The marketing world quickly evolves, and if you don’t keep your pulse on the current trends, you’ll find yourself left behind. Not only is it important to be aware of marketing trends to keep your business current and competitive with others, but it’s also important to keep up with trends because some of these trends become integral tactics, rather than a passing phase.
That’s just what happened with the following three marketing tactics. Once regarded simply as trends, with the test of time and the realization of how effective and important these strategies are, they’ve now become marketing tactics that you absolutely need to use if you want to market your business effectively.
Mobile Optimization and User Experience
Mobile optimization was once a trend, as business owners recognized that many customers were accessing websites and shopping from their cell phones. The growth of social media further drove this trend, with users sharing reviews of products and companies, driving traffic from social media directly to business’s websites.
But we’ve reached the mobile tipping point, and mobile optimization is now a central marketing tactic that every business needs to embrace. While all demographics use their phones to shop, mobile optimization is even more important for businesses marketing to millennials. Ninety-three percent of millennials and Generation Z shoppers use their smartphones for over an hour every day. If a business doesn’t optimize their site and their shopping cart to be mobile-friendly, they could miss out on significant sales, especially if millennials and Generation Z individuals are part of their target audience.
Mobile optimization goes hand-in-hand with overall user experience. User experience consists of everything that a customer could encounter while navigating your website, making a purchase, and using the product that they receive, but most often, user experience falls short on the website. Small mistakes, like shopping carts that are difficult to navigate, unclear site design, and even fonts that are hard to read can turn visitors off and cost your business a sale. Sites don’t just need to be mobile-friendly, but they also need to be user-friendly, too. This is far more than a trend and is now essential to creating any business site.
Content Marketing
Content marketing has also moved beyond a trend and into becoming an actual marketing tactic. When content marketing first gained popularity, it was largely focused on SEO benefits and driving traffic to websites. As a result, lots of poor-quality content was created.
But search engines got smarter, and marketers got smarter, too. Having realized the actual value that quality content can provide to a business and its audience, marketers focused on creating valuable content that serves a purpose, and content marketing became a tactic, rather than a trend.
Today, content optimization is an essential element of marketing and driving conversions. With so many purchases occurring online, buyers want to be able to thoroughly research their purchases, especially if they don’t have the ability to evaluate the items in person before making a purchase. This means that there’s an increased demand for resource material and reviews on a product, as well as a business. Businesses can perform content marketing by publishing resources and reviews that validate their products, then organically transitioning readers to landing pages where they can make a purchase. The ability to access these supplementary materials is a central part of any customer’s journey today, and businesses need to focus on how they can leverage quality, helpful content to drive sales.
Email Marketing
Many businesses embraced the trend of social media marketing, only to face ongoing challenges in organically reaching the audiences that they’ve worked so hard to establish. Email marketing doesn’t have this challenge since it’s the only marketing channel that a business fully owns and controls. Because of this, though, it’s important to do email marketing well.
Email marketing can help to widen the reach of a local business, and it also works on national and international levels, too. With A/B testing, carefully timed emails, and mobile optimization, businesses can increase the effectiveness of their email marketing. Building a list also needs to be an ongoing marketing effort, and a business that takes the time to develop a curated list of warm leads can experience significant success through their email marketing strategy.
Creativity also goes a long way when it comes to email marketing. Offering lead magnets to visitors who subscribe to an e-newsletter can quickly grow a business’ audience and email list, and running a creative and unusual email campaign can result in increased open rates and marketing effectiveness. Creative designs, titles, and even voices help emails to stand out in recipients’ inboxes and also make a business memorable.
While these tactics may once have been trends, they’ve proven to be essential elements in effective business marketing. We’ll probably see more of today’s current marketing trends head this same route, and may be embracing them as marketing musts in just a few years’ time.
