Technological and cultural trends are quickly pounced on by marketing pundits and resold to the business community as the latest-and-greatest-thing to incorporate into a marketing strategy. What we tend to miss is that not every trend is appropriate for every market.
Here’s a great example: It’s 2007, and Campbell’s marketing consultants are salivating over the metrics on blogging trends. Naturally, they launched an aggressive campaign to get people to blog about their soup. They push hard, throw plenty of money at it, and it didn’t work. Few are willing to blog about it, most who do feel somewhat ridiculous. It’s wasn’t believable, nor sustainable. Blogging was certainly the largest new trend, but that just didn’t translate for the can of soup.
There’s a flip-side to this coin. Some trends are so massive and pervasive, our clients need to adopt them regardless of personal bias. We can help our clients to navigate these trends, assess appropriate opportunities, and evaluate ROI potential. Some of the latest trends in marketing are:
- Chatbots
- Programmatic Advertising or Smart Ads
- Conservational Marketing
- Personalization
- Video Marketing
- Social Commerce
- Interactive Content
- User-Generated Content
- Voice Search Engine Optimization (VSEO)
- SERP Position Zero
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)