In today’s complex markets, consumer behavior is changing rapidly. So rapidly that it is often hard to predict. In order to keep up, marketing must have fresh advertising ideas, and also be highly adaptable and open to change.
The time of educated and lucky guesses in digital marketing is over. Today, brands must develop a full-blown strategy that covers all of the bases – sometimes including tactics that are “outside the box,” maybe even revolutionary.
This article looks into sneaky but brilliant advertising ideas that include a wide variety of approaches, from chatbots to influencers.
Advertising Idea #1: Capitalize On Google My Business
All businesses should consider it essential to have an up-to-date Google My Business listing. This rings true even moreso for businesses that operate primarily in a local market.
When people use search engines to look for your business, the GMB listing will summarize all essential info about your company, such as working hours, user reviews, photos, and location.
For physical brick-and-mortar locations, GMB helps your business show up on Google Maps, as well. For this reason alone, you should consider a well-optimized Google My Business profile a must.
Advertising Idea #2: Personalize Your Marketing
Personalization is posed to become even more important in 2021 than it has been in the past. It can be effectively used for website content, emails, customer service, and all other facets of business and branding.
Let’s observe some statistics about marketing personalization:
- 90% of consumers like personalized content
- 80% claim they would do business with a company that offers personalized experiences
- 63% find generic advertising annoying
Personalization is already an important component of eCommerce. It is common to see online retailers offering recommended products based on consumer purchase behavior, history, and interests.
As another example, Netflix effectively uses personalization to enhance customer satisfaction by providing tailored recommendations for movies and television series.
Starbucks takes it a step further with a gamification mobile app. This app uses purchase history and location data to let customers personalize their beverages. It also effectively integrates a rewards system, resulting in skyrocketing revenue and customer loyalty.
Advertising Idea #3: Use Chatbots
Consumers are becoming much more comfortable with live chat / chatbots when seeking clarifications about purchases or product evaluation. Voice search is also becoming a popular method of sending queries online.
Chatbots have a distinct advantage of 24/7 availability. They can provide information, educate, answer questions, and help prospects find what they are seeking even when the business is closed for the night or weekend. For this reason, chatbots are an ROI-positive strategy in the majority of implementations.
Any solid web design company that develops chatbots will advise you not to require visitor contact information unless absolutely necessary. A lot of consumers will be turned off if you ask for too much personal information, so save that ask for a stage further down the sales funnel.
A helpful chatbot will raise your brand image and boost trust with users. As we all know, a solid brand reputation is the best marketing strategy to build on top of.
Advertising Idea #4: Tap Into Conversational Marketing
Closely related to chatbots, conversational marketing is becoming a dominant type of digital advertising.
As many as 82% of consumers request an immediate response to questions or complaints. Brands must adapt to this in order to keep up with competitors. With conversational marketing, brands facilitate a real-time connection and one-on-one conversation with consumers.
Conversational marketing is, by nature, omni-channel. It enables marketers to meet their audiences across multiple devices and platforms.
The businesses of today must be available across a wide array of channels and communicate the way their audiences do. Conversational marketing improves the user experience through feedback that fosters greater user engagement and loyalty.
Advertising Idea #5: Make Content That Solves Visitors’ Pain Points
Content marketing is an integral part of a wider marketing strategy for any business that aims to systematically grow its online presence and reputation.
Coming up with a clear blogging strategy has multiple benefits:
- It keeps your visitors well-informed and engaged, while helping solve their problems
- Google favors websites that update their content on regular basis, and this will help improve organic rankings for these same domains
Of course, it’s important to decide what kind of content you will create in order to achieve the above. Long-form articles, over 1,000 words long and rich in information, research data and multimedia is an example of content that has a high chance of ranking.
When creating blog content, always aim to provide value to your readers. The blog is the first place your audience will look for answers to their questions, so your blog articles need to come across as informative, authoritative, and authentic.
Advertising Idea #6: Reach Out To Influencers
Influencer marketing is a newer type of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. It is very effective at stirring up buzz around a brand and capturing the attention of a wider range of audiences.
It relies on online leaders and celebrities to amplify the brand message to larger, untapped demographics. These influencers are usually Instagram or YouTube personalities with large bases of niche followers that may be interested in your products or services.
Through their social media channels, influencers can help spread the word about your products. They generally come across as more authentic and reliable than traditional forms of corporate advertising.
As many as 63% of people trust the opinions of influencers, while 58% of us have purchased a new product after an influencer’s recommendation.
By the end of 2020, influencer marketing ad spend reached a stunning $8.08 billion!
Conclusion: Use These Advertising Ideas to Your Advantage
In 2021 and beyond, digital marketing tactics will need to be a lot more creative, in-depth and thoughtful to yield positive business results.
Advertising is much more than promoting your brand. Truly effective advertising campaigns begin and end with audience interaction across social media, your website, and other channels. Try out all of these advertising ideas and see which of them can add value to your own marketing campaigns.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. Image sourced via pexels.com.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
Liza Wickham
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