Ep5 Digital Trends in 2017

Tim Nicholas joins Kym in this marketing.planning episode to discuss 2017 digital trends and why you must consider them when developing your marketing strategy

Tim Nicholas is one of Australia’s leading Digital Strategists with over 25 years’ experience in the field and he shares his thoughts about digital technology on his Marketing Bytes blog but most importantly he talks about digital technology and how it affects businesses and the way they market to their customers.

Digital Marketing in Social Media, Mobile, Customer Experience and Data in the last 5 years

• Social media
  • Facebook has been around for over 10 years and in that time platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest have all appeared and grown exponentially and become popular in their own right
  • In the last few years in the social media space video and live video has been one of the biggest trends;
    1. Twitter introduced the Periscope app
    2. Facebook introduced a live streaming feature in their iOS app
    3. Instagram allowed videos to be uploaded
  • Tim thinks this is likely to the natural evolution of social media. It started off with text only and then as a progression added photographs and continued onto video.
  • In the future Tim sees artificial intelligence or augmented reality inside social media
  • According to the latest census social media reports Australians are accessing social media more during the day, its gone up to roughly an average of five times a day
  • Couple the more frequent usage with the fact that now over 25% of Australians use a form of social media compared to the 18% last year it is important to note that not only the frequency of use went up the number of users also went up
  • If you are interested in pursuing Social Media Marketing you must be on video and consider messenger apps

• Mobile
  • In the last few years smartphones have become much smarter if you like
  • Smartphones now have more functionality, higher quality capabilities
  • The camera in the video and stills camera picture quality is just extraordinary compared to the early versions of smartphones
  • Camera phone pictures are now a perfectly legitimate way of capturing images
  • In fact, IPhone uses it in their advertising now “beautiful images shot on the iPhone” which they use in huge posters around the world
  • Technology both in terms of internet speed and the way you can shoot videos and photos has changed the way we interact with social media

• Customer Experience
  • Businesses need strong systems in place to profile their customers
  • In customer experience, you need to consider end to end how a customer or prospect is searching for you right through to you your customer interacts with you/ your business daily
  • Think of the two key questions when looking at customer experience;
    1. How can you speed up the process?
    2. How can you make it easier for the customer?
  • CRM systems and mailing automation systems like Hubspot have made the development of social media posts much easier with the ability to post to all social channels at once and the ability to strategically space out your content to maximize response
  • MailChimp have made the formulation of email campaigns much simpler with easy pre-built content blocks and more detailed results and reports following completion
  • The platforms to complete these sorts of tasks are a lot more sophisticated than they were 4 or 5 years ago
  • One of the best things to use when deciding your CRM is the user reviews of the products as well as any comparisons of similar products
  • You can also with most services and sites buy packages at varying price points with different levels of support and different tools so you can pick and choose what level of package works best for you
  • You need to know your customer. Build a data profile of your customers so you can work out grouping them for easy reference.
  • One of the benefits of building these customer profiles and grouping them is you can send customized messages to say a section of your customers who are in the same industry

• Data
  • Look at what data you have as a starting point. During this stage it is also a good idea to look at what your customers are buying to be able to build more tailored and segmented buyer personas
  • what additional data you will need as well as what data you need to build around the profile.
  • The profile that you build
  • A great quote to remember is “data shouldn’t just be putting lipstick onto your digital marketing” meaning it’s not just a matter of having relevant data but implementing the data for meaningful results
  • You need to find out clever ways of taking advantage of this knowledge
  • This is where a lot of small businesses struggle where they have all the data they need but not the skills needed to analyse the data from a marketing standpoint

You can grab a free copy of our TMSC Marketing Roadmap. This resource will help guide you through the 10 steps of an Integrated Marketing Plan.

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Resources

• Tim Nicholas Website – marketingbytes.com.au
• Linkedin Tim Nicholas – https://www.linkedin.com/in/timnicholas/?ppe=1
• Twitter – @timontwtr or @mktgbytes