On average, Americans interact on their phones 2,617 times each day. More than half of these swipes, clicks, and taps are done on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.
With your target audience spending so much time online and so many products available at the push of a button, it’s essential that your company not only utilizes cutting-edge digital marketing trends, but interacts with your target audience in a meaningful way.
While artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven marketing continue to grow, social media and digital marketing trends skew towards people more than technology.
Your customers want marketing to be more human, like the good old days.
To stay ahead of the pack, your company will need to utilize these five marketing trends that are here to stay.
1. Content personalization
Your customers are flooded with more advertising than at any other time in history.
From YouTube ads to Facebook ads, your customers are tired of being marketed to. Instead of relying on the old way of mass advertising, you can improve ad spend and optimize conversions with your audience’s personalized ad experience.
Not only do personalized marketing campaigns connect with your customers better than mass marketing, but a personalized ad will also deliver a better conversion rate, which improves your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).
In short, if you personalize your marketing campaigns based on customer segments and personas, you and your customers win compared to traditional mass marketing campaigns.
Epsilon’s recent survey revealed 80% of consumers say they are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers a personalized experience compared to a generic campaign. Your company can capitalize on these numbers using personalized content in your marketing campaign.
If you want to succeed in today’s market, your company needs to make a connection with consumers at every touchpoint; you need to personalize every message to ensure you speak to the needs of your customer segments.
2. Uplifting messages for all consumers
American consumers have shown that they value diversity when it comes to marketing messages. It is common to see positive messages and ad campaigns that promote happiness and joy compared to doom and gloom.
This is no accident because, according to Forbes, 77% of millennials and 76% of teens have interacted with and purchased a product or service after seeing inclusive digital marketing content.
There’s no better example of companies who get positive marketing right than the Dove brand. In a recent brand campaign, Dove used positive body image for their target audience with great success to empower women and increase their sales.
You can see the positive messages and feedback in their ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ that went viral as it got picked up by national news outlets and women groups. While most marketing campaigns revolve around the products, Dove used this Campaign for Real Beauty to showcase women of all shapes, sizes, ethnicities and shine a light on the cause for modern insecurities women face.
Dove proved that companies could significantly impact the market and their bottom line with positive messages that speak directly to their target audience. Instead of using negative messages, Dove lifted women to understand that they are all beautiful and gave them a voice through advertising.
This lesson is essential to remember because it shows that your business can connect with your customers through uplifting messages that make your audience feel empowered and valued. Taking a ‘customer-first’ approach to marketing while positioning your products and services in your customers’ overall story can establish brand equity and position your products or services as a central tenant for your customers’ success and happiness.
Think about your customers’ pain points and needs as you build out your product offering. Once you know your customers’ needs and pain points, you will be able to build a marketing campaign to lift them and help them realize happiness and self-worth.
Not only will this make the world a better place, but it will also position your company for continued success.
3. Short-form video and memes
The power of memes and short-form videos, like those found on Tik Tok and Instagram Reels, is evident: 74% of social media users report sending these social media powerhouses to friends and family members to make them smile, and 36% use funny, viral pictures to represent how they feel.
On average, consumers only watch one minute of content before engaging or move on to the next eye-catching image or video. This makes short-form videos the perfect option to leverage short attention spans and connect with consumers because you can use this type of content to build a relationship with your audience.
For years, Crocs were the butt of jokes and the stars of hilarious memes. Instead of investing in a public relations (PR) campaign to counter the tides of public opinion, the company decided to leverage this attention to build momentum for its online presence.
Their TikTok videos have spawned prevalent challenges, like the #ThousandDollarCrocs challenge, which encourages users to make their crocs as fancy as possible. Their partnership with famous singer Post Malone and popular YouTubers generated more than 2.9 billion video starts.
Crocs’ marketing success shows that using preconceived notions of their products to create humorous, shareable content made their brand more relatable. Rather than producing long-form videos that may not be played through, Crocs chose short form, viral content to spark renewed interest in their brand.
You can use memes, short-form videos, and other humorous and relevant content to showcase your product and secure higher consumer retention rates.
4. SERP position zero
The gold standard for SEO has always been the ability to get your brand into the first position in Google. However, times have changed, and your company can experience lots of benefits for your marketing strategy by securing position zero in SERPs.
SERP position zero includes featured snippets, where your company can rank above traditional organic search results in SERPs.
Securing this position can be valuable to your brand because it not only gives the consumer the answer they were looking for in a small, manageable chunk but also includes a link to where the information comes from.
This means that you can optimize your content to trigger featured snippets and other SERP features to improve your online visibility and drive more qualified traffic to your site.
Be sure to track different types of content in SERPs to make sure your marketing strategy involves different types of content to trigger position zero in SERPs. This approach to SEO and online marketing can help you rise above your competitors and drive more traffic to your site.
5. Hyper-local marketing
Local marketing is not a new concept, and as Americans look to support local vendors, more sales are coming through local search than ever before. Even huge global brands recognize the need for customizing their market messages at the local level.
8 in 10 marketers use location data in their marketing strategy, with 94% of those not currently using it planning to implement location data shortly.
Much like personalization, even bricks-and-mortar stores are turning to local SEO and other hyper-local marketing strategies to engage with qualified local customers.
With the smartphone’s advent, geofencing allows potential customers to be targeted with your marketing messages as soon as they enter a digital perimeter you set around your store. For example, a customer could receive everyday grocery reminders while passing by a local grocery store.
Location-based marketing has been proven to be 20 times more effective than regular ads because the personalized messages are delivered to a small set of individuals who are more likely to buy your product.
Your company can optimize ad spend with geographic targeting from Facebook, Google Ads, and Google My Business.
This form of advertising is ideal for local businesses because it focuses smaller amounts of money on local, more qualified leads.
Leveraging social media marketing trends in the US
Consumer behaviors are changing across the world, and the five marketing trends lead the way in US markets.
This means that your business has to build your marketing strategy around powerful technology with knowledge of target audiences and what makes them tick.
While some marketing trends come and go, digital marketing trends that allow you to focus on and communicate with your target audience as individuals are the best way to establish solid, lasting consumer relationships.
