Five Interesting Marketing Developments to watch out for in the coming months

The fundamentals of marketing have changed. With business landscape evolving at a tremendous pace, experts predict multiple BIG Things to make it into the marketing sphere this year or early next year.

In what follows is a compilation of five upcoming marketing trends suggested by Kate Maddox (Expert on B2B marketing &Technology).

Read, understand and implement her suggestions, or else get devoured by your competitors.

1. Connecting technologies

Marketers will start playing a decisive role in providing a cohesive customer experience. Resultant of which, they will have to ditch the departmental silos and work in tandem with other units (sales & customer service). One of the best ways to do so is to align the marketing technologies with other enterprise applications to create a connected cloud of systems. This will provide a deeper understanding of customers and buyer journey.

We suggest: to invest in unified business growth software like the new age cloud CRM applications. These CRMs eliminate the pertinent issue of unconnected technologies. Functioning as one platform for entire business management – they are integrated with every crucial functionality, right from Data Management, Sales Force Automation, Document Management to Project Management, Email Marketing and Reports and Analytics as well. Together these modules will help the marketers in identifying the interest of the customer experience and mapping the customer journey at large.

2. Holistic user experiences

Marketers will get involved in product designing. In view of the fact that marketers deal with customer feedback the most – CIOs &CTOs will collaborate with the marketers to develop strategies on product design. The objective will be simple: to use the marketers’ insights and develop products that perks up the entire user experience.

Inevitably, this added role will increase the importance of the marketers.

3. Re-prioritizing marketing mediums

Business demands have changed and so have the marketing rules. With the onset of digitization – now it will be imperative for marketers to work in both worlds -- online and offline -- completely in parallel. While digital marketing mediums are the new favorite hub of the buyers, marketers altogether cannot leave the traditional mediums as well. So by all means it will be twice as much work for the marketers as they had 10 years ago. Now they will be required to be more nimble and experienced to handle this accelerated rate of change.

4. Video content

Marketers will realize that most of their promotions are complicated because of which lead generation is low.

As a result – Marketers will have to resort to creating simple easy to scan and understandable videos that showcase complicated products/service offerings in a compelling way. Not just this, the videos will be aimed to educate the potential buyer of the general industry trends and how the product/service fits into the whole situation. Developing such videos will help marketers gain the target audience interest and take them one step forward into being sales-ready.

5. Humane Marketing

Reports suggest that often marketing promotions are devoid of the human element; which is why they fail to connect with the target audience. The coming year will see more of the marketers compensating for this deficiency in their promotions. Focus will be to take the target audience not as some XYZ individual or company but people who have specific interests.

Emotions will come into play in promotions that will help the marketers cut through the clutter and get noticed.

Paraphrasing the words of Avi Dan (Forbes contributor on marketing and advertising) in relation to this context –

Marketing will shift from globalization to personalization. The promotions will become more localized and individualized with target-oriented messages. Marketers will realize that personalization is just not a momentary phase but will stay for long. As a result – they will condense the generic nature of their promotions and make it more specific.