Making the Most of Your Marketing Campaigns

January 24, 2021 Stan

Effective marketing is often what separates rapidly-growing companies from slow-growing companies. If you want your business to flourish and thrive, you will need to become an effective marketer of your business. One path for being an effective marketer is executing and deploying thoughtful campaigns that relay content that your customers want and need.

Campaign trends are always evolving as new technology and innovations come to fruition. It is always a good time to review these trends to see how they can integrate with your current and future marketing campaigns. Implementing these trends can help you in the way you communicate with your customers and also help to have a positive impact on performance. If you’re ready to see how you can start making some changes to your campaigns, then keep reading. Below are a few trends that I personally think will have the greatest impact to your customers and will keep you one step ahead of the competition.

Content Marketing

This is a trend that comes up time and time again, and I don’t see it going anywhere any time soon. Content Marketing is very different from just producing content or an advertisement. Content marketing is about creating and telling a story. It is about having a conversation with your audience while connecting with them and educating them on your company.

Content marketing is particularly valuable during certain stages of the buying process, particularly when buyers are looking for education on products and services. Having content readily available and easy to access will be key during these stages so that they can eventually consider making a purchase. But content marketing doesn’t just stop there. It can be a valuable tactic to leverage when launching all kinds of campaigns. The meat and potatoes of campaigns is the content so why not look to beef it up with a strategic approach.

You can think of content marketing as a big bucket, and all types of structured content lives in this bucket. It consists of content like blogs, videos, social media, whitepapers, and many more. This content can be used across campaigns as a means of providing high value content that is relevant. When thinking of implementing, start first by defining your target audience and think about the problems or needs that would lead them to your company. Then develop a strategic plan around creating content for each of your customer personas. Be sure each plan has a goal whether it’s around creating brand awareness or generating sales leads or maybe even boosting customer loyalty For more information on content marketing, check out our recent post in how to crush your content marketing goals.

Mobile First

In this digital age, more and more of the population is using their smartphones and tablets as a means to read emails, shop, and communicate. Since these devices are not going anywhere, it would behoove companies to design emails with a mobile first approach. What is a mobile first approach you ask? Mobile first refers to a philosophy that starts the design process from the smallest of screens first, then works the design and code up from there, moving on to tablets, then finally a full-screen desktop monitor. By designing for small screens first, this helps to ensure proper code is in place for when users view content on their smartphones. This approach is really about catering to your audience to ensure they have a seamless experience on any device they choose to use – and we like options.

So now that we know what mobile first is, why is it such a big trend? Well, let’s face the facts. According to Statista, there are more than 3.5 billion mobile users with 3.7 billion expected in 2021. With so much of the population using mobile phones, the need for mobile-friendly emails and websites increase. The mobile first experience will help to ensure emails and websites are intuitive and easy-to-navigate across all devices.

Then big benefit of using this approach will allow for a better user experience that can, in turn, lead to more clicks on emails and more traffic on websites. With all this potential new activity, I think this is a very important trend to adopt. Again, this trend is all about tailoring to your audience and giving them an optimized experience regardless of their device selection. We want their whole experience to be as easy and seamless as possible. This trend is here to stay.

Send Time Optimization

Successful email open rates can lie within the execution of Send Time Optimization (STO). STO uses historical data on contacts that have engaged with your company and evaluates data such as the time of day and day of week engagements take place. STO uses machine learning to predict when each individual is most likely to engage with an email. Simply said, it takes the guesswork out of deciding whether the best time to send an email is morning or night or on a Monday or a Friday. The answer all lies in the data. Being a marketer, we know that consumers are inundated with emails daily and in order to get the attention of them we must cater to them and their daily habits. Ultimately, it will likely be the content that will drive your engagement, but what if we could take advantage of this technology to increase open rates that will help in supporting engagement.

Using a tool like STO will ensure emails go out to each individual person’s high engagement window. This could mean that a particular email goes to Sally at 6 am while she has quiet time to check all her emails in the morning, and the same email goes to Bob at 6 pm while he is on the train ride home. The goal is to send emails when the end user is likely checking emails. Again, it’s all about tailoring the campaign to revolve around your audience at an individual and personalized level.

Clearly the benefits of leveraging a tool like this can be impactful to any business. By sending emails at the right time per recipient, it allows emails to be at the top of the inbox and not lost in the hundreds of emails they receive each day. An increase in the chance of seeing an email will increase the likelihood of an open and, therefore, engagement. And that is a win in my book!

Conclusion

As tools, techniques and technology continue to evolve, so will campaign trends. Advancements in the tech landscape of marketing will allow marketers to be more thoughtful and impactful toward their audience. It will give marketers a creative space to leverage some of these tools and create new marketing trends. I strongly encourage you to look deeper into these trends as to how they can support your company to excel in years to come. As always, Relationship One is here to help. Reach out if you’d like to discuss how we can support you.

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