help you build real and significant trust with your customers.
People no longer fall for scarcity or countdown timers to force them to give up their information. Now, you need to provide your readers with relevant content at the perfect time, based on what you believe their current awareness and engagement to be. This is practically the only way to build trust between yourself and your customers and their trust is what you need in order to make 2018 your best year yet.
A sales funnel is the decision-making journey a customer goes through towards a potential purchase. Marketers can use these sales funnel stages to determine how to best appeal to the customer journey at each point in the sales process.
Invisible ROI… Awareness
In previous years, it was enough for you to focus your ad spend on generating leads and sales but that is no longer the case. Businesses who see the greatest success with their online marketing spend are those to place a lot into brand awareness and nurturing their audience.
This doesn’t mean that creating new leads isn’t important because obviously you want more sales, but you must also learn to nurture the audience you already have and not simply sell to them all the time.
It is important that you are at the forefront of their mind for the specific service or product you offer. This isn’t achievable by constantly trying to sell to them, one message after another. Of course, it takes time to become the “go-to” expert they need for the niche your business operates in. If you decide to solely focus your ad spend ongenerating new leads, you’ll continue to see your ad spend increase while, unfortunately, your conversions go down.
Author: Helen Sayer
Bio: Helen Sayer is a Digital Marketing Executive with several years of experience in marketing and business development. She works for Halifax-based web design and SEO agency, Digital Renovators, and has helped clients from all over the world – including the UK, America, Canada, Australia and Mainland Europe.