By 2020, global ecommerce is expected to become a $4 trillion industry. To make the most of this promising outlook, businesses need to step up their marketing strategies to find new customers throughout the world. Here are 6 marketing trends that your company should adopt in 2018 to become the first choice of your customers.
1. Trade Show Displays
Trade shows and expositions are going to be a big trend in 2018 as businesses seek out new customers by offering experiential and immersive branding campaigns. Trade shows offer the opportunity to interact with customers face-to-face and use the power of interpersonal communication to create positive impressions about your brand. Engaging and entertaining trade show displays can give visitors the opportunity to trial a new product, learn about your brand and company, all in a highly engaging and social environment.
2. Aligning Marketing Strategies to the Customer Lifecycle
In 2018, marketers are going to focus on aligning their marketing strategies with the customer lifecycle. A wealth of information about customer activity through social media has enabled marketers to determine identify customers in the purchase intent, first purchase, repeat purchase, loyal customer and lapsed customer stages. At each stage, a differentiated marketing strategy is needed which means that you will need to address the psychological needs of customers at each stage by using the right media channels. The options that are available to choose from include paid media, owned media, earned media or experience. Trade show displays are employed to generate demand and create intention to purchase within a new segment.
3. Offer Personalized Marketing
To avoid your heavily-invested marketing messages drowning in the sea of marketing information, you need to craft more personalized messages for your customers. This strategy is extremely useful for social media marketers because it allows you to customize your marketing content according to the communication norms used on different social media platforms. You’ll also notice that the focus of customers’ conversations differs depending on which social media platform they are on.
4. Artificial Intelligence
While we are still a long way off from the day when artificial intelligence can be used to create and deliver highly targeted marketing messages, 2018 may be the year when marketers might be ready to pursue this opportunity over the next few years. The basic idea of using AI to create marketing messages is to employ machine learning methods to segment online audiences and customize email marketing messages according to the customer lifecycle stage. This is one field that marketers have ignored for far too long.
5. The Use of Video
Of all the social media content available online, video content has grown at an unbelievable pace in recent years. The rise and rise of celebrity vloggers and video marketing content suggests that consumers have placed greater trust in the credibility of these vloggers as sources of unbiased and honest opinion about different products. Videos are highly engaging, entertaining and can be viewed at the user’s convenience. YouTube is a great platform to share content about your product, including descriptions, demos and tutorials, reviews, and testimonials.
6. Social Apps
The use of social media apps to market your products or services is by no means a new trend. However, in 2018, this trend seems to have matured and become a standard practice among marketers. The reach of social media apps is now in the millions and more early adopters keep joining all the time. Many large global brands have invested heavily in formulating marketing messages that can be delivered exclusively via Facebook and Messenger apps. It is high time that marketers focus on this form of communication as an integral part of their marketing toolkit.
