Trends for the future of marketing prioritize meeting customers where they are, primarily on their phones, and embracing innovative technologies such as non-fungible tokens.
Speakers at HubSpot’s Inbound 2022 user conference in Boston highlighted key strategies and technologies they believe will shape the future of marketing. As strategies such as conversational marketing and social media optimization have become popular, they highlight marketers’ goals of connecting communities and systems that were disconnected during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Explore five trends that will affect the future of marketing.
1. Conversational marketing
People carry their phones everywhere, so the easiest place for marketers to find them is on mobile, whether through messaging or other mobile apps.
The session “Conversational Marketing: Is This the End of Mobile Apps?” explored conversational marketing, a practice that prioritizes one-on-one conversations with customers to allow for more personalization in customer interactions.
Griffin LaFleur, senior director of marketing operations at Swing Education, said his preferred conversational marketing channel is live chat because it can easily facilitate a two-way communication flow. This type of communication helps customers feel a person-to-person connection, something LaFleur said she finds difficult in the traditional one-to-many approach to marketing.
“If you come to multiple people and you know a certain person is coming … you offer a different experience, one that’s more tailored and tailored to them,” LaFleur said in an interview. “So when we’re thinking about how we’re going to continue to excel in marketing, it’s to embrace other channels.”
To start with a conversational marketing strategy, marketers can choose a simple use case, such as loyalty program communications or newsletters, to see how customers respond. If successful, marketers can dip their toes into more use cases and channels, including social media.
2. Optimization of social networks
If people aren’t texting on their phones, they’re likely scrolling, searching, and interacting with social media platforms. However, the way people search organically has started to change, LaFleur said, so marketing teams should start optimizing social media content as much as they focus on search engine optimization. search (SEO) for other content.
Social networks offer real-time information, results and community building, which has made audiences expect and desire more personal connections with brands.
“There’s an attachment to brands for a lot of people… We can post things that appeal to potential customers and existing customers, but for brands like ours, social media should be the heartbeat of your culture.” said Lauren Wiggins, a corporate communications manager for the steel industry, in an interview. “You should be able to showcase your culture and really use social media to connect people.”
SEO can help marketers create content that people can easily find, but it can’t build communities. This trait and its emotional connections are unique to social media, and these communities are the foundation of online culture, said Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok’s global head of creator marketing, in the session “What We Owe the Creators of the culture”. If marketers spend more time on social media, they’re more likely to connect with these communities and stay up-to-date online trends.
Sherrell Dorsey, Kudzi Chikumbu and TJ Adeshola discussed social media and cultural trends at Inbound 2022.
3. Emotional connections
Whether people are scrolling through Twitter or watching TV, ads interrupt their experiences. This strategy is so common that many people have learned to filter it out over time. Customers now want more personalized experiences and feel connected to the brands they interact with.
The session “Ignite Your Brand With Empowerment Over Interruptions” highlighted the power of emotional connections and how empowering and creating personal connections with customers can enable better results.
Marketers like Wiggins, who primarily interact with customers through social media, can interact with them in a meaningful way through empathy, especially if the customer is unhappy. Wiggins said customers often complain on social media and are often the ones who have to respond. In the responses, Wiggins apologized, empathized and tried to correct the problem, which often received positive responses from customers.
At the core of it all is just being human and [having] empathy … If you don’t prioritize those things, you’re doing it wrong.
Lauren WigginsResponsible for corporate communication
“The core of it all is just being human and [having] empathy,” Wiggins said. “If you’re a marketer and you don’t have those things, if you don’t prioritize them, you’re doing it wrong.”
To facilitate these emotional connections, marketers must also build trust with customers. Trust requires transparency, which means open dialogue with customers about potential challenges and adhering to brand values. Trust also requires consistency across channels and over time, meaning that all content and campaigns must align with the brand’s core values.
4. Hybrid experience
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have forced most experiences to support both physical and digital elements.
The conversational marketing session highlighted the importance of connecting in-person and digital brand experiences to stay consistent and authentic with customers. However, marketers like LaFleur are wondering how to digitally capture in-person event participation and ensure that customers who receive physical mail can still reach company websites.
Inbound 2022: topics and summary
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“[Make] Make sure you’re looking at your overall marketing strategies and how you can combine offline experiences with online experiences,” LaFleur said. “But also make sure you can digitally capture data from offline experiences “.
Brands don’t just compete with competitors; they also compete against themselves. If customers enjoy their online experiences with a brand more than in-person experiences, this inconsistency can negatively affect their brand perception. However, if people can seamlessly search for a product on a brand’s website, find the product’s in-store location, and purchase it that day in person, they are likely to feel more connected to the brand because they have a certain ownership of their experiences.
5. Web3
While Web3 still remains on the horizon, vendors can begin to learn about it and its features to prepare their strategies for the future, which may include non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The “What’s Next: Connecting the Dots in Web3” session helped attendees understand what sets Web3 apart from its predecessors and how brands can connect with customers in this new web era.
NFTs, for example, can open the door to Web3 for the general public. Also, since NFTs are still in their infancy, people who own them can easily build close-knit communities. If marketers and brands help build and support these groups over time, they can foster customer loyalty as they work on their Web3 strategies.
However, Web3 and the metaverse are not areas many marketers are currently focusing on as this new era continues to unfold.
“I think everyone has their own idea of what they would become or what they could become,” LaFleur said. “But how do you build it, how do you get there and how do you exchange funds? That’s still growing.”
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