Top 5 trends for the future of marketing

1. Conversational marketing

People carry their phones everywhere, so the easiest place for marketers to find them is on mobile — whether through messaging or other mobile apps.

The session “Conversational Marketing: Is This the End of Mobile Apps?” explored conversational marketing, a practice that prioritizes one-on-one conversations with customers to enable more personalization in customer interactions.

Griffin LaFleur, a senior marketing operations manager at Swing Education, said his conversational marketing channel of choice is live chat, as it can easily facilitate a two-way communication stream. This type of communication helps customers feel a human-to-human connection, which LaFleur said he finds difficult in marketing’s traditional one-to-many approach.

“If you sell to various personas, and you know that a certain persona is coming in … you serve up a different experience — one that’s more tailored and catered toward them,” LaFleur said in an interview. “So, when we’re thinking about how we’re going to continue to excel in marketing, it’s adopting other channels.”

To get started with a conversational marketing strategy, marketers can pick a simple use case — like loyalty program communications or newsletters — to see how customers respond. If it’s successful, marketers can dip their toes into more use cases and channels, including social media.

2. Social media optimization

If people aren’t texting on their phones, they’re likely scrolling through, searching on and engaging with social media platforms. Yet the way people search organically has begun to change, LaFleur said, so marketing teams should start to optimize social media content as much as they focus on search engine optimization (SEO) for other content.

Social media offers real-time information, results and community building, which has led audiences to expect and desire more personal connections with brands.

“There is an attachment to brands for a lot of people. … We can put out stuff that appeals to potential clients and current clients, but for brands like ours, social media should be the heartbeat of your culture,” said Lauren Wiggins, a corporate communications manager in the steel industry, in an interview. “You should be able to showcase your culture and really use social media to connect people.”

SEO can help marketers create content that people can easily find, but it can’t build communities. That trait and its emotional connections are unique to social media, and these communities are the bedrock of online culture, said Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok’s global head of creator marketing, in the session “What We Owe the Creators of Culture.” If marketers invest more time in social media, they are more likely to connect with these communities and keep up with online trends.

3. Emotional connections

Whether people scroll Twitter or watch TV, ads interrupt their experiences. This strategy is so common that many people have learned to filter them out over time. Now, customers want more personalized experiences and to feel connected to brands they engage with.

The session “Ignite Your Brand With Empowerment Over Interruptions” highlighted the power of emotional connections and how empowering and creating personal connections with customers can enable better results.

Marketers like Wiggins, who primarily interact with customers through social media, can meaningfully engage with them using empathy — especially if the customer is unhappy. Wiggins said customers frequently complain on social media, and they’re often the person who has to respond. In replies, Wiggins would apologize, empathize and aim to correct the issue, which often received positive customer responses.