Marketing Trends That Endure
By definition, a trend changes over time. (A more cynical view holds that trends are like fashion – they go in and out of style.) Marketing trends do change, but always in service of what’s working in terms of sales and profit margins
In this keynote, we lay out three current marketing trends that have actually been around for decades, and in that sense, they’re not trends at all. But the Internet, social media, and the ability to create content with nothing more than a smartphone cast these trends in a whole new light.
1. Customer Experience
Our prediction: Customer experience is one of the few marketing trends that will still be here 100 years from now, no matter how much technology changes.
It may look different – just like advertising 50 years ago – but at heart, the customer experience will always be about the quality of your relationship with your customers, prospective customers, and consumers at large.
In The Design of Everyday Things, author Don Norman wrote that people tend to blame themselves when they fail to understand how to operate something correctly, like a door with confusing visual cues (“Which way does this thing open?!”). However, the fault, Norman argues, is the designer, not the consumer.
People may blame themselves when they have trouble opening a door or operating a kitchen appliance, but they
won’t blame themselves if they have trouble finding the answer they need on your website, or when the process
of buying or resolving an issue is so frustrating that they feel the need to vent on Facebook or Twitter.
They will blame you.
How, then, do you design a great customer experience?
Answer your customers’ questions.
It would be best if you strived to accomplish one overarching goal: Answer your customers’ questions. Give them the information they need to make a decision. Make your website easy to navigate. Provide accessible and meaningful information. Stay on point. Be relevant. Remember: What customers want is an answer to their question. Not coincidentally, that is exactly what Google wants for your customers, too.
Understand your customers’ needs.
You can learn – direct and with real-time feedback – about your customers’ needs through the social media of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other appropriate social venues. On these sites, you can choose to engage – or not. (However, you do not necessarily need to be on every platform.) You can also decide to participate in a meaningful way, in an authentic voice, and to make good on the promise of your brand, whatever that promise may be.
Leverage emotional value.
Every brand and every product or service has at least some degree of emotional value tied to it. Does your product or service, more than just satisfying a want or need, also meet some deeper human need? The chances are that’s so. If you can pin down what that is, it can help tailor and enhance the customer experience.
Customer experience is much more than just a marketing tool. It’s the human relationship between the leaders and employees of your business and the people knocking at the door with their wallets and hard-earned cash in hand. Don’t take it lightly.
2. Executive Branding
Our prediction: Executive branding will become so common that every chief executive will have her own branded Facebook page.
Just as advertising looked a lot different 50 years ago than it does today, so too with executive branding, people can access almost any type of information they want on the web. We have come to expect instant access to answers via search. We demand it. In short, we expect to find what we’re looking for on a company’s website or Facebook page. If we can’t find the answer, our patience runs thin and quickly. Clicking the back button – or the swipe of a finger – is the easiest thing to do when you’re frustrated.
You must earn buyers’ trust and show your personality.
Example:
1. Take two small, local businesses that match up pretty evenly in an apples-to-apples comparison. One has a well-written and engaging profile of the founder, who still runs much of the day-to-day operations and is well known in the community. She’s also in a short video that accompanies her written profile, in which she explains why she got into this industry, with a short statement about her values and vision.
2. The other business has plenty to say about its products, which are just as good, but almost nothing to say about its founder and leadership team.
Which would you choose?
3. Visual Content
Our prediction: It’s not that people don’t want to read. It’s just … well, they don’t want to read, and video will become one of the biggest players in the years to come.
This isn’t a dig on reading in the age of Twitter (or the continued reign of television, the original sage of visual
content). However, the simple fact is that it is far easier to consume information contained in an engaging and compelling video profile or product demonstration than it is to find the information you seek by consuming and digesting long blocks of written content.
The web is primarily transactional. While there still is an element of old-school “surfing” on the web – which, these days, takes the form of newsfeed scrolling on Facebook and other social sites – many users come seeking an answer to their question (which brings us back to customer experience). In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug argued exactly that: Web users seeking answers don’t necessarily want to spend a ton of time thinking their way to the answer … they want the answer.
Visual content can do that.
The key here is to make your content engaging, compelling, and shareable, to the best of your ability. This holds whether it’s text, visual, or (as in the majority of cases) a combination of both. Think video shorts, infographics, and images on blog posts and social media ads.
There are a billion people on YouTube. Go where the people are. NobleRock Creative can help you implement and sustain these elements in your marketing plan
