Digital Marketing. It’s all in the palm of your hand. Literally. Personalized content, apps, email, video, social, and search are driven by marketing automation and displayed via mobile-friendly content on your phone.
Yes, convergence is here and while you may find it intimidating, it can be a beautiful thing if you prioritize your efforts; which leads me to…
…My Top 3 Priorities for Your Digital Plan in 2016:
#1. Optimize Mobile
Google now ranks mobile-friendly sites above those deemed unfriendly because more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers. Following suit, mobile commerce is growing 300 times faster than e-commerce.
That is why becoming super mobile-friendly is priority number one. People just won’t fumble around with a non mobile-optimized website on a phone any longer. You absolutely must be on a responsive design platform that resizes your site for any device — phone, tablet, phablet, laptop, and desktop; or, you need a dedicated mobile version of your website.
But a mobile-friendly site is not enough. Other areas to address on the mobile optimization front include:
- Apps and video to make your content even easier for users to engage with.
- Digital assistants (Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google Now) who need to know who and where you are for speech-based queries.
- Mobile payments, which can make or break closing a new sale.
#2. Automate Marketing
The need for immediate gratification and relevant information demands that you take CRM to a higher level. Marketers must deploy a hyper-personalized, turnkey content system that delivers helpful information to the right people in a way that they prefer to receive it at the right time during the sales process.
We prefer Hubspot, which makes it easy to generate inbound leads, segment contacts into personas, schedule email campaigns, distribute content, and make the right calls-to-action throughout the lifecycle of each customer in the sales funnel.
#3. Communicate Meaningfully
Content — and by that I mean websites, video, presentations, social interaction, podcasts, email, landing pages, eBooks, white papers, and infographics — is a catchall term for how we communicate with our customers. In 2016, it will need to rise to a level that truly resonates with each and every individual.
Data gathered from your marketing automation system helps inform all variations of content creation. Content creators can draw from it to craft narrowly-distributed, hyper-personalized material that is relevant to each persona for maintaining meaningful relationships.
In my estimation, 2016 will be the year that data, customer intel, social media activity, content creation, and digital marketing all converge to become a well-oiled machine firing on all platforms. What do you think? Tell us in the comments below.
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