Avi Ben Ezra Official website In today’s fast-paced business landscape, it is very important for executives to have a well-crafted digital marketing strategy in place. In the first half of 2019, we’ve seen many organizations take their digital marketing efforts to new levels. They connect with more customers and drive higher sales. New trends include onboarding innovative new technologies and learning a variety of new skills. The following are five of the most popular trends.
- Onboarding New Technologies: AI and Chatbots
If business owners want to stay ahead of the curve in customer experience and satisfaction, it is essential for them to be ready and willing to adopt new technologies. Implementing new technology solutions can save countless hours from tedious tasks, free up time for more impactful work and help companies stay ahead of competitors.
New technologies become available frequently, so it is essential to follow trending articles about new tools and platforms. This year, you can expect to see – and probably are already seeing – many mentions around innovative new artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. With AI, computer systems are now smart enough to simulate human intelligence factors such as reasoning, learning and self-correcting. In the marketing field, AI has great potential for stimulating the customer experience as well as attracting and securing new leads.
An example of a new cutting-edge technology that is quickly growing in popularity this year is the AI-powered chatbot. Chatbots can automate simple conversations and tasks, allowing them to talk to customers through an interface – such as a website, app or social media channel – and can be used for customer service, to offer suggestions and to answer questions. AI enables the bots to perform more complex tasks such as personalized responses to customers. These technological improvements have dramatically improved interactions.
SnatchBot, a leader in AI-powered chatbot technology, is a platform that allows businesses and developers to build personalized bots for a variety of different uses. In France, Isreal and the US, SnachBot has orchestrated record adoption of chatbots, enabling entire regions to cut their carbon footprint due to the reduction of people traveling to work during peak times.
- SEO for Video Marketing
Video content should be a top priority in a business’s digital marketing strategy – it is visually captivating, easy for consumers to share and has demonstrated high success rates in sales conversion. A person is significantly more likely to share a video over a post with just text or links. Additionally, video vastly increases click-through rates on landing pages and in emails.
Video marketing can extend far beyond YouTube, as it creates great content for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat as well. To engage with potential customers in real-time at events or on special holidays, marketers should consider live video feeds on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat.
Just as with any other form of content marketing, it is essential to add search engine optimization (SEO) of video content to your marketing strategy. Optimization will ensure that your video is ranking high in search engines and being shown to the right consumers at the right time. For SEO purposes, make sure to include high-volume keywords in URL, video title, description and file names as well as use text overlays and closed captions. If done strategically, video marketing can drive awareness and bring increased website traffic, new users and more sales.
- Quality Interaction on Social Media
Its now time for businesses to step beyond the typical social media strategy of drafting and scheduling social media posts and ad campaigns in advance. They should consider a more developed plan that includes quality interaction with the community. In an influencer dominated social media era, it is crucial to personalize the consumer experience on your various social channels.
Social listening, or paying keen attention to what consumers are saying about your company and its competitors, is beneficial for learning what type of content your business should be focusing on putting out. Some recommended tips include responding quickly to comments, asking questions to followers, creating opinion polls, actively listening to feedback and hosting giveaways.
Learning what customers want and in turn, creating timely and relevant content is critical for making connections with potential customers and retaining current customers. More options for increased brand awareness include forming influencer partnerships and utilizing contributed posts.
- Email Personalization
Personalizing an email is an excellent way for brands to connect with specific consumer segments authentically and genuinely. You will want to sort your target customers into different market segments based on unique characteristics. This way, you can draft different versions of your email template for each segment. For example, promote specific products or service offerings to young people, and others to older people.
With email marketing, it’s always a good idea to keep the content brief to ensure you are maintaining your user’s attention. The content should be engaging and relevant for the target customer. There are many programs available for making personalized email campaigns, such as the one offered by Hubspot. Creating a customer feel special is key for loyalty and conversion in an email campaign.
- Geo-Marketing
Geo-fencing is an accurate way to target a company’s customer location and can be used to create location-specific campaigns. An app will use a GPS-enabled virtual boundary to trigger actions such as push notifications, social media ads or personalized texts.
Geo-marketing can also be used to target a competitor’s customers or locations that have a high saturation of your target market. For example, if a business wanted to target customers within a certain radius of a competitor’s store, they could send a push notification when the user is in that area containing an ad to attract them to its store instead.
Bring Your Strategy to Life
In the competitive business landscape, it’s essential to engage your customers by staying ahead of the trend and implementing these new technologies and procedures to give your business a competitive advantage. Integrating these five new digital marketing trends into your strategy is a great way to increase engagement, drive sales and deliver results.
