When a new year comes so does new advancements in the Marketing, Web, IT, and Digital spaces. I want to outline 3 major social media marketing trends that will positively affect social media strategies this year. The relevancies of these trends have been building since late 2013 and soon these trends will become increasingly more important to implement in 2014.
Marketing with a Purpose
Marketing with a purpose is really social media marketing 2.0. Simply what that means, is that a more customer focused approach to marketing, via social channels, will need to be implemented. There will no longer be formal marketing on social channels to customers, but instead increased emphasis on constant customer back-and-forth conversations. This move to a more “social” social interaction on the web will be anchored on better understanding of the touch points of customers. No longer will brands be posting on social channels just to post, but instead will be taking a closer look at customers to create better content and posts aimed at garnering a higher percentage of online social interactions. The largest part of this new Marketing with a purpose trend will be that businesses will see an increase in customer interaction and with that increase they will now have to actually listen to what the customer is saying and using that information gathered to fine tune their Marketing with a purpose strategy.
Real-Time Relevant Content
Real-Time relevant content is going to be another very large trend in Social Media Marketing in 2014. This trend will rely on constant popular culture monitoring to really be able to take advantage of the positive effects it can have on your marketing strategy. A great example of Real-Time relevant content would be Arby’s tweet during the Grammy’s. This well timed and appropriate tweet was ‘retweeted’ over 83,000 times as well as ‘favorited’ almost 50,000 times, talk about going viral! The importance of this trend is to really separate your brand from the highly saturated social media playground where brand messaging is so plentiful. It is becoming more and more important for businesses to establish teams and protocols around how to respond to large national or global events on social media channels. The reason for this is the need for real-time posting that shouldn’t be hindered by layers upon layers of red tape. The person(s) on your team, who are posting, should be in power so that Real-Time relevant content can be produced and posted when necessary.
Data Driven Marketing Efforts
This trend is not necessarily “new” so to speak, but instead something that has gained more focus due to innovation in data mining. Big Data is a buzz term, that is becoming more and more of a reality every day. With the creation of new tools to capture new data sets and with the evolution of data interpretation, we are now able to use this data to draw amazing conclusions about consumers and their habits that we were not privy too years ago. Not only can we track what is being purchased, by what person, from what nationality, in what region of the world, but now we can deduce why they are choosing these brands over others, and what they may have experienced to make that brand a better choice for them. The beauty of Data Driven Marketing Efforts is that now companies will really be able to target their marketing strategies, especially social marketing strategies, to really foster brand interaction to ultimately turn consumer into customer.
Author Name – Malik Mack
Title – Marketing Manager
Location – Baltimore, MD
Twitter – @MalikMack
Byline – Malik is the Marketing Manager at Profiles. He is a Cornell Graduate with exceptional skills in the Marketing, Web and IT space.
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