Marketing by the Numbers: How Marketing Strategies Are Evolving

We’ve seen incredible change in the business world in the last few decades. The rise of digital marketing — in combination with rapid digital transformations — have transformed the way we approach marketing.

Influencers Take Center Stage

Brevity Is the Soul of Wit

Everyone Is Going Mobile

The Sales Funnel Becomes the Sales Cycle

Marketing Becomes More of an Experience

Empower Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Influencers Take Center Stage

Regardless of what you think about them, influencers have certainly influenced marketing trends with the rise of social media. More and more people are interacting with their friends, families, strangers, and even businesses over platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. It doesn’t take a marketing expert to know the impact of social media on today’s audiences.

And influencers are naturally masters of their respective platforms. For example, a travel influencer will know the best places to travel, local attractions, and can easily recommend great travel products. The practice of advertising through influencers is so popular that 4 out of 5 marketers find the strategy “effective.”

Building brand awareness is a challenging part of marketing, and influencers are the key to bringing your name to the largest audiences most likely to be interested in your brand. However, a sub-trend that’s also worth considering is the micro-influencer. These accounts have fewer followers but are still a viable option for several reasons:

• Price: People with fewer followers obviously charge less for sponsored posts, and you might hit a perfect price-to-performance ratio when working with a smaller influencer.
• Niche: Micro-influencers also typically appeal to a more specific target niche, which your brand can take advantage of for pushing conversions with a specific target audience.
• Engagement: Smaller communities are also more tightly-knit and have higher engagement rates in some cases.

Those with smaller follower counts are typically seen as “regular” individuals rather than hard-to-reach online celebrities, hence why these followers are more engaged and trustworthy of their posts.

Smaller influencers can be just as good if not better of an option for businesses, so don’t be afraid to look at micro-influencers during your search.

Internet users love short content, a pattern that can be deduced by looking at the most popular social networking sites in recent years.

• Twitter restricts its posts to a certain character count.
• Snapchat posts last only seconds before being deleted.
• TikTok videos are only seconds long.
• YouTube has even joined the party with YouTube Shorts.

Long videos are still an important part of content marketing strategies, and are certainly still necessary, especially if the customers are at a late point in the sales funnel. From there, they are already hooked on your pitch and are more interested in learning a large amount of information about your product or service. A long video would be more fitting in that case.

However, short-form content has become a powerful tool for modern marketers in both B2C (business-to-customer) and B2B (business-to-business) spaces. The Social Media Marketing Industry Report shows us that the vast majority of advertising videos are under 3 minutes long.

Web design and mobile app development are in high demand from businesses for a good reason. Today’s audiences are using their mobile devices like smartphones and tablets more often than ever, with a whopping 6.4 billion people using them globally as of 2021. To put that statistic into perspective, there are 7.9 billion people on earth right now.

It’s for these reasons why mobile web design and application development are must-haves for companies and their marketing departments. You want your main website to be optimized not only for desktops with large screens running Windows, MacOS, and Linux operating systems but also for smaller mobile devices running Android or iOS.

We used the term “sales funnel” earlier in this article, but the truth is that that approach to marketing is slowly being phased out in favor of a more circular approach known as “inbound marketing.” The traditional sales funnel would work like this:

• The marketing team attempts to appeal to broad audiences.
• A certain portion responds to the marketing efforts and gets transferred to the sales team.
• The sales team manages to convince a small portion of that audience, who themselves become paying customers.

This setup is known as a funnel since each respective group of potential audience members becomes smaller at each stage. The one major flaw with this approach is that, once customers reach the final conversion, they are no longer being considered by the company.

The cyclical approach, which leverages the inbound marketing strategy, involves three main steps which are part of the customer journey. Once the last one completes, the process starts again at the beginning:

• Attract: Generate powerful marketing content to get people’s attention and establish yourself as a trusted name in the industry.
• Engage: Show that you are worth listening to by addressing customers’ pain points and showing how you can solve their problems.
• Please: Provide support for your customers even after the sale to ensure they have a positive experience with your brand overall.

If done correctly, happy customers will encourage their friends, family members, and other connections to join the cycle with them, forming a self-fulfilling loop. Inbound marketing fixes the problem with the funnel in that the customer is always at the center of attention. Learn more about why every business needs a marketing funnel

Text, images, and videos have been the de facto standard for advertising for many decades. Only recently, we have seen more companies compete on the basis of the customer experience, thanks to new technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality that aim to empower marketing even further.

While it used to be a dream of sci-fi movie enthusiasts, newer VR headsets and mobile phones have the right tools to provide a believable virtual experience to your potential customers. You’ve probably seen augmented reality before when buying a new TV on Amazon, where the storefront uses your camera to add a to-scale model of the product right in your own room.

These immersive experiences are known as “experiential marketing.” They can also take the form of physical events, though those have certainly hit the brakes since the pandemic. However, as the technology is becoming cheaper to own and as public venues reopen, it seems that experiential learning is coming back into popularity.

In summary, we can pinpoint three ways modern companies can provide advertising as an experience:

• Virtual reality through VR headsets and phone holders
• Augmented reality largely through smart devices
• Live events at public venues

While they may seem complicated, experiential marketing does actually work out in the field. 77% of marketers adopt it as a “core part of their advertising strategy.”

As technologies are improving, we continue to see a shift in customer needs, with people demanding more personalized experiences. This has led to changing habits, and marketing departments must always stay on their toes regarding new trends and patterns that will bring them a better return on their marketing investments.

The trends we’ve covered here—influencer culture, short-form content, mobile optimization, and experiential marketing—are only scratching the surface. Do some research, and you’ll find a variety of trends that your teams will be excited to apply to your business too.

Need help with building an effective growth strategy for your business? Work with an award-winning digital marketing agency that can empower you with purpose-built marketing strategies that convert. Book a meeting and see how we can make a difference.