Future trends in marketing prioritize meeting customers wherever they are (mostly on mobile phones) and embracing innovative technologies such as non-fungible tokens.
Speakers at HubSpot’s Inbound 2022 user conference in Boston highlighted key strategies and technologies they believe will shape the future of marketing. As strategies like conversational marketing and social media optimization become more prevalent, they underscore marketers’ goals to connect communities and systems that have been divided by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Explore five trends influencing the future of marketing.
1. Conversational Marketing
People carry their phones with them everywhere, so the easiest place for marketers to find them is through Messages and other mobile apps.
Session “Conversational Marketing: Is This the End of Mobile Apps?” This is a technique that prioritizes one-on-one conversations with customers so that customer interactions can be more personalized.
Griffin LaFleur, senior marketing operations manager at Swing Education, said live chat was his conversational marketing channel of choice. This type of communication helps customers feel a human connection, which LaFleur says is difficult with his one-to-many approach to traditional marketing.
“If you market to different personas, and you know certain personas are coming… you’re going to offer them a different experience, one that’s tailored to them,” Ruffler said in an interview. So when you’re thinking about how to continue to do well in marketing, it’s embracing other channels.”
To kick off a conversational marketing strategy, marketers can choose simple use cases such as loyalty program communications or newsletters and see how customers respond. If successful, marketers can tap into more use cases and channels, including social media.
2. Social media optimization
If people aren’t texting on their phones, chances are they’re scrolling, searching, and using social media platforms. But the way people search organically is starting to change, so marketing teams need to start optimizing their social media content as much as they focus on search engine optimization (SEO) for other content. There is, he says, LaFleur.
Audiences have come to expect and demand a more personal connection with brands as social media provides real-time information, results and community building.
“For many people there is an attachment to a brand. …We can put out something that appeals to potential and current clients, but for brands like us, social media is your culture. In an interview, a corporate communications manager in the steel industry said, “You should be able to showcase your culture and really use social media to connect people.”
SEO helps marketers create content that people can easily find, but it cannot build communities. Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok’s Global Head of Creator Marketing, said in the session “What We Owe to Creators of Culture” that their characteristics and their emotional connections are inherent in social media, and that these communities are A cornerstone of online culture. The more time marketers invest in social media, the more likely they are to connect with these communities and keep up with online trends.
Sherrell Dorsey, Kudzi Chikumbu, and TJ Adeshola discuss social media and cultural trends at Inbound 2022.
3. Emotional connection
Whether people are scrolling through Twitter or watching TV, ads disrupt the user experience. This strategy is so common that many have learned to leave them out over time. Now customers want a more personalized experience and feel connected to the brands they engage with. I’m here.
The session, “Ignite Your Brand With Empowerment Over Interruptions,” focused on the power of emotional connection and how empowering customers and building personal connections drives better results.
Marketers like Wiggins, who interact with customers primarily through social media, can use empathy to engage with customers in a meaningful way, especially when customers are dissatisfied. According to Wiggins, customers frequently complain on social media, and they are often the ones who have to respond. In replies, Wiggins apologized, empathized, and aimed to fix the problem, often with a positive response from customers.
At the heart of it all is just humans, [having] sympathy. … If you don’t prioritize these things, it is wrong.
Lauren WigginsCorporate Communications Manager
“At the heart of it all is being human and [having] “If you’re a marketer and you don’t have them, if you don’t prioritize them, you’re doing it wrong.
To foster these emotional connections, marketers also need to build trust with their customers. Trust requires transparency. This means speaking openly with your customers about potential challenges and sticking to your brand values. Trust also requires consistency across channels and over time. This means that all content and campaigns must align with your brand’s core values.
4. Hybrid experience
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced most experiences to support both physical and digital elements.
Conversational marketing sessions emphasized the importance of connecting in-person and digital brand experiences to maintain consistency and trust with customers. But marketers like LaFleur are figuring out how to digitally capture in-person event engagements so that customers who receive a physical email can still visit her website for the company.
Inbound 2022: Themes and Conclusion
“[Make] Make sure you’re looking at your overall marketing strategy and how you blend offline and online experiences. Also make sure you can capture data digitally from your offline experience. ”
Brands don’t just compete with their competitors. They also compete with themselves. This discrepancy can negatively affect their perception of a brand if customers enjoy an online experience with the brand more than an in-person experience. If people could find an in-store location for that product and be able to buy it in person that day, they would feel more connected to the brand because they have a degree of ownership over their experience.
5.Web3
Web3 is still a work in progress, but marketers can start learning about Web3 and its capabilities to prepare their strategies for the future. This may include non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The session “What’s Next: Connecting the Dots in Web3” helped attendees understand the differences between Web3 and its predecessors and how brands can connect with their customers in this new web era.
For example, NFTs can open the door to Web3 for the general public. Additionally, since NFTs are still in their early stages, owners can easily build a tight-knit community. If marketers and brands help build and support these groups long-term, they can increase customer loyalty as they work on her Web3 strategy.
However, Web3 and the Metaverse are not the focus of many marketers as this new era continues to evolve.
“I think everyone has their own idea of what it could be, what it could be,” Raffler said. “But how do you build it, how do you get there, how do you exchange funds? It’s still growing.”
