The Future of Marketing and Beyond 2017

Data Integration and true omnichannel experiences are still in the early stages for many, ideally, they need to combine ALL data sources including historic sales data, historic visitor data, live social data, live weather data and of course marketing data and sales forecasting. Analyzing these data sets are giving businesses an entire 360-degree view of their business. Creating the insights to build relationships with customers and to convert them into brand advocates by nurturing them and building a truly remarkable customer experience.

Big data analysis is also assisting in ALL business processes, increasing productivity and managing supply chain resources rolling on from the just in time delivery scenarios of the 90’s.

Personalization has reached the next level, Donald Trump was elected into power we had Brexit thanks to a little company in Cambridge, UK. They segmented the audience into 32 different behaviour types and then used highly targeted advertisements to utilize their fears and advertise in front of them.

But some are switching to Ad-Blockers, publishers are using ways to grow revenues firstly by making sure the content they create is of better quality and some are even allowing you to read three to five articles before you must register for content. They are also supplying lots more free content and then selling you a subscription for premium content, even though in many cases they don’t tell you why it is better than the free content.

Print is still important as is telephone sales, whilst many people in digital marketing think it these old skool methods are dead, they need to remember that both these methods have their place, just with a more targeted approach, face to face relationships and personalization are key moving forward, not the freaky messaging and tactics that have been used in the past, but moving forwards as marketers learning how to work with software providers to give people what they want as opposed to annoying them or freaking them out.

A search is still a valuable tool for people looking online, marketers are still creating regular content and paying for AdWords and they are still reaping the rewards. You can still gain huge amounts of traffic by recording video, podcasts and writing blog posts, ideally re-purposing this content and turning it into multiple formats to save time.

Personal branding has become huge for businesses and individuals, many have put their teams through social media and social selling courses and showed their employees and execs how to use social media and unfortunately, their profiles lacked substance and personality in what they say about themselves so they are revisiting this and doing personal branding courses to polish up how they look online to take away the generic feel of all their teams’ profiles.

Chatbots on websites have become extremely important for businesses to retain visitors on-page, to also use AI and recommendation engines to furnish visitors with information that they can use to make informed purchasing decisions. The information provided is based on prior sales history and data and of course to solve simple customer service inquiries then refer them to a real human at just the right time.

Facebook Chatbots have the capability to advise people as to the right content they need to review and you can set up a good Facebook Chatbot to save you time with customer service inquiries and tyre kickers.

Social search has become huge, the uses within the business have become extremely important for reputation management and for listening to customer feedback, many businesses are also using social search to gain knowledge of their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses but also to build relationships with potential clients or influencers within their marketplace.

Private groups are also growing where people are making product and service recommendations.

Live video opportunities are just one of the ways to build stronger relationships with customers, potential new customers or partners, podcasts are also a great way to obtain traffic.

There are still many ways to utilize low cost, growth hacking ideas to obtain traffic.

These are just some of the topics that we discuss in Build Business Acumen Podcast with over 50 podcasts and many more are being edited with many more experts to interview in the pipeline.

If you have a huge amount to offer our audience or would like to be one of our sponsors then please let us know.

Email Me nat@www.natschooler.com  or contact me on Twitter for a fast response @NatSchooler

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