Future marketing trends emphasize engaging consumers where they are, mostly on their phones, and embracing cutting-edge technologies like nonfungible tokens.
Key business growth tactics and innovations were highlighted by speakers at HubSpot's Inbound 2022 user conference in Boston, who shared their predictions for how marketing would develop in the future.
As business development techniques like conversational marketing and social media optimization have gained popularity, they stress marketers' objectives to link systems and communities that grew estranged during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Discover five trends that will impact marketing in the future
Discussion-based advertising
Because people always have their phones with them, using texting or other mobile apps is the most convenient way for marketers to connect with consumers.
Live chat is his preferred conversational marketing medium, according to Griffin LaFleur, a senior marketing operations manager at Swing Education, because it is simple to set up a two-way dialogue stream. Customers can establish a human-to-human connection through this form of contact, which LaFleur said he finds challenging in the conventional one-to-many marketing strategy.
In an interview, LaFleur stated that serving up a different experience—one that is more customized and targeted toward them—if you sell to multiple personas and you know that a particular persona is coming in. Therefore, adopting new channels is important while considering how to continue to excel in marketing.
Marketers can choose a straightforward use case, such as newsletters or communications from loyalty programs, to get a conversational marketing plan off the ground and gauge customer reaction. If it is a success, marketers can test the waters with additional use cases and distribution channels, such as social media.
Optimization for social media
People are probably reading through, searching on, and interacting with social media sites if they aren't texting on their phones. However, LaFleur noted that organic search has started to evolve, so marketing teams should begin to optimize social media content in the same way that they do other content.
Because of the real-time information, community building, and outcomes provided by social media, consumers now expect and want more intimate relationships with brands.
SEO can assist marketers in producing content that is simple to locate, but it cannot generate communities. According to Kudzi Chikumbu, global head of creator marketing for TikTok, in the session "What We Owe the Creators of Culture," this trait and its emotional connections are specific to social media, and these communities are the cornerstone of online culture. Marketing professionals are more likely to connect with these communities and stay on top of online trends if they spend more time on social media.
Relations on a heart level
Ads obstruct people's experiences whether they are scrolling through Twitter or watching TV. Due of the prevalence of this tactic, many people have developed the ability to filter them out over time. Customers today demand experiences that are more tailored to them and want to connect with the brands they interact with.
Additionally, marketers need to develop customer trust in order to facilitate these emotional relationships. Transparency is necessary for building trust, which calls for being honest with customers about potential problems and upholding the company's core principles. All content and marketing should be in line with the brand's basic principles because building trust also requires consistency over time and across media.
Hybrid encounter
The COVID-19 pandemic's impacts have made it necessary for most experiences to accommodate both analog and digital components.
In order to maintain consistency and authenticity with clients, the conversational marketing session emphasized the significance of tying both physical and online brand interactions. However, advertisers like LaFleur are unsure of the best ways to digitally record in-person event interaction and make sure that clients who receive physical mail can still access their websites.
Brands compete not just with other companies, but also among themselves. Customers' impressions of a brand may be negatively impacted if they prefer their interactions with it online more than they do in-person. However, customers will likely feel more connected to a brand if they can easily search for a product on a brand website, locate the product's in-store location, and make an in-person purchase that same day.
Web3
While Web3 is still in the future, marketers should start learning about it and its characteristics to get ready for future plans that might involve nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
NFTs, for instance, can give the general public access to Web3. Furthermore, since NFTs are still in their infancy, owners can readily create tight-knit communities. As they develop their Web3 strategy, marketers and brands can increase customer loyalty by gradually assisting in the development and support of these communities.
However, because this new period is still in its early stages of development, few marketers presently concentrate on Web3 and the metaverse.