Current trends in digital marketing

Digital marketing refers to the use of electronic or digital media channels to market your products, services, your brand or even your organization. Here we will try and take a look at trends and events that could have an impact on the digital marketing domain in 2015:

Facebook’s new algorithm

As the biggest (in terms of users) social media platform out there, anything that significantly impacts content delivery on Facebook is big news and to be carefully considered. So, here goes:

Facebook has rung in changes to their algorithm to improve the News Feed experience for their users by restricting the appearance of organic posts in users’ News Feeds. Three types of content have been specifically restricted: content whose purpose is to push people to install an app or buy a product, content that seeks to push users to enter contests or promotions without context and posts that reuse ad content.

Current Trends in Digital Marketing

But if you’ve already invested time and resources and built yourself a loyal Facebook audience you can consider these three changes to help you garner value from your Facebook presence in light of the recent changes:

Follow Facebook’s guidelines for posting

The Facebook algorithm is always improving as the social network responds to user feedback. So, for best results consider using Facebook’s posting guidelines:

Post consistently – Create a content calendar to ensure you are posting regularly and staying relevant for your audience.

Targeted posts – You can target posts by gender, interest, age or location by using the variety of options in the Post Targeting and Privacy sections under “Settings”.

Use the right words and pictures – Short, descriptive phrases and high-quality lifestyle images are a shoo-in. Try and avoid sales phrases such as “buy now” and “shop now”.

Leverage the versatility of Facebook pages

Facebook pages are already optimized for device viewing and use, making them an easy to maintain touch point for your business. They can also easily double up as both an information publishing service and a customer service channel as some businesses have already discovered.

Use Facebook ads

Facebook’s algorithmic changes will not affect Facebook ads. According to Facebook, surveyed users did not mind promotional content that is marked upfront as advertising. They only took exception when promotional content masqueraded as organic content and clogged their news feeds.

Twitter-Google partnership

Google and Twitter have cemented plans to integrate tweets in Google search pages. This symbiotic search-social relationship has pluses for both the partners: Google gets real-time content while Twitter will benefit from the increased organic traffic sent its way by Google.

In order to better leverage this new partnership / reach, brands will need to treat tweets like ads or landing pages and not as mere messages. Meaningful calls to action, links back to your brand site etc will need to find a place if you are serious about becoming part of the twitterati.

Hot new technology

Augmented reality and wearable technology are the currently trending technology topics. We are talking about devices like the Apple Watch Apps, Google Glass, Facebook Oculus Rift etc that are garnering sound bytes by the bucketful. If these devices could yet gain some measure of mainstream adoption, marketing applications are sure to follow.

Digital Marketing and how it impacts your business

More and more people are spending more and more time on the highways of the Internet, on the enticing attractions of the social media platforms, the alluring chat that appears on their screens, the latest update presented courtesy their mobile apps. The Digital Age is long here. It has sunk its roots deep. This is one bandwagon that you should’ve been on and if you haven’t this is all the convincing you will need:

You are out of step – Have you read up the latest post about your business on say, Facebook? Or the scathing review of the customer who found a fly in his soup? Is Twitter just bird talk to you? If you’ve replied yes to all of the above, you’re just not speaking the language of your customers. Present and Future. And this is a demanding generation. A demanding, digital generation. They like it just so. But don’t worry. It doesn’t take too much time or money to hire an expert. Or two. And let them get on with it. Watch them release your struggling inner digital self. And, watch it soar away.

Your competitors will steal a march over you – You’ve spent years building up and maintaining your business. That was probably carefully nurtured by your father before you. And your grandfather before that who founded it. This is a business that you take a lot of pride in.

Don’t sit by and watch your as customers get swept away by competition, competition that may not be as finicky about quality as you. And, worse still by start-ups. Kids whose fathers you patted on their heads as you walked by to open up your store.

The digital lingo is not hard to learn. Its not rocket science or writing this article. Its pretty intuitive in fact. With a little guidance and a helping hand, with a little time and some money, you are well on your way to becoming conversant.

You don’t know your customers – Do you have a great digital strategy in place? Can you give your customers a powerful online value proposition? When you are not able to communicate with your customers, you will not be able to deliver for them. You are not able to deliver because you don’t know them. There are digital tools out there that will, in fact, will not, enable you to read their minds.

But you will still get a pretty good understanding of them; what makes them tick. You will get a pretty decent handle on their likes, their dislikes, their whimsies and the fashions that leave them drooling. You may not approve of all this, but there is no harm in knowing (in fact you may even get to like a few of them once the initial hiccoughs are past). And in putting your old cunning to a little use. All you need to do is to deliver your products packaged in their expectations. Just be a little patient. And get to know them a little more.

To Know more.Visit:http://blog.xerago.com/2013/11/the-forbidden-sins-of-digital-marketing/

Essential requirements for Digital Branding

A brand is an essential element of your business. Branding not only makes your business company unique, but it also establishes credibility. It creates a long-term idea and impression in the minds of a new possible customer or an existing one. Building an image of a great brand can provide you a considerable chunk of market share. Your brand is the first opportunity to tell customers how you differ from the competition.

The rise of digital marketing has changed the marketing plans of many brands fundamentally. To grow as a successful brand in this digital age, you need digital branding. Digital brand creation is all about understanding consumer buying habits and constructing online-marketing tools to complement their online behavior. How you create a brand is the difference between developing your point of distinction or mixing with the crowd.

So what are the essential requirements for digital branding? Here are some of them:

Essential Value: Modern consumers are always looking for the best deal and people need a reason to keep returning. This does not, of course, mean that value hasn’t always been important, but people today look closer than ever at what the brand means to them as an individual. As a digital marketer, the aim is to provide something amazing that will make the customer return, pass on the details, and make purchases. All data capture elements need to provide value to the customer and your web design needs to be tailored to provide value even to those customers who do not make a purchase.

Your brand’s voice: Digital media marketing, unlike traditional marketing is conversational. Brands that listen and respond to their prospects or customers on the digital front without time lag are the ones that can keep the audience glued to the marketing activities. When we say two-way communication, it implies that the brands need to be careful with both, listening as well as responding to the customers.

Every response from the brand should reflect its traits. Consistency of voice and tone in communication creates uniqueness and makes it easy for the customer to recognize the brand, just by reading or listening to what the brand wants to say. Brands need to invest ample time to zero in on the brand voice, keeping relevancy and market trends in mind.

Building trust: Building on trust, be it for a company operating online or offline, is a tough task. A tougher task is to manage the trust issues in line with changing trends and market updates. Along with being consistent, brands need to be friendly and reachable to consumers. When it comes to digital media activities, just promoting products/services wouldn’t do the magic. Marketers need to wear thinking caps and understand what triggers consumers.

For example, if a brand posts only promotional and sales messages on a Facebook fan page, fans will never be engaged or connected. But if the same brand is able to connect the happenings around, relevant to the consumers’ lifestyle, it will create an energetic impact on the consumers.

Be Data-centric: Brands today should keenly observe and understand consumer behavior, purchasing trends, psychometrics, emotional quotient and the like. Decoding these patterns may lead to the identification of an undiscovered sect of target audience, an unexplored genre in the industry or something even more valuable.

Brands operating with data-driven insights build on innovative approaches to traditional products/services. Willful marketers are spending fortunes on market and marketing research services to understand consumer metrics and fine tune their sales and marketing practices accordingly.

Visibility: Brands now need to be available everywhere on the internet. When customers are searching products, looking to socialize, find entertainment or seek inspiration, a brand should be available to engage and encourage.

Alongside that, the brand’s presence should also be in-line with the consumer’s mindset. It needs to be present on relevant networks and platforms where the audience is present.

Use People Power: The fastest items to reach a large audience online are viral adverts that people love for what they are, not what they offer. Embracing the ability that people have to share videos, stories and ideas will allow you to spread your message fastest. To do this you will need to create something, or allow the customer to do something, that is truly original and exciting.

Formulating your digital branding strategies based on the above points will help your brand rise in the digital marketing space.

Why Digital and Traditional Marketing Makes a Balanced Strategy

MARKETING PROGRAMS 101: HOW TO CREATE A BALANCED MARKETING STRATEGY

In their race to grab maximum likes, tweets, ratings, shares and reviews, marketers tend to forget that traditional marketing is still a viable option when it comes to converting strategies into sales.

Nowadays, many organizations shift to internet marketing because of several reasons like low rate of investment, increasing penetration of internet exposure at the consumer level and larger reach of the same. In US itself digital advertising grew up to 16.6% in 2012 and touched a remarkable 37 million figure that year. So does this indicate the end of traditional media? Has traditional marketing lost all its significance to digital marketing? Well experts have something else to say.

Even though the statistics show the rise in use of internet marketing, traditional marketing has not completely lost all its ground. One example is the television, which still happens to be one of the highest used modes of information today. One of the prominent benefits of using traditional marketing is that it helps in better understanding the consumer and their needs and is therefore, still a plausible option amongst others. Here are some reasons as to why marketers shouldn’t obsess over internet marketing tactics alone and why their strategies should have an equal share of traditional marketing tactics.

EASY ACCESSIBILITY

Print advertisements still have a larger reach over internet ads as the chances of a person coming across an advertisement in a magazine, newspaper or on the television are more than the possibilities of a chance encounter on a website. Also, the reach of traditional media is still way ahead of internet in many parts of the world today.

PERSONALISED APPROACH

The main aim of any business is to make the products reach the target audience at a minimal cost and reaching customers personally is a tiresome task. However, some traditional marketing tactics like one-to-one marketing offer a great way to overcome this hurdle. Customers today fall into various groups or cliques based upon their interests, thereby categorizing themselves from a heterogeneous group to a homogeneous one. This makes it easier for the marketers in reaching out to them quickly while maintaining the personalised approach. Some traditional marketing tactics like events are perfect for this purpose as they have the ability to get the desired impact while being inexpensive.

AFFORDABLE

The traditional marketing strategies like direct marketing, personal selling or use of flyers and pamphlets are cheaper in reaching out to the customers.

HIGHER REACH

SMS’s, direct mailers, and even door-to-door selling are some of the traditional marketing tactics that can be used in various combinations to reach the maximum number of audience and to create brand recognition. These tactics are flexible and cheap and can be used in tandem with other tools like brochures and catalogues, pamphlets and fliers to give any other marketing tactic a run for its money.

The code of the game is to not obsess over any type of marketing strategy too much and to let the client’s requirements drive one’s strategic decisions, while maintaining a unique selling proposition and a worthwhile offer. The rest you leave to fall into its own place like the tiles in a game of dominoes.

Highlighting The Digital Marketing Potential For Banks

Pros & Cons of Digital Marketing for Banks!

Highlights the opportunities and challenges faced in using Digital Marketing for Banks and Financial Services.

Research:
With reference to the 2013 Global Retail Banking Digital Marketing report, the key trends have been identified. Underpinning the growth of Digital Marketing is the growing access to the Internet, and the proliferation of mobile phones. The trend in the last 10 years has been significant across the Digital Channels. Today, majority of the Banks offer online Banking, and in the next few years majority of the Banks will offer mobile banking.

Opportunities:

Broad Customer reach: Digital Marketing offers significant opportunity to Banks and Financial Services to extend their customer reach. These channels meet the customer need of convenience and speed.

Social Media: Banks need to focus on two questions, how they expect customers to interact with them in five years? , And how will these customers buy products and services in the future? Face book and Twitter have proved successful, but how they evolve is crucial to track.

Focus on Gen Y, who are quick adaptors to Technology. Developing countries offer growth and have a relatively young population, so the impact of Gen Y on the digital trends cannot be underestimated.

Encourages Creativity and Innovation in satisfying the customer.

Create a Digital Strategy based on testing, segmentation and data analytics to stay competitive in the Banking space.

Challenges:

1. Digital Marketing growth is different in the Developing Countries and the Developed world, because of Internet access speed and Internet penetration. Therefore, sales and marketing efforts need to be balanced across the various Marketing Channels.

2. Real Time: The ability to have Real Time Single Customer views of products and transactions across channels, and the ability to conduct Real Time event driven marketing using digital marketing is limited for most of the Banks today.

3. Measurement: Testing and Learning processes are weak along with the lack of measurement on the return on investment. Banks will need to address these capabilities as a priority.

4. Big Data: Handling Big Data poses a challenge, because it is beyond the ability of typical database software to capture, store, manage, and assess. Despite the use of predictive analytics within Banks, most do not have the capability to integrate this in Real Time, into their Marketing initiatives on a multi channel basis.

5. Return on Marketing Investment: Assess the banks digital marketing capability on a regular basis, and invest based on future trends.

6. Regulations: Established Banks operating in a highly regulated environment pose a bigger challenge for Digital Marketing.

It is an on going challenge for Banks, to optimize the Digital Marketing potential. Thereby Online and Mobile Banking technology become key focus areas.

The 3 questions that need to be answered are

a) how to disseminate information on new products and services using Digital Technology?,

b) How to engage customers?,

c) how to use customer information and personalize the marketing?

The dynamic nature of the digital landscape in conjunction with the uncertainty will continue to keep this a hotly discussed matter into the near future. Every challenge that is met in a timely and thorough way will prove to be a clear opportunity.

Why do brands need Digital Marketing?

From a place where they have to be, the digital world has become a place where consumers love to be. One of the major reasons for this shift in consumer focus towards the digital world is – empowerment! Consumers can get information about anything with just a few clicks. The widespread adoption of Internet, social, and mobile technologies has shifted power from the producer to the consumer.

The explosive influx of consumers into digital space makes it the best place for brands to communicate with potential customers. Brands are using technology like never before in order to provide a high quality and seamless customer engagement and shopping experience for customers. To stay competitive, brands need a new approach to consumer engagement and conversion; brands need digital marketing!

 Brands need digital marketing because it makes communication with their consumers more direct and definitely more exciting. According to a recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council report B2B businesses spend around $16.6 billion on content marketing to generate leads. These numbers will increase as studies reveal that 95% of brands plan to expand their digital marketing budgets over the next year.

Here is a look at why brands need digital marketing –

 High brand visibility – digital marketing helps you acquire an online identity, to be specific; you acquire an online brand presence. This increases your brand’s visibility tremendously.

 Hit the right target – a sound digital marketing strategy will not only reduce conventional advertising spending but also help your brand reach the right segment of consumers that you target. One of the cool things about digital marketing is that it helps you mine data from various channels. What is even cooler is such data helps you to target your consumers more accurately by way of – segmentation, identifying consumer needs, and developing behaviour based profiles.

 Optimal performance – digital marketing offers you an awesome tool called web analytics! Web analytics helps you measure your brand’s performance at every level. It makes you adjust your marketing strategies according to evolving trends. You can optimize every part of your marketing venture through analytics.

 No more geographical constraints – digital marketing can help spread your presence all over the globe, or to particular locations of your choice. Starting with a website, to SEO, getting inbound links, using email marketing, active social media presence, digital marketing offers tactics by which your brand attains global visibility.

 Customer engagement – highly interactive in design, digital marketing lets you communicate with your consumers. Digital marketing makes customer engagement more pertinent and in the longer run – profitable.

 It only gets better – here is the clincher – online shopping. In this fast-paced world, most consumers prefer shopping online. With more consumers shopping online, it means more sales for digital businesses.

These characteristics of digital marketing benefit both consumers and brands, and make the communication more direct and enjoyable. The brands that see this value and invest in digital marketing will not only emerge as leaders within their space, but will quickly become brands that people truly love. The success of a company will soon depend on not only their products, also but how they develop this aspect of their business to tackle the new digital world we live in.