When a channel is new, the businesses that jump on it right away get big results with little effort. Now that digital marketing is quite mature and more and more businesses have woken up to the importance of content, there is quite a lot of content out there.
In a cluttered space, where everyone is being bombarded with marketing messages every day and there are tighter regulations around data privacy, how you execute your strategy is as important as the strategy itself.
Current best practices- Distribution over creation: Most businesses are now busy creating content and that means you need to work even harder for that content to be seen. Don’t just post once and think that’s enough—you need to publish, promote and re-publish across all your channels.
- Engagement over reach: In the early days, you’d have been excited about getting a load of likes on your Facebook page. Today, the number of followers is less important than the number of genuinely active followers, the people who are seeing, engaging with and responding to your content. These are the metrics you should be looking at improving.
- Personalization: People are sick of mass marketing and want tailored content and messages that speak directly to them. Look at how you can bring the personal touch and engage on a one-to-one basis. (You can even use chatbots to help you scale.)
- Authenticity: Your customers, especially the famous Millennials and the generations after them, are cynical about businesses over-promising and under-delivering. They prefer honesty and being ‘real’ over perfection and being ‘fake’ so try to embrace that in your marketing.
- Transparency: Given everyone’s worries about hacking and misuse of their data, customers are increasingly placing more value on an honest and open approach where it’s clear exactly what a business is going to do with their data and why. Make sure you’re complying with all regulations but more than that make sure that you’re putting your customer’s interests first.