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As the world continues to rely more digitally in many aspects of life it’s crucial to watch and observe the trends, new technologies, and even new strategies in marketing. I predict that conversion rate optimization, influencer, and marketing automation will be the key drivers to digital marketing. With recent World health discoveries from Covid, we have been catapulted to testing the waters in a fully digital atmosphere from elementary children in full online school to a coin shortage encouraging society to pay digitally.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of visitors to a business’s website by taking an action or marketing strategy and focusing on that tool. While focusing on that tool the CRO process is handled similarly to the scientific method. First, the marketer must gather preliminary research along with the necessary key performance indicators. Then finding the hypothesis, implementing, and analyzing the results. This process is a continuous cycle in growing and building the best possible scenarios/process possible. Additionally, as the digital world grows it becomes more and more important to have traffic on a business’s website.
While advertising, such as display ads or social media marketing is great, it does not bring the consumer to the place in which they can make a purchase and truly bring revenue to the company. It was found that the average return on investment from CRO tools estimated a 223% increase in visitors (Duggar-Herd, 2018). CRO marketing also is a great strategy in not only growing the number of visitors to the website but perfecting strategies through a revised and refined the process. With the ever so fast-changing world this process allows for the little changes in the target audience, such as fads and interests, to help modify marketing strategies (Hello Bar, n.d). Overall CRO will provide great tracking and measurements to the growing and changing target market and their reaction and effects to the digital world.
Influencer marketing is the use of a well-known social media account/person for marketing a service or product through use and reviews of a company’s service/product on their (influencer) social media account. While there can be different tiers ranging from smaller local influencers (like a smaller city mayor, or a neighborhood head of their HOA) to larger worldly known influencers (like Kylie Jenner). Influencer marketing reaches directly into specified groups of interest in a target market. While Kylie Jenner, a social media influencer, has interests such as health, beauty, and make up her followers would contain the same interests along with being in a generalized age group.
In combination with the digital growth around the world, there is an expected 30.6% increase from 2019 until 2025 of influencer marketing to grow (Phartyal, 2020). Influencers get engagement from their followers with their posts of reviews of products they test/use. One of the most important factors an influencer has on marketing is its authenticity. Consumers feel more compelled to consider the influencer to give a trustworthy review on a brand/product/service, which many consumers are feeling that reviews influence their purchases (Phartyal, 2020).
Due to the growth of the digital world reviews have become more and more important in seeing a review or the product prior to the purchase. It has been found that 40% of people have purchased a product online and a result of seeing an influencer use that product, in addition to 49% of consumers who relied on the recommendation based from the influencer, and 72% of customers trust a business more after it is recommended from an influencer (Saleh, n.d).
Marketing automation is a collection of tools creating an automated process while also giving respective reporting information based on campaign success. Marketing automation creates an easy to use option for marketers instead of needing an expert or learning new software or technology the system is able to manipulate multiple channels to advertise across all channels cohesively. For instance, when a New campaign stretched across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook could offer the same ads, platform messages, and even through email. Currently, about 75% of businesses use automation tools on top of this there’s an expected 14% annual increase for marketing automation (Van Rijn, n.d.). The marketing automation technology has also allowed for improved targeting of messages to the consumer as well as even provided a better customer experience from the metrics of the reports (Van Rijn, n.d.). It becomes important to know when your consumer is active online whether it’s mobile or through a desktop computer. It’s also important to understand which avenue or platforms they navigate on along with the times they are on those platforms. With marketing automation, it allows for targeted consumers Who may be active online at 2 AM or 3 AM to see ads targeted towards them without the business having to post or send information at those times of the day. Marketing automation will create a more flexible schedule for a business allowing them to reach a larger scope of the new digital consumers.
References
Duggan-Herd, T. (2018, April 18). What is CRO Marketing? Retrieved from Campaign Creators: https://www.campaigncreators.com/blog/what-is-cro-marketing
Hello Bar. (n.d.). Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization: 11 Important CRO Benefits. Retrieved from Hello Bar: https://www.hellobar.com/blog/benefits-of-conversion-rate-optimization/
Phartyal, N. (2020, June 9). The Unstoppable Growth of Influencer Marketing. Retrieved from Business 2 Community: https://www.business2community.com/social-media/the-unstoppable-growth-of-influencer-marketing-02318053
Saleah, K. (n.d.). Invesp. Retrieved from How Social Media Influencers Impact Online Buying Decisions- Statistics and Trends: https://www.invespcro.com/blog/social-media-influencers/
Van Rijn, J. (n.d.). The Ultimate Marketing Automation statistics overview. Retrieved from Email Monday: https://www.emailmonday.com/marketing-automation-statistics-overview/#benefits