Wednesday, December 17, 2014

3 Online Marketing Trends To Take Advantage Of

Editor's Note: Today's post comes courtesy of Ivan Guzenko, VP and Founder of SmartyAds. His passion is advertisement and social engineering. Active digital-fraud fighter.

Each year we see new online marketing trends come and go, some will remain relevant but most of these trends are constantly shifting and evolving to fit the ever fast moving industry. If you’re not aware of these new marketing trends, you could put yourself in serious danger of falling behind in the face of your competition.

1. Data Insights in Online Marketing - Spending on marketing analytics is expected to increase 60% by 2015 according to Gartner. With the increase in action on all social media platforms a huge bonus becomes apparent to online marketing specialists, data. Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon provide so much more information about human behavior and psychology then we ever had access to before. Where do your consumers live? What other brands are they interacting online? How much time do they spend online?

Analyzing user behavior allows us to uncover a whole new fascinating and relevant piece of the online marketing puzzle. Learning about how your users are interacting with your page and understanding new information is extremely valuable for your online marketing efforts. If you’re not aware of these essential analytics you’re likely missing a huge portion of your target audience hence losing a huge customer base.

2. The continual Rise of the "Prosumer" - Prosumers are an essential part of your online business. Today consumers want to take a more active part in engaging with your brand online. These "prosumers" can be extremely influential online. Let’s not forget the case of DellHell, when a Dell customer was so angered by the customer service he received from Dell that he created a parody off of the original Dell logo with the words ‘DellHell’ which instantly went viral.

Often these Prosumers are the most engaged and active online as well, these are the types of people we want to be marketing toward. The people are always going to have a big influence on your brand, after all it’s them you’re trying to attract. Give the people what they want when it comes to customer service it’s essential to be personable and form real human connections. Let them get a real interactive experience in your online campaign, too. Revlon came out with an awesome campaign this year that lead the user through an interactive ‘choose your own adventure’ experience. Allowing their customers to interact with their advertisement makes the prosumer feel they took part and can take part in the outcome of the ad itself.

3. Combined Campaigns - Allowing your consumers to interact with your campaigning efforts on multiple media facets is an exceedingly growing trend in online marketing. This practice yields increased engagement and network traffic across the marketing spectrum. If you can find a way to link a common thread through all of your media channels including both traditional advertising techniques and new media you’ll definitely begin to see the powerful benefits in your campaigns. Brand names that integrate their campaigns into a multi-channel digital marketplace have shown results of achieving increased ROI sale values up to 300%.

Once you’ve connected with your consumers on one platform, multiple media facets only motivate your consumers to connect with your brand in multiple different ways. It also encourages more engagement through multiple forms of media. Bing’s collaboration with Jay-Z is a brilliant example of combined campaigns. The online aspect of the campaign involved people using the Bing search engine to discover new clues which lead to different pages of Jay-Z’s new book Decoded. Areas of New York City were then covered with pages of the book related to the specific area. The campaign made a huge splash on social media, online, and offline.

These online marketing trends are just a few of the recent trending tactics that you should be aware of, and definitely taking advantage of. There’s ways to incorporate these broad ideas into your local campaigns for small businesses, the big takeaway here is the trend itself and you can play with them and work them into your campaign however fits.

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