Has Your Marketing Strategy Adjusted for the New Year?

If your resolution for 2019 was to improve your company’s marketing efforts, you need to adjust your marketing strategy from 2018 and put your best foot forward to keep up with current and future marketing trends. Making your adjustments now rather than later is more important than you think. Due to technological advancements, the capabilities at your disposal are changing extremely rapidly -- failing to keep up with them will make your business fall behind.

2019 has already begun. Have you made the right adjustments to your marketing strategy?

Current Marketing Trends That Aren’t Going Away

There are some marketing tactics that are already important, and are expected to remain important in the coming years. Make sure your current marketing strategy reflects the following:

• Google My Business: Since this is one of the first things that you should take care of when establishing your business, we hope that you’ve claimed your business through Google and have been managing your page. As a small business, keeping your page up-to-date is essential to attracting more customers and controlling your company’s online visibility.
• Content Marketing: Content marketing continues to be an essential piece of any marketing strategy due to the value it brings to current and prospective clients. However, 80% of small businesses don’t invest at all in content marketing. Invest now if you haven’t already in a company blog and other types of digital content. If you are already putting an effort towards this, consider expanding the amount and/or variety of content you have. Just keep it relevant to what your target audience is interested in.
• The Digital Experience: Keep in mind the overall user experience at every digital touchpoint, and how that experience differs between devices. Make sure you optimize all of your online content and communications so the user experience is positive, no matter what device that individual is on.
• Social Media: Social media is a great way to reach new customers and interact with your current customers, and its power continues to grow. As of now, your business should be posting frequently on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This may change in the future (remember MySpace?), so make sure that you monitor up-and-coming social media platforms.
• Email Marketing: Email has been around for quite some time, and still has a powerful reach. Once you get their permission, you should be communicating with your audience on a regular basis.
• Video: 96% of B2B marketers use video in some sort of marketing capacity, and you should too: 70% of B2B decision makers watch videos while moving through the sales funnel. Videos are expected to become even more valuable in the future, so start incorporating them into your marketing if you haven’t yet.

If you aren’t yet including the above in your strategy, you’re already behind! Start adjusting things now before your competition’s marketing overpowers yours.

Upcoming Marketing Trends To Adapt To

Marketing experts have predicted that certain marketing-related topics are going to become more pertinent to address in the coming years. If you’ve already adapted your strategy to go with the current trends, it might be time to start planning for what’s to come in the future.

Small business-to-business companies should keep in mind these future predicted trends:

• Location-Based Marketing: Geo-location is skyrocketing in use in the small business marketing world. Beyond using the capabilities of digital location-based marketing mediums, you should work to further connect your company to your service area by getting involved locally and creating content specific to your location.
• Voice Search & Digital Assistants: The improvement of voice recognition and the increased capabilities of digital assistants has made voice search easier and faster than typing a search into Google. Some marketing experts believe that voice search will comprise half of all searches by the end of 2019. To adapt your marketing to this, optimize your content for long-tail keywords and conversational language.
• Artificial Intelligence and Your Marketing: The capabilities of A.I. continue to advance, enabling you to better target your audience, personalize your marketing message, and improve your customer service if you use AI-powered platforms. Start exploring what your options are and making your processes more efficient.
• Instagram: As we mentioned in the previous section, social media continues to grow and evolve into an essential marketing medium for businesses in nearly every arena. Currently, Instagram is the fastest-growing social media platform and provides businesses with the best way to reach younger generations. But, as older generations start to create accounts and actively use the platform (which we’ve already started to see), it’ll become a great way to reach decision makers in your area. Start dipping your toes in the water now by creating a business account - if you haven’t yet - and fine-tune your Instagram strategy.

Our team is well knowledgeable on current and future marketing trends. If you need help revamping your strategy, you can turn to us.