Try these 8 new and trending customer-centric approaches to help you keep proving your value to leads and customers over email
Marketing trends forecasts should be resources marketers can consult to help them set strategic priorities for the coming year. But all too often they recycle the same old ideas or serve as thinly disguised showcases for vendor specialties.
So let’s make this email marketing forecast more useful by focusing on one overarching development we see happening in the world of email marketing and the supporting events that make it a significant development.
For my part, I expect that email experience will be the defining trend for 2024 – the increasing focus on improving our customers’ experiences with our brands, products, services, representatives, and messages.
Many of the more specific trends included in forecasts that are beginning to trickle in revolve around improving our customers' experiences of our emails. That includes everything from building…
Your website reflects your organization
No one wants their website to look tired and out of date. Being aware of the latest website design trends means you can ensure your website keeps impressing visitors. It’s not about chasing the latest fads, which you should be careful to avoid, but rather understanding the current state of best practice and applying these to your site where relevant to you.
Website design agency Numiko builds stunning and complex websites for some of the most prestigious organizations in the world. So we asked their team of web designers to uncover the latest web design trends for this year and share what their predictions are for 2024. Here’s what they identified as the current top web design trends:
Bento grid layouts
These types of layouts aren’t new. In fact, they’ve been around for decades. However, they have exploded in popularity recently, in part…
Social media done well is your absolute best shot at getting even closer to the most important people for your business
By embracing today's social media trends, you'll open a direct line of communication with your everyday audiences, channeling both positive and negative feedback from your customers, colleagues, competitors, and other voices in your brand's social ecosystem.
In fact, the public and connected nature of today's current trending social media techniques helps us shine an even brighter spotlight on our social media campaigns and always-on digital presence. It's like digital PR on speed.
But it's no secret that consumers and advocates are becoming more aware, and demanding, in terms of their social experiences of our brands too. That's why it can help to turn to the upcoming 2024 social media trends to inform our strategies.
What do the current trends on social media mean for marketers in 2024?
At Smart Insights, we practice an integrated…
What AI-based tools and digital marketing techniques should businesses from small to large be considering?
I’ve been fortunate to be involved in digital marketing for over 25 years now. The opportunities presented by AI recently are the most exciting developments that I have seen in this time, since the early days, where everything from organic search, a website and email marketing seemed a similarly huge opportunity.
This range of projections of advancement in AI presented at Technology for Marketing by Implement AI highlights that we are at a relatively early stage of adoption of AI, with the biggest advancements yet to come recently hinted by the rapid adoption of ChatGPT.
In this post, I’ll summarize trends in real-world applications of AI and tools to consider in each of these categories of AI that are open to any business from small to large. Some of the…
Actionable steps to prepare for the future of marketing
Digital marketing today is complex and it’s inevitable it will get more complex in the future as new technologies and platforms emerge. Take the recent rapid adoption and interest in Instagram Threads and Open AI ChatGPT, as an example. Marketers also have to contend with the complexity of the many channels we need to track in our analytics such as organic and paid search, social media, display, and email marketing.
This visualization of the B2B customer lifecycle shows the great opportunities for harnessing different digital marketing channels to encourage lead generation, nurture, and purchase. It also highlights the challenge of managing the always-on marketing activities that need continuous focus to maximize conversion in the face of fierce competition.
Our latest research on digital marketing trends for 2023 to 2024
Each year, at Smart Insights we…
Benchmark your use of AI with other businesses
Despite the recent hype around ChatGPT, the opportunities for using AI in marketing are far from new. We have been advising on using AI for marketing since at least 2017 when we first recommended businesses consider these 15 use-cases of AI in marketing.
Yet before 2023, I have been surprised by relatively low levels of interest and use of AI by marketers and within businesses when we have asked in our surveys. Typically in-house use of AI had been at the level of 10-15% of respondents since it seems only the largest brands with Business Intelligence teams could work on their own AI applications. Of course, levels of use are much higher if you include AI in paid media such as Google Ads, LinkedIn or Meta Advertising.
However, with the growth of interest in using…
Why you need to rethink your B2B marketing strategy to keep up with the pace of change
Let’s start with addressing the status quo.
For a long time, tried and tested B2B marketing strategies have been based around a linear model, where activities aim to gather prospects at one end of a pipeline (or funnel) and gently nudge and nurture until they leave as newly won customers at the other end.
It’s been this way for quite a while.
It’s given rise to language that any B2B marketer is familiar with such as “MQLs” (marketing qualified leads) and “SQLs” (sales qualified leads), it’s shaped how B2B marketing and sales should work together (where one hands the baton on to the other in the form of a well nurtured, warm lead) and KPIs that evaluate this linear performance (pipeline velocity, #MQLs and #SQLs, to name just three).
So established is the thinking that the world’s biggest…
Evaluating technology options for innovation in marketing - do you know your Hype Cycles?
If you're involved in marketing strategy development, you will be constantly making judgments and reviewing with colleagues which digital technology innovations are most relevant to your organization. The Gartner Hype Cycle, which is published each year is a good tool to use to find out about both newly emerging innovations and more established marketing technology that could be relevant.
In this article, we compare different examples of the well-established Gartner Hype Cycle tools which serve to highlight the adoption of new technology services within marketing technology.
Gartner publishes many different hype cycles reviewing the adoption curves for different types of technologies, but as a digital strategist, I am most interested in those focusing on digital marketing technologies. A summary of the report with the infographic is published annually and I have been monitoring them and sharing them for over…
