5 Marketing Trends in 2017 to Engage Your Audience.

As a small business owner, entrepreneur, content marketer, or anyone else who needs to target an audience, you’ll know that your marketing efforts are heavily reliant on social media to deliver your message to that audience.

Your marketing efforts need to focus in and around the social media dominated world – ignore it, or even drop the ball temporarily, and you will be back to square one.

Getting your message out to your existing followers is not all that difficult – what is challenging is continually getting new followers who you can then get your message out to.

If you have the right tips and tricks and software, you’ll be able to find and refine your target audience, and engage them on a personal level.

Here are 5 Marketing Trends to help you engage your audience on a more personal level, and being able to shout above the ‘noise’ of social media.

1. VISUAL MARKETING IS A KEY COMMUNICATOR

Think of your own social newsfeed: What do you engage with more – Words, Image, or Video?

Social feeds are becoming more crowded, with viewers attention spans becoming shorter and shorter. How far do you scroll through a feed? Do you open an engaging post or just conclude the content from the headline?

I love diving into the comments of an active post even before I read the whole story, just to see how many of those commentators have actually read it, or are just passing judgement based on the sensational headline. Usually the greater majority is commenting on something they have little or knowledge about, and have been steered toward via a standout headline.

Therefore, your image or video needs to pack a punch, tell a story, and engage the audience enough to want to open the article or story.

There are some great digital content tools available to produce regular quick content that will make an impression to your new target audience.

2. TARGET PERSONALIZATION IS A PRIORITY

“Hello Customer” or “Hi Jane”. Which greeting would get a better response?

It’s becoming easier to target your customers personally and even find out about your potential audience before you target them. The software is getting better, the social channels are integrating and the marketing tools are helping marketers cut through the noise and speak directly to their audience.

I do laugh when my teenage daughter tells me she looks at something on a website, then that same messaging pops up to her when she is on her social media or even playing an App game. She’s astounded, I’m just quietly chuckling inside that marketing is becoming easier.

Tracking consumers’ behaviour on social media platforms and search engines is pretty common place these days which means marketers can target their audience by posting content that only they can relate to, therefore not wasting ad spend.

3. INFLUENCER MARKETING IS A MUST HAVE CHANNEL

Maybe you’ve heard about influencer marketing where the brand pays the High-Profile Personality or Blogger to mention, post or pose with their product. The idea is that the recipient of that post is so impressed by the influencer, that they will share it with their own network, or even better click through to the info about that product. This is known as Amplification.

The message, product, or brand message is amplified via the readers own network, gaining much more exposure that they could expect to get from a generic informational post.

However, this takes big bucks and a lot of time for that sort of reach.

The ‘small-business’ marketer can achieve similar effect using their employees, current customers, and existing social fans as their Influencers to attain amplification reach.

It’s as easy as encouraging your followers to comment or share your information by incentivising them with a giveaway or opportunity as a reason to promote and rave about your brand or product.

A ‘Like’ itself is not going to have near the same effect as a customer espousing your products’ virtues for you. Get them talking about your product and their own followers will take notice.

4. CREATE ORGANIC CONTENT

You may have heard of Organic food a lot over the last five years, given all the health issues and cancers we are facing. Your body says enough of the preservatives and additives. It reacts poorly to it. Eat fresh and you’ll feel better.

Well your marketing message is a bit like that. If you keep pumping out staged, commercial branding time and time again, your audience says “Enough is enough. Give me something new and something fresh”.

To attract a new audience and to keep your existing audience, you need to give them new fresh content continually.

This takes time and effort, the right experience and knowledge and definitely the right tools in your content toolbox. It is very achievable to pump out new engaging content for any size business, or any experience of marketer, you just need the right guide and the right tools and you will be able to position your content where it can earn you some good traction.

5. MARKETING AUTOMATION WILL GO MAINSTREAM

Get your marketing tools to do more for you with less effort. That may be auto-posting onto your social platforms, or auto-responding to email sign-ups. Just the other day one of my go-to email marketing platforms sent a blast about how response automation is included in all of their plans, even their free starter plan. How things are changing in the marketing world.

Companies with limited marketing budgets may not be using marketing automation because they think it represents an unnecessary cost. Yes it may cost something to use these tools, but the ROI or extra return as a result should outweigh that cost.

Creating and posting organic content, even just for your social media, let alone SEO and PR reasons, can be time consuming. No question there. So using automation tools and tricks can save you time. And time is money.  

SUMMARY

If you want to grow your business or product or service, you need to continually find new audiences and then continually engage that audience so you remain in their minds.

This a time-consuming exercise if you don’t know what you are doing and can also be a costly one too. If you have the right guidance and the right tools, you’ll be two steps ahead of your competitors.

Make sure you are well equipped when undertaking your marketing, no matter how small or large your budget is.

ABOUT ME

I’m Rogan Carroll, a career marketer and entrepreneur who knows how to save time and money when it comes to grass-roots marketing. I have opened my Digital Content Toolbox to everyone so you too can now know what you should do and what tools to use to reach your target audience. Learn More at https://digitalcontenttoolbox.com/freeaccess