Since everyone is using online marketing channels, how can you expect to gain a competitive advantage? You need to look for unique and innovative ways to put your business in front of the customer online. The following are 4 of them.

• Social Media Stories

Some call social media stories the next big trend in social media marketing. Already used by several businesses, social media stories are expected to become a norm for businesses in the future.

With the proliferation of smartphones, stories are all set to take over most social networks. We are already seeing their domination on Instagram. On Instagram, the most popular platform for social media stories, stories are now viewed by 500 million users per day.

Today, more and more businesses are using stories on social media to come across as ‘authentic’ to their audiences. To prove their authenticity with the power of social media stories, businesses produce engaging videos for followers, countdowns, fun polls, and behind-the-scenes content.

On most occasions, the help of a marketing expert or creative professional is not required to create stories. However, you must have a strategy in place to produce engaging and effective social media stories.

• Social Messaging Apps

If you thought that social messaging apps were just for sending emojis to friends and family, then think again. Following are some statistics that will change your perspective on social messaging apps:

• Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion active monthly users
• The messages exchanged between people and businesses on Facebook Messenger every month amount to 2 billion
• There are 1.3 billion monthly active users on WhatsApp 
• The number of messages sent via WhatsApp exceeds 50 billion
• The combined users of Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and WhatsApp are more than the users on YouTube or Facebook

The statistics listed above represent the increase in the popularity of social messaging apps for business purposes. Since a significant percentage of your potential customers spend a good part of their day or week on messaging apps, it makes perfect sense for you to market your products and/or services on these platforms.

If you want to market your business, products, and/or services to customers directly, then social messaging apps can be a great way to do that. Social messaging apps allow businesses to perform more ‘personalized’ marketing, which adds value for your intended audience.

• Marketing Automation

Although the trend has been around for a few years now, marketing automation is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. As the name suggests, marketing automation is the use of software technology and platforms to automate different marketing actions.

With marketing automation, you can reach out to customers and prospects with automated messages across the web, social, email, and text. There are several reasons why marketing automation makes sense for your business.

Firstly, marketing automation can help you to reduce or even eliminate time wastage. When you or your employees need to manually copy lead information, a lot of precious time is lost. This time could have been used to contact more leads.

Another benefit of marketing automation is minimizing error. It is easy for us humans to forget something that we need to do. Here, this would mean forgetting to copy the contact details or calling a lead.

With marketing automation, you can avoid this as automated marketing has all the records stored with it. It allows the system to alert you or your staff about an activity that needs to be performed. It also keeps your business on track.

Finally, marketing automation can help to increase collaboration. A major problem faced by many businesses today is the lack of collaboration between their sales and marketing departments. When there is a lack of collaboration between these departments, some of the details about a lead by either of these departments goes missing. Marketing automation can help to avoid this by making all information about a lead or customer needed by any department available at a time it is required. This eliminates silos and streamlines marketing across your organization.

• Content Personalization

When it comes to content marketing, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy that you can use to effectively reach out to your intended audience. However, since customers seek relevant content, the best approach to content marketing may well be personalization.

Content personalization can help boost your users’ engagement rates by adding value to your content marketing strategy. With this approach to content marketing, you can increase your chances of reaching out to an intended audience. For example- a prospective buyer of a Volkswagen T-Cross, would need to be targeted with the right content, to help them make up their mind.

To deliver relevant content, you need to personalize or customize the content according to the customer profile. For this, you will need the data of visitors to your site or other pages on the web. This data includes key information about a certain segment of customers such as their demographics, geographic location, and behavioral attributes.

Once you have the above information, you can create high-targeted content and call-to-actions to increase your chances of converting leads and converting them more effectively. 

Final Word

By using these unique and innovative ways to put your business in front of the customer, you can make your target audience more aware of your brand while increasing your business’s appeal and value to them.