Are you ready to rock your business in 2019?
Here are seven of the most powerful trends that can help your business stand out, attract more customers, provide value, and develop your customers into advocates that keep your company top-of-mind.
Ready? Let's dive In.
If you feel like video is everywhere, you’re right. From scrolling through the videos on your social media feeds to watching the retail giants’ Super Bowl ads, video is here. And it’s only going to get bigger.
One reason it’s becoming the go-to vehicle for information sharing is that it’s easy to consume. You can watch it anywhere. And let’s face it. It’s just easier to watch a video than it is to read content. Our brains also crave newness, so video — with its motion and sound — grabs our attention.
If you use video and your competitors don’t, you’re ahead of the pack.
With video, you can share a lot about your product and brand in a short amount of time. Plus, engaging videos can attract new customers and further engage current fans.
You can use it to educate, inspire, inform, and reward your customers.
If you have a complex product or service, educate your customers with quick how-to videos. If you have a visually beautiful business — think flower shop — show how your customer will feel buying fresh flowers. And if your business isn’t obviously video-ready (say, insurance), create short videos that explain common questions clearly and let customers get to know you and trust you as a person.
The sky’s the limit when it comes to creative ways to share your business story and brand through video.
Don’t let video scare you. Just start, have fun, and get better as you go.
If you have a Facebook or Instagram business account, get out your SmartPhone and start taking video.
Take video of your product in action. Capture customer reactions when they see their new remodeling project completed (be sure to get their permission to post it). Set up your product in a pretty location and take video that gives a sense of place in your community.
Then upload the clip to social media, add a sentence or two of description, and post it.
That’s it, and then wait to see how your audience responds. Tweak as needed.
You can also hire a videographer and go for a custom video that showcases your business.
Tech tips:
Those little pop-up boxes that “talk” with you and answer questions you type in are software platforms that use Artificial Intelligence to mimic human conversation. They’re used with messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and integrated into apps and text SMS platforms.
They can also be used with CRM platforms to capture data on customers, leads, and prospects. Customers will also be able to subscribe to your chatbot to receive regular content or special announcements (the new newsletter?).
Done well, chatbots add humanness to technology, and help your customers get the information they need from the platform they prefer, all in real time.
A well-programmed chatbot can be your never-needs-a-day-off friendly customer service staff member. Your chatbot can provide answers to the usual questions many customers have: What are your hours? Are you open on Sunday? Where’s your business located? Do you accept Apple Pay?
With use of messaging outpacing social media, chatbots give you an easy way to meet your customer’s simple needs 24/7. Plus, more and more people actually don’t want to talk to a human when they have a simple question. They turn to chatbots to get answers quickly and easily.
By providing answers immediately, your business maintains a great reputation for prompt response, and you’ll be alerted when there’s a question that only a human can answer.
Your chatbot can also:
One of the first ways to add a chatbot is to hook one into your Facebook Messenger. While this is not straightforward, there are a number of free and paid options on the market.
Customers get their questions answered immediately, and you can also point them to the relevant pages on your website based on their queries.
🤖 Blue Ascension Media is working on implementing multiple chatbots and will be adding more to this section including a detailed guide in the near future. Be sure to like us on Facebook to be notified for future updates.
Tech Tips:
No matter where you start, focus on implementing your chatbot in one place first, and branch out from there.
Alexa, what is voice search and how can I use it for my business?
Whether it’s through the Google voice search capability, the ever-present Siri built in to Apple products, or a voice-assisted device like Amazon’s Echo, Google’s Home Hub, or Facebook’s Portal, your customers are accessing content with voice search more than ever before.
And performing visual search using capability on Google, whether through images.google.com or its Lens app on Android devices, is close behind.
Voice and visual search make it easy for customers to get the information they need on any topic, wherever they are. When your content comes up and meets their needs, it’s another way to attract new customers or more fully connect with your current customers.
Voice search is especially helpful for local searches for your business. When your business pops up for a query like “best Mexican food in San Luis Obispo,” or “where to go wine tasting in Paso Robles,” you stand to gain a lot of traffic.
Voice-activated assistants aren’t magic — they’re pulling their data from content on the Internet. If the content is relevant, easy to access, quick to load, and uses terms that match the query, they’ll grab it. And your business’s info can be the answer they share out of all the similar data on the Internet.
While there are lots of tech tips to optimize your content for voice and visual searches, it still comes down to good content and solid SEO. Following this approach will help your content be findable in all sorts of searches, and that’s the real goal. Part of that is to create or rework your content to meet web accessibility guidelines and be sure your content is machine readable.
Tech Tips (Voice Search):
Tech Tips (Visual Search):
Gone are the days of marketing being a one-way push of information outward to customers. Today, your customers want to be seen as individuals with unique needs and they want to develop a longer-term relationship with companies they can trust and believe in.
One way to do this is viewing your content as a story with your customer as the leading character. How can your product or service help them solve challenges, improve their lives, increase their connection with others, or simply have a few moments of quiet or humor in their busy day?
Customers aren’t keywords. They’re human being searching for something to fill a need or ease a pain point.
When your content moves beyond a one-time post to content that can inspire, encourage, educate, and provide value over time, you can gain long-term customers that choose your company over the competition offering “the same” product or service.
Providing a longer-term view of customer nurturance rather than a one-time sale can create true fans — loyal and who can become lifetime advocates who rely on your business and share it with others.
The value of personal recommendations is worth infinitely more than finding a new customer for a single transaction.
Content is more than sales-speak and pushing a product or special offer. Develop content that your customers care about and want to share with their friends and family.
Go deeper: share the reason you started your company, the people who make it special, and the customers you’ve been with you over time.
Find ways to create experiences and foster an ongoing relationship with customers. When it’s time to buy, they’ll come to you.
With every piece of content, think of two-way communication. How can you engage with your customers and start a conversation?
With every piece of content, think of two-way communication. How can you engage with your customers and start a conversation?
Micro moments are those split-second decisions to get on our mobile device and find what we need to know — right now. Whether it’s searching for a lunch spot, a nearby ATM, the best place to do wine tasting, or the best tires for our car, we expect instant answers.
More and more people are using in-the-moment search to shape and validate their decisions. Now is the time to learn and leverage these concepts.
When your business can provide the answers to these four micro-moment topics, you can be the top choice for that customer. In fact, several studies show that the first result that best matches a query can even result in spontaneous purchases if you have a way for the customer to buy a related product that second.
And providing instant answers to micro-moment questions is just one piece of the puzzle. When your overall content can take the customer through this arc — from awareness through purchase — your business can reap the rewards of attracting customers by being the solution to their needs.
It all comes down to delivering your message quickly — within seconds — and clearly and concisely. If you miss the very small window of opportunity, the customer will move on.
To capitalize on this instantaneous demand, your business needs to come up first. This is a result of good content, good SEO, and being on the platforms that people turn to most frequently. Google, Google Business, Yelp, Foursquare, and others are some of the top platforms.
Tech Tip:
When creating your content, keep in mind the four decision points behind the instant decisions:
More and more of us follow the recommendations of friends and trusted sources like influencers rather than brand advertising on what to buy, eat, wear, or experience. We are growing wary and weary of being sold to by impersonal advertising campaigns and seek communities of people like us for input on what’s worth our time and money.
While we may follow a few mega influencers for the entertainment or FOMO (fear of missing out) value, those we really trust are micro influencers.
With between 1,000 – 10,000 followers, micro influencers are more like us than the online celebrities. They are genuinely passionate about their niche, whether it’s dog training or beauty products. We look to them for their knowledge and expertise, and see them as a source of trusted information on our shared passion.
If you have a smaller brand, don’t think that the smaller audience of a micro influencer means smaller results. The smaller audience actually means much higher engagement rates than the mega influencers, often by a huge margin.
Working with influencers is a balance between promotion and authenticity. People more and more put trust in a micro influencer’s decisions and opinions.
The key to influencer marketing? Understanding your brand, then finding and building relationships with people you believe align with your brand and your story. Begin by clarifying two things about your audience: the type of content they will respond to, and how they are evolving. Which micro influencer is best at meeting at that point of intersection?
A survey from Burst Media reported that…
“$6.85 in earned media value for every $1.00 of paid media,”
Not bad ROI, if you ask us.
This is even more impressive if you can put this into effect in the aggregate and build it as one component of your holistic campaign strategy .
Influencer marketing is becoming the fastest-growing channel, and the benefits to business are starting to be understood and utilized.
The overall message is that customers acquired over social media, via a trusted source like a micro influencer, tend to spend more and spread the word to friends and family.
The first step on this path is to really watch and see how your local micro influencers are interacting with their followers. What is their message? Are they consistent and do they speak the right message towards your industry’s brands and products?
Another good way is to search hashtags on your brand’s keywords and even on your products. There may be people that are already raving about your brand. They are ideal candidates for being a micro influencer.
There are many tools to see how influencers are performing and it’s not all about number of fans. In the end, it’s about engagement and how this leads to new customers and fans for your business.
Second, looking at this from your perspective, it’s good to know your overall goals for the campaign. This could be new fans, getting people into your store, brand recognition, promoting a special sale or event, getting new email subscribers, etc.
Tech Tips:
In the end, finding and working with micro influencers can benefit your brand and business. This is an exciting time and we can’t wait to see how micro influencer marketing continues to evolve in the coming year.
The relationship between brand and influencer is a mutually beneficial one where both gain something meaningful. The best relationships ensure that the brand is in line with the influencer’s aesthetic and audience, and the influencer has creative room to let their own voice shine.
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