The most successful businesses have one thing in common – they continually find a way to stay one step ahead of the competition. More than ever, customers are looking for brands they can trust with marketing that is simple, relevant and personalised. We’ve put together some of the marketing trends you might like to embrace this year to set your business up for success in 2018.
1. Understand your customer
Delivering tailored experiences and putting yourself in your customers’ shoes is essential to gaining brand loyalty in 2018. So it’s essential to build a picture of each consumer’s journey and find ways to make each interaction with your business an individual experience. An effective way to achieve this is to let people set up customer profiles on your website so that you can track browsing and purchasing habits. This allows you to develop personalised promotions as well as product and service recommendations based on their own personal interactions with your company.
2. Tell your brand story
Everyone loves a good story and in 2018, storytelling will be key to consumer engagement. As a result, consumers want to do business with people they can trust and who they feel understands them. Use powerful images and effective copy to help people relate to your brand. Storytelling is perfect for print marketing campaigns where you can use appealing visuals in brochures, catalogues and direct mail together with effective copy to help engage people in your brand narrative.
3. Leverage video marketing (and live stream)
Video is a great way to tell your brand story and your customers are far more likely to help spread the word by liking or sharing videos on social media. In addition, video also helps make your brand much more relatable which helps build trust and engagement. Streaming live video content is an opportunity to engage with your audience directly. So expect 2018 to see increased use of ‘live streaming’ across social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.
4. Personalise your campaigns
Personalisation is the keyword for 2018 and key to developing effective email (EDM) and print direct mail campaigns. Studies show personalised email messages to subscribers can improve conversion rates by 10% and click-through rates by 14% (1). Also, personalising an email subject line increases the chances of someone opening your email by 26% (2). And when it comes to direct mail, personalised direct mail is far more effective than addressing your direct mail to ‘the homeowner’.
5. Content continues to reign
So you’ve heard the expression ‘content is king’ and this continues to be the case in 2018. Once again, it’s all about understanding your audience to generate relevant content. Users will be attracted to content that taps into their emotions in 2018. Make sure you leverage your social media by analysing the social media platforms that work best for your business and developing a consistent brand voice. Finding relevant and compelling ways to tell your story will make your audience want to engage, ‘like’ and ‘share’.
For quality marketing collateral and promotional campaigns, speak the team at your local Kwik Kopy today.
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