Every business firm is concerned about the question: "How to retain regular customers and attract new ones?" In this article, we've compiled the most important trends of the year to help you build the right marketing strategy.
1.Customer experience
According to a study by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, 73% of buyers believe that customer service is a vital factor in their buying decisions.
A positive customer experience drives customers to contact your company over and over again, in part because the customer is interacting more and more online, and based on the experience, they decide whether they should contact the business next time or not.
What to do: check how suitable and logical it is for the user to contact with you. Develop convinent payment systems, simplify the mobile version, improve the site design.
2.Personalization
A personal appeal to each client is not only an automatic name change in an email newsletter. Artificial intelligence, social media analytics, and the scale of personal data collection can customize all the things from content to product advises.
Clients are exhausted with information from different channels, there is an overload of content. To be visible in the flow of advertising messages, you need to find new ways to convey information. The key in this situation can be achieving a new goal of personalized treatment.
According to an Epsilon survey, 80% of coustomers said they were more likely to do entrepreneur with a brand that provides a more personalized experience.
What to do: Go beyond simple segmentation. collect information, learn more about the client and provide the product and content that suits him.
3.Automation and artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence technology has made great strides forward, and now it's much easier to learn about the actual audience. In the previous couple of years, more and more companies have started using automation to improve their marketing strategies.
Artificial intelligence is one of the primary technologies for creating smart assistants on websites, for example, chat bots. Big data helps to gather information in order to deliver personalized experiences on a massive scale.
It should be considered that the human factor is still important, therefore automation is a help, but not a replacement for real people.
What to do: Use smart assistants. Analyze data to simplify customer service.
4.Loyalty
Another trend is the intensification of work with regular customers. Research by Invesp shows that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it is to retain the interest of regular customers.
Regular customers improve the brand's reputation, increase its recognition: they recommend you to their social circle - friends, relatives, colleagues. Ie, in fact, they make free advertising for the brand. And here we come again to customer experience and its importance, especially for regular customers.
What to do: Don't chase new customers, but focus on getting repeat customers to come back to you because you have the best quality customer service. Build personalized communication with regular clients.
5.Live video
Video has become one of the primary types of content. We can say that Youtube today is the second largest search engine in the world. According to the statistics of CISCO, in 2021, 80% of smartphone traffic will belong to videos.
The most relevant form of video content in 2020 is live streaming. Customers want live contact, and live broadcasts just give the effect of presence: you can ask a question and immediately get an answer to it. This is easier for companies because they don't have to spend a lot of time and money on video creation.
What to do: Include interviews, webinars, social media broadcasts in your strategy.
6.Podcasts
This is a type of audio content with a deep degree of engagement: 75% of users listen to the audio content to the end, 69% confirm that they learn about new products thanks to advertising in podcasts (according to research by the analytical agency Nielsen).
The podcast industry is set to grow even faster in 2020 thanks to a boom in advertising and technological change, which is great news for both listeners content creators.
Podcasts are quite popular because they are easy to manage: at any time you can turn down or interrupt and return to listening later. You can listen to them on your way to work, at the gym, or while you cook dinner.
By using statistics and considering user listening behavior, you can understand who your customers are. This brings us back to the personalized content trend again: with podcasts, you can create just that.
7.Voice search
It is predicted that in 2021 50% of all requests will be voice. Users are looking for the fastest information, such as when on the go. They want to get the information they want right on the search page. The way of searching is changing - the mechanisms of search engines are also changing.
Now it is not so much important to be the first in the search results as to get into the "zero" line and highlighted fragments of Google or Bing. Often information in the "0" line is the only thing that fits on the first screen of the mobile phone.
Users do not always go to the website, but, despite this, they will see information about the company more often, which will increase awareness.
What to do: optimize the content for results in the "zero" line and highlighted fragments of Google and Yandex.
8.Visual content
In spite of the boom in voice search, visual content is still trending. And it is more popular than text material. Not surprisingly, according to research, our brains perceive visual content 60,000 times faster than text.
According to Socialmediatoday, 62% of millennials (and they are now the main paying audience) are interested in visual content more than any other.
What to do: accompany texts with infographics, videos and photos. It will help not only interest the user, but also deliver messages more clearly and convincingly.
9.AR technologies
Aaugmented Reality (AR) is a technology by which virtual objects become visible in reality. AR technologies are developing, and in the future they will occupy no less place than video ads. Photo filters, Instagram masks, Pokemon Go are the simplest examples of aaugmented rReality. More difficult options: trying on clothes or choosing furniture directly in the AR application.
This technology is taking over retail: users are more likely to buy a product if they have already “tried” it, although not in reality. About 55% of users would prefer to make a purchase in a store with AR options.
AR helps you stand out because few other companies use this technology, and also helps you retain attention and give the customer a new, improved experience of interacting with the product.
What to do: create an AR app for your products, use AR elements on social networks.
10.Educational content
Instructional marketing strategy will be another hot topic this year. People want to be helped to solve a problem, and not just convinced to buy a product that they may not even realize they need. The likelihood of a purchase will increase if you explain how you can solve the client's “pain”.
Almost all content today is not just advertising "head-on" and demonstrating the benefits of a product or service, but user training or information. Good educational marketing helps you solve problems and makes choices faster.
