Keep up with marketing trends!
The digital marketing space is changing far too quickly for any one team to keep on top of. You’d have to cover every corner of the internet to keep up on all the trendy ways companies and startups are targeting and pulling in new customers. Luckily, the Hibox marketing team has done a little research, and we’ve identified some of the hottest marketing trends any company can put to use (including ours!)
For a short preview check this video out!
Live video streaming via social media is a really popular marketing trend
Thanks to the takeover of mobile, everything is live and on the go. Sports, news, and our own personal lives are broadcasted with the touch of a button. Now, so is advertising. And it can be incredibly effective if done right. “Live” video streaming on platforms such as Facebook means that your audience feels immediately connected. Additionally, there’s an exclusivity and scarcity to it that draws and keeps viewers longer than adspace. If you can use a platform like Facebook Live to bring your target audience content that’s interesting and informative, you’ll have their attention much longer than a pay-per-click ad. At Hibox, we’re about to do our first webinar.
Chatting directly with potential customers
We jumped on the customer chat trend pretty quickly and it’s been hugely effective for us. With other platforms like Facebook messenger opening up to private companies, having discussions with your customer base is easier than ever. The benefit of having a company chat or chat bot ready to talk to your potential customers is that any questions they may have (that are preventing them from following your CTA), you’re “there” to answer right away. Plus, you can gather information on what your customers actually want. It’s soon to move from a marketing trend to necessity.
Interactive Content
People are now spending more and more time online procrastinating, rather than doing anything actually productive, especially with the advent of social media. As such, more and more companies are learning to capture their target audience’s attention with interactive content. Cosmo and Buzzfeed have done a brilliant job of creating popular and frequently shared interactive quizzes. But interactive content isn’t just for gossip and clickbait sites. Use interactive content to provide valuable information to your audience to build credibility. We’ve just launched our first quiz as well!
Social buying
Pretty much off the bat, social media became a place of advertisement for consumer products. Some of the most followed and shared social accounts are those of large corporations that have carefully curated their content to capture the attention of their target audience around the world, and get them to their site. Now that last step isn’t even necessary, as many social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram have introduced a “click to buy”, so that customers can purchase your product as soon as they’ve found you. Now obviously, this makes perfect sense for consumer goods like fashion and homeware, but it will be interesting to see how B2B and tech uses this trend.
Expiring content
As you probably know from their insane IPO this year, Snapchat is addicting for one reason only: expiring content. There’s something hugely intriguing about visual content that you’ll miss out on if you’re not in time. It plays brilliantly on the millennial FOMO (fear of missing out) disposition. People love “top 10” lists and “tips” on platforms like Snapchat. If you can provide interesting and useful content to your target audience, no matter what age and industry – and then make it disappear – you’ll have your customers cyberstalking you and then telling their friends to do the same. It’s an interesting turning of the tables thanks to this new trend.
Obviously, the clickbait and social media companies already have these techniques down to a tee.
How the rest of us is going to take these marketing trends and use them to communicate better with our target customers?
We hope this post sparked some inspiration for your marketing team!
