Marketing, like many parallel business facets, can move at the speed of light, or at least it may feel that way when brainstorming a new campaign. On a yearly, quarterly, and even monthly basis, new trends and techniques pop-up and transform the way we attract and market to new audiences. Of course, there are the staple trends of marketing, like social media, which help businesses connect directly with customers, cut costs, and increase brand awareness. Whereas social media has cemented its place as an essential piece of today’s go-to business marketing strategy, newer trends, statistics and technology can appear and introduce change.
Head of U.S. Acne Marketing at SUN Pharmaceuticals Pharma and Pennsylvania native Aimee Amann has tracked the rise and fall of different marketing staples over the course of her twenty-plus-year career. Amann began her career as a medical sales representative for Merck & Co. and was quickly promoted to the position of U.S. national sales trainer, where she helped train and build a primary care sales team. From there, she moved into marketing and became Merck & Co.’s U.S. brand manager for MIRCETTE, where she re-launched the brand, producing 45% growth year-over-year. For the next four years, Aimee Amann worked as their senior marketing manager gaining endorsement to commercialize the single rod contraceptive, IMPLANON. Next on her journey, she became a senior marketing manager at Pfizer Inc. Over the next eleven years, while at Pfizer Inc. she worked in various marketing positions as a senior marketing manager, then director, spanning the US and Global markets.
Below, Aimee Amann has helped to outline three streams of marketing that are widely available to businesses. She advises that businesses look beyond the more obvious implementations like print and content media as simply keeping up with the popular marketing styles is not always enough; to succeed in the fast-paced, marketing world, you have to stay ahead of the curve.
Exceptional Customer Experience
One priority of marketing at the moment is the move towards providing unparalleled customer experiences that will keep people coming back for more. In a sense, when you focus on building a positive business culture and simultaneously provide great service, the marketing almost takes care of itself; however, the act of delivering superior customer service is more robust. The growth of online content has given consumers more power, but also provided more options. Customers are no longer a passive party when it comes to learning about products, instead they are actively going out and doing their own research. As such, the question becomes what makes a superior customer experience when a consumer does find a business they wish to support? The key principles are diverse and include efficiency, convenience, knowledgeable, friendly service, easy payment options, up-to-date technology, personalization, an easy mobile experience, brand image, and design, all of which add up to a fulfilled customer experience that people will value and remember.
Data Driven Marketing
Alternatively, a great deal of money and value are put behind the implementation of analytics and data in marketing, as they provide critical insight to drive business performance and optimize the results from digital marketing efforts. Improving their data-driven marketing is an aim of many businesses in that increased data collection and advancements in technology have already had a huge impact on the level of personalization that is possible and on what consumers expect from their interactions with brands. Today’s consumers are flooded with marketing messages from multiple channels to the point where they have started to tune them out. Traditional advertising is losing its effectiveness, whereas personalized marketing messages that forge a real connection between the brand and the target market seem to garner results. Some more specific tactics within this trend of big data are things like fan pages, contests, etc., which create brand profiles, promote audience engagement and provide a company with even more data from which to cull and use with the existing customer.
Voice Search Technology
A third trend is that of voice search, which shows no sign of slowing down and will continue to be a major influence on how brands create content and market themselves online. One of the biggest developments impacting the world of digital marketing today is the widespread adoption of voice search technology, which is changing how search marketing professionals optimize websites to rank for targeted keywords and queries. With the smart speaker business booming (Google Home, Amazon Echo), companies are having to adapt their SEO’S to incorporate more natural language patterns so as to attach their results to spoken queries. Along these same lines, a business’s content and back-end should answer as many common, spoken question-based searches as possible. Closely related, Artificial Intelligence is one of the major staples in technology today and the crux behind voice search and smart assistants. AI has made chatbots possible, which are now appearing on more websites than ever before and it is a major component of predictive analytics.
That being said, these are simply three viable options in marketing and there are many more to consider. If a business is not utilizing these particular campaigns, or their advertising does not align with these trends, they can slowly apply these changes, and more, to their marketing efforts. As long as a business is keeping a thumb on the pulse of current marketing trends, and always remaining open to change, their enterprises will not fall behind.
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