What can you learn from 2018 for marketing in 2019

Marketing Funnel

Whatever you’re marketing, your aim is to make people believe in your product or service or make them aware that you exist. In order to do this, there are a set of steps to follow. It all starts with your marketing campaign. There are many campaigns to go with, such as content marketing; SEO; online ads and email marketing just to name a few.

The aim of the campaign should be to get your consumers interested or at least make them aware. This is known as the “Lead gen” where you generate a lead. Next up comes the “lead nurture”. This is when you increase the interest of your consumer. You could do this with a second campaign with more information than the first and directly target it towards people who engaged with your first campaign. However, there lots of ways to do this.

Next up comes sales. If your business has a dedicated sales team then it is their job to sell the prospect. One effective way they could do this is through demonstration.

And this is essentially how the marketing funnel works.

Why follow trends?

With how fast the internet moves, new trends rise and fall in a blink of an eye. It is very rare that a trend lasts longer than 1 month. But why should you follow trends?

Trends physically show you what consumers are currently interested in. Content-based around trend at the time will perform a lot better than other content. This is because trends are a hot topic, they are trending. Everybody is talking about it and for a business to follow the trend you can gain a lot of awareness in the short term and then promote a campaign to reign those consumers in for the long term. Spotting a trend early is difficult because it’s hard to tell what will go viral, but if you can spot the trend early then capitalising on it is the easy part.

Content Marketing

Content marketing isn’t new, but in 2018 it has been taken to another level. It’s as if every social media post is an ad or marketing campaign. However, content marketing is very effective. Especially with the use of video. Speaking from personal experience, I would much rather go out of the way of scrolling to watch a video than to read plain text. Certain content looks appealing and it baits us in to watch. I know they say never judge a book by its cover, but that is all a part of human nature and humans would much rather watch something that looks appealing than something that looks boring.

Voice Search

In 2014 Amazon took the world by storm with the release of the Amazon Echo. 4 years later and not so much has been done with this technology. Okay, that sound arrogant as the Google home and Apple Homepod were released as a result, but as for marketing, I think a lot more could be done. For instance, when somebody searches a term, Alexa could promote a certain product (as an Ad) and ask if you would like to purchase said product or if you want her to find other products. I think the use of Voice control is going to be a big thing in the next few years and jumping on that trend early will pay off.

Conclusion

To conclude, 2018 has been a rocky road for me, and marketing has to take a turn for the best, but 2019 is going to better than ever. With certain technologies and strategies being refined I can’t wait to see what 2019 has to offer for digital marketing.