5 Strategies to Improve Your Marketing Efficiency

Marketing is not an exact science. The successful practices of yesterday are no longer producing significant yields today. Consumer behavior and buying patterns change constantly. If you are not attuned to developments and do not take decisive, timely and informed action, you’ll be left in the dust.

How do you truly increase the effectiveness of your marketing and maximize your results? Here are five marketing efficiency tips to get you started.

1. Never Ditch Content Marketing

While talks of how content will no longer be a significant ingredient to any marketing endeavor persist, professional marketing agencies and business organizations beg to differ.

According to a 2019 B2B digital marketing report, 15.1% of 985 professional marketers say that content marketing remains the biggest, most impactful marketing activity. The same report revealed that machine learning and artificial intelligence (15.1%) shares the top spot, followed by marketing automation (14.8%) and big data (14.4%).

Content marketing can be utilized in so many ways and can support all sorts of marketing campaigns. Content can engage, interact, and influence customers at any touchpoint of their lifecycle. That said, marketing experts advise businesses and marketers that instead of creating a huge marketing funnel and attract just about everyone to go in, they must efficiently leverage relevant and original content to target specific niche audiences using content marketing tools.

Whether you are using marketing software for small companies or large corporations or marketing firms, you can truly boost your results if you include content marketing as part of your overall strategy.

2. Leverage AI-Powered Chatbots

Chatbots are proving to be useful, as evidenced by its many applications in various business areas. They provide customer support outside working hours. They engage website visitors and respond to their queries and requests when all your human agents are busy taking calls and performing other tasks.

The best part is chatbots don’t tire, which means they can deal with large volumes of customer requests and queries without feeling and exhibiting emotions, something human agents are very prone to after working for hours and feeling stressed. But how do chatbots impact your marketing strategies?

For one, they capture all the juicy details from your customers and potential visitors. Aside from the usual contact information they automatically collect, AI-powered chatbots can analyze conversations to determine the prevailing sentiments, emotions, trends, and tendencies of your customers and prospects. Such a wealth of information helps you devise and execute highly effective and targeted marketing campaigns at the right time, using the most relevant and significant content.

Chatbot adoption and implementation are slated to increase in the years to come. If you’re shopping for a marketing software solution and the products on your marketing software list don’t have AI chatbot capability, you better reconstruct your list and add ones that have.

3. Consider Integrating Marketing Software with AI

On a related note, AI is becoming more significant and prominent in the digital marketing landscape. AI is a separate technology but can be integrated with most digital marketing software for agencies. It won’t be long before marketing systems are equipped with AI capabilities as well.

With AI, data analysis becomes more efficient. It can quickly identify and filter leads with the highest potential to convert. AI can easily handle marketing tasks and processes that are taxing and exhausting to humans.

AI can closely track consumers’ online behavior and patterns. This functionality enables you to understand their motivations and identify their triggers in real-time for data-driven marketing. Thus, it helps you create and deliver personalized marketing messages and execute campaigns that are intelligent and well-targeted, yielding excellent results for your business.

4. Don’t Ignore Social Media Metrics

Statista says that by 2021, global internet users will increase to 3.1 billion people. Currently, 59% of internet users access social media daily and more than a third of them check social media more than five times a day.

With so many people on social media, it’s only logical for marketers to reach out and engage customers and prospects through a variety of social media channels. The Social Media Examiner noted in its 2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report that 97% of over 5,700 professional marketers use social media to reach and engage their target audience.

Many social media marketing strategies include automated and scheduled posts and chatbots for conversations. However, only a few marketers measure social media metrics.

Marketing via social media is now becoming a standard. You need to monitor the aforementioned metrics and derive top quality insights to effectively evaluate and optimize current and future marketing campaigns.

5. Focus Your Marketing Efforts on Gen Z

As members of Generation Z, or Gen Z, now become part of the workforce, it is high time that marketers and businesses should shift their attention on them. Their entry to the workforce means there are now more people with purchasing power. Businesses and marketing agencies should create profiles of all their Gen Z contacts, leads, and prospects for immediate and future marketing campaigns.

Like people from other generations, members of Gen Z have different likes, needs, motivations, and reasons. But bear in mind that the majority of Gen Z people are entering a world that is filled with tension and an economy that is visibly struggling. More than just relevant and significant content and marketing messages, they are likely to respond and turn to companies that are socially responsible,

Voice Search Gains Serious Traction

A few years back, voice-powered searches were just a tiny blip on the radar screen. Online searches have been dominantly text-based and still are. But according to ComScore, as published by Forbes, at least 50% of online searches will be through voice by 2020.

User adoption of voice search has greatly increased in the past years and it’s slated to be widely implemented in the near future. Its impact on digital marketing revealed that 41.5% of the respondents started using voice search within the six months. Only 11.3% said they began utilizing voice search three years prior.

While landing on Page 1 of SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) is considered a win, it won’t matter anymore once voice search becomes the prevailing standard. People who use voice search are presented with one option that usually satisfies their query. Even when your #2 or #3 in the SERPs, most people are not going to go down to check the top results.

Voice search is going to revolutionize the way people search for information online. From a marketing perspective, it is crucial that marketers take a good look at their current strategies and think about how they can best prepare when voice search becomes ubiquitous.