The word “trends” kinda has a bad connotation to it. Trends are fleeting and tend to fade. There’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of trends in your marketing, but if you solely focus on trends in your marketing strategy, you’re gonna have a bad time.
That’s why we’re serving up this blog post on the latest marketing trends to get on board with. Uhhh…what? Yep. Even though the author used the word “trends” in the title of this one, we don’t think these are fleeting trends. Some of them are definitely here to stay.
Let’s just dive in…
- Brands operating like media companies. Content needs to be the leading part of any company’s overall strategy, not just their marketing strategy. Look at General Electric, they have a podcast. Dollar Shave Club has a digital publication. Adobe runs CMO.com. AirBnB has an actual print magazine.
- Optimize for humans, not robots. SEO is becoming more about humans. Social media is more about conversations. Don’t try to beat the system with 100 hashtags per post on Instagram. Use them when they’re relevant to your audience. Califia Farms only uses a few, relevant tags per post.
- Optimize the top of your funnel. Pretend you don’t work at your company, you’ve never even heard of it, and you’re not a marketer. If you came across an ad for your company, would you engage with it? If the answer is “no” or even “maybe,” it’s time to rethink the top of your funnel.
- Showcase your brand’s personality. People want personality from the brands they follow! Sprout’s research shows that consumers want brands to be honest, friendly, helpful, funny, and trendy. In that order.
- Consumers want transparency. Tying into the point above, transparency is important. Take a note from the first point in this list, and use social media to be transparent about your brand’s story.
- Live video is getting even bigger. You already knew this though.
- Start building a brand community now. Another one you already knew, but it’s really freakin’ important.
Plenty more we couldn’t fit in →
