Influencer marketing is a force to be reckoned with today. Brands are rapidly adopting this means of marketing to reach out to their target audience and engage with them. While some companies are following the usual method for reaching out to the highly engaged online audience, others are trying to fine-tune their influencer marketing strategies as per the latest trends to cash in on influencers and their vast popularity.  Live videos have recently boomed the digital media industry. According to reports, nearly 80% of audiences prefer watching live videos from brands over reading blogs. Brands have also started to hop on the live-streaming bandwagon to stay ahead of the competition and reach a wider audience. As per sources, around 70% of B2B businesses using live streaming report positive results in their ROI. And this number will continue to grow.  Here are some fascinating ways live streaming is shaping the face of influencer marketing campaigns. 

Makes influencers more accessible to the audience

The live-streaming form allows audiences to directly engage with popular influencers. It makes the audience feel like they are peers and not just followers of the influencers. There exists an undeniable thrill within the audience when they get a response from their favourite influencer or celebrity. This sense of excitement merely amplifies when followers get a live reaction to their questions. It gives a face and voice to the content that is lacking in the written forms of marketing. 

Builds trust with the viewers 

Live video streaming provides transparency between the influencers and the audience. Their voice rings truer during the live streaming than in a blog post, which results in increased influencer engagement and open conversations. If you're looking for a compelling way to build trust with your audience, live video is for you. Some examples of building trust with viewers during live streaming are offering a behind the scenes at your offices and production facilities, inviting industry influencers to interview some of your employees in live conversations with audience questions and comments, and more.

Allows content creation with quantitative ROI

Influencer marketing ROI is often difficult to measure. However, live streaming is one area where you can get measurable results that provide valuable information for designing future campaigns. This technique is highly engaging with viewers, attracting a much larger audience than traditional online video. You can watch their Facebook Live videos at three times the length of their recorded videos. Businesses can leverage powerful influencers and live videos to reach audiences across industries.

Provides an affordable way to add videos to marketing campaigns

Professionally produced videos can be incredibly expensive. Even the DIY approach videos require time and video editing software. Editing a 3-minute video takes around 3 hours, but a 30-minute live stream only takes 30 minutes, plus prep time. These two factors are one of the reasons why influencers love live streaming so much. All you need is a stable internet connection and a quality smartphone to stream videos live. After the live stream ends, you can save the recording and reuse it as a video for your marketing campaign.

Conclusion

Live video is a powerful medium that can be used in any influencer marketing strategy. Adding influencers to the mix makes your posts more impactful. By including authentic names and faces in your live videos, you can reach your audience in the most relatable way.

There is a famous quote by marketing Guru, Philip Kotler, “It is no longer enough to satisfy your customers. You must delight them.” And, influencers have mastered the art of doing so.As per stats, 80% of customers have made a purchase after seeing an influencer recommendation, which has propelled businesses to partner with influencers to upscale their marketing campaigns and experience significant growth. 

What is Influencer Marketing? 

Influencer Marketing is a practice that leverages the clout of people who have established a successful personal brand for themselves, predominantly on social media platforms. They are looked up to by their community and have a loyal follower base. Influencers have the ability to direct their follower's attention towards a particular brand and drive their purchase decision in a subtle manner. Their target audience both relates to them and aspires to be like them. There are numerous benefits of running an influencer marketing campaign, such as: 

• Influencer marketing exposes your brand to a wide set of audience.
• It ensures accurate framing of your brand’s perception. 
• Influencer marketing yields a higher conversion rate.
• Influencer collaborations offer long-term benefits by generating brand credibility and trust.

8 Tips to devise a Successful Influencer Marketing Campaign

Influencer Marketing is an amazing technique that aims to enhance your brand’s name in a creative manner, therefore demands diligent planning and smart implementation.  Set your KPIs Just like goals guide your campaign planning and implementation, KPIs guide your campaign analysis. Different influencer marketing campaigns may have different KPIs. For example, the dominant KPI for a campaign with affiliate links and discount coupons would be sales conversion but the dominant KPI for a campaign with a major message to spread might be clicks and impressions.  Specify your campaign goals Your campaign goals are a guiding light to your influencer marketing strategy. Prior to reaching out to an influencer, you must have an ultimate goal you wish to achieve through the collaboration, the message you plan to share, and the brand perception you wish to create. This would not only provide clarity to the influencer while creating content but would also shed light on the best possible ways to run your campaign.  Define your campaign budget Influencer Marketing is just one marketing technique under the wide roof of campaigns brands craft for their digital marketing. Therefore, a set budget must be defined in the initial stages after examining the influencer industry benchmarks. This would assist in staying away from unhealthy negotiations and would provide a structure with optimal utilization of monetary resources. Identify your target audience To identify your target audience, you must start by observing how your customers engage in the social media space and post that, create a customer persona with both behavioural and demographic elements specified. This would assist you in understanding your audience through the lens of influencers as the social media space is highly ruled by quality content creators. Choose the right influencers The influencers you choose would represent your business. They would be the face of your brand, even after your campaign ends because, content that goes online, always stays. Therefore, it is key to ensure that you choose an influencer that aligns with your brand’s values and has a follower base that you recognize as your target audience. Mass appeal is an added advantage with influencers but you still should choose one that is perceived as the industry expert of your niche.  Build your campaign brief You must prepare a campaign brief prior to pitching an influencer. Every influencer marketing campaign must have an exclusive brief containing the basic details about the campaign, such as the content expectation, main message, your brand’s perception, timeline of the campaign, etc. This gives the influencers an idea of how to create content that best caters to your brand image and when and how to deliver it. Select the best-suited campaign There are an array of campaigns that you can run depending on your ultimate goal, your target audience and the type of influencer you are deciding on working with. For example, macro influencers can be collaborated with for sponsored campaigns, or co-creation of products, and micro and nano influencers can be a part of giveaways, contests and even product reviews.  Tailor your campaign to the platform Lastly, it is imperative to tailor your campaign depending on the platform you are choosing to publish at. There is no “one size fits all” in the digital space. Almost every business is collaborating with an array of influencers to reach their target audience, but the ones that cater to the audience keeping in mind what they seek are the ones that are able to grab and retain attention. Also, Read Influencer Marketing Trends for 2023.

Conclusion

Influencers are like relatable celebrities in the social media space. People see them as their peers and not as brands. Therefore, they have a better connection with the audience, which is indeed loyal to them. Businesses have recognized the strong connection influencers have with their followers and are leveraging that for expansion and growth. If you are also looking for a way to reach out to your target audience and appeal to them in a subtle and aesthetic manner, then Influencer Marketing is the next best tool in your digital marketing toolkit. #ARM Worldwide identifies as a dedicated influencer marketing agency. We can help you build a strong influencer marketing strategy and improve your brand presence significantly.

By 2025, researchers have estimated that the channel will reach another all-time high with investments totalling $24 billion. Why? Because consumers want it more than ever. As target audiences begin to shift for businesses, the appeal of influencers continues to make its way to the forefront of business marketing strategies.  Brands must keep up with these latest trends, adapting their strategies to placate and engage a restless audience and emerge on top:

Consumption of Quick Content

The consumption of quick content has increased among social media users, and this is going to become a trend in the future. A short span of content intrigues the audience and increases the retention value. In addition, the span of human attention is getting shorter as social media usage increases. Therefore, utilising the potential short-form content will help you stand out and engage your audience. These days, short-form videos are everywhere. And brands continue to pay attention as platforms like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, Google and Pinterest increase their short-form offerings. YouTube's evolving entry into short video content is worth exploring for marketers who are ready to take risks and engage in quick content.

Rise of Nano Influencers

The newest additions to the influencer marketing industry are known as nano influencers. Consumers refer to these as "ordinary individuals" with remarkable social media abilities and a built-in capacity for influence. Brands will recognise the close and valuable bond nano influencers share with their audience in comparison to those with large followings. Potential sponsors will find the nano-influencers more appealing in terms of niche, so the audience will be more devoted to their identity. They will consequently have a big impact on lead generation for the brand. A survey examines the growth of nano influencers in the influencer marketing industry, with a particular emphasis on the benefits that businesses can derive from this new talent level.

Employing Influencer Subscriptions

Paid subscriptions are being tested by social media platforms, while newsletter services like Substack are becoming more and more well-liked among creators. In addition, subscriptions can strengthen bonds between content producers and their audiences, whether used in conjunction with current social network services or a different subscription platform. By providing restricted access to creative work, subscription-based content gives producers a means to interact with their audience. Brands can benefit from subscriptions by financing a creator's specialised subscriber-only material or by connecting with a close-knit subscriber group in other ways.

Power of Live Streaming

Live streaming is an innovative and powerful way to engage influencers in your campaigns. The craze and allure towards live streaming are expected to rise among consumers in 2023. When you receive a real-time response to your queries or remarks, your excitement level increases, and live streaming does exactly this, increasing your curiosity towards the product. Live streaming adds a voice and a face to the message, which written forms of marketing lack. Additionally, live streaming outperforms pre-recorded video when you want to make a strong personal impression.

Expanding Influence Genres

With digital transformation swooping in, altering how businesses operate and communicate with consumers, banks, financial companies, and everything in between have swayed to hop on the influencer marketing train. As a result, financial Services and Infotainment industries can tap into a group of Influencers at once to access their ideal audience and often drive better engagement than if they used other marketing channels. Brands use influencers to promote their offerings through paid advertisements, free giveaways, and endorsements. They can generate important brand awareness and loyalty via paid or unpaid posts. The goal is to get influencers to share valuable information & create excitement around a particular topic. The key benefit here is that they reach a larger or wider audience at a lower cost than traditional advertising.

Final Thoughts

In order to increase client confidence in your company, influencer marketing is a crucial strategy. As a result, it will be essential to promote brand awareness as well as online sales. Influencer marketing companies can assist in doing this by helping to convey the correct message at the right time on the right platform, which will promote further sales. Additionally, consumers of today are driven to authenticity and realism; therefore, adaptable content stirs rather than branded scripts will be the foundation of your successful influencer marketing campaigns. Finally, keep in mind that influencers can only create strong, positive brand connections when brands allow them the freedom and liberty to be who they truly are.

By 2025, researchers have estimated that the channel will reach another all-time high with investments totalling $24 billion. Why? Because consumers want it more than ever. As target audiences begin to shift for businesses, the appeal of influencers continues to make its way to the forefront of business marketing strategies.  Brands must keep up with these latest trends, adapting their strategies to placate and engage a restless audience and emerge on top:

Consumption of Quick Content

The consumption of quick content has increased among social media users, and this is going to become a trend in the future. A short span of content intrigues the audience and increases the retention value. In addition, the span of human attention is getting shorter as social media usage increases. Therefore, utilising the potential short-form content will help you stand out and engage your audience. These days, short-form videos are everywhere. And brands continue to pay attention as platforms like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, Google and Pinterest increase their short-form offerings. YouTube's evolving entry into short video content is worth exploring for marketers who are ready to take risks and engage in quick content.

Rise of Nano Influencers

The newest additions to the influencer marketing industry are known as nano influencers. Consumers refer to these as "ordinary individuals" with remarkable social media abilities and a built-in capacity for influence. Brands will recognise the close and valuable bond nano influencers share with their audience in comparison to those with large followings. Potential sponsors will find the nano-influencers more appealing in terms of niche, so the audience will be more devoted to their identity. They will consequently have a big impact on lead generation for the brand. A survey examines the growth of nano influencers in the influencer marketing industry, with a particular emphasis on the benefits that businesses can derive from this new talent level.

Employing Influencer Subscriptions

Paid subscriptions are being tested by social media platforms, while newsletter services like Substack are becoming more and more well-liked among creators. In addition, subscriptions can strengthen bonds between content producers and their audiences, whether used in conjunction with current social network services or a different subscription platform. By providing restricted access to creative work, subscription-based content gives producers a means to interact with their audience. Brands can benefit from subscriptions by financing a creator's specialised subscriber-only material or by connecting with a close-knit subscriber group in other ways.

Power of Live Streaming

Live streaming is an innovative and powerful way to engage influencers in your campaigns. The craze and allure towards live streaming are expected to rise among consumers in 2023. When you receive a real-time response to your queries or remarks, your excitement level increases, and live streaming does exactly this, increasing your curiosity towards the product. Live streaming adds a voice and a face to the message, which written forms of marketing lack. Additionally, live streaming outperforms pre-recorded video when you want to make a strong personal impression.

Expanding Influence Genres

With digital transformation swooping in, altering how businesses operate and communicate with consumers, banks, financial companies, and everything in between have swayed to hop on the influencer marketing train. As a result, financial Services and Infotainment industries can tap into a group of Influencers at once to access their ideal audience and often drive better engagement than if they used other marketing channels. Brands use influencers to promote their offerings through paid advertisements, free giveaways, and endorsements. They can generate important brand awareness and loyalty via paid or unpaid posts. The goal is to get influencers to share valuable information & create excitement around a particular topic. The key benefit here is that they reach a larger or wider audience at a lower cost than traditional advertising.

Final Thoughts

In order to increase client confidence in your company, influencer marketing is a crucial strategy. As a result, it will be essential to promote brand awareness as well as online sales. Influencer marketing companies can assist in doing this by helping to convey the correct message at the right time on the right platform, which will promote further sales. Additionally, consumers of today are driven to authenticity and realism; therefore, adaptable content stirs rather than branded scripts will be the foundation of your successful influencer marketing campaigns. Finally, keep in mind that influencers can only create strong, positive brand connections when brands allow them the freedom and liberty to be who they truly are.

As the number of digital video viewers is expected to reach 3.48 billion in 2023, marketers embrace video content as a reliable promotional tool. It is critical in today’s oversaturated, competitive, and ever-evolving marketing environment to have a diverse video content strategy in place. For your video content to thrive, you must learn to take calculated risks. Read on to gain insights into the future of video marketing and actionable practices to guide you on how to get started:

Rise of Video

Videos are not only engaging and visually appealing, but they also allow you to communicate your brand message in a more personal and memorable way. Video-first marketing plays a significant role in interactions as the customer goes through a journey from the consideration to the ‘sold out’ stage, convinced that yours is the product/service they need.

86% of marketers use video as a digital marketing tool. The majority (78%) say videos have directly helped them increase sales, while 86% also say that videos increased website traffic. A reason why video marketing is favoured as a marketing tool is due to its potential to explain everything in a format preferred by the audience — visually. Therefore, tutorial videos are especially popular among end-users.

Video Equals Value

Besides helping your website rank on relevant SERPs, videos make your snippet (or the actual result listing content) more eye-catching, meaning searchers will likely see it before seeing other results on the page. Video aids in lowering bounce rates. People spend over twice as long on a webpage with video than without. Its usefulness and engaging nature correlate with more time spent on your page.

Compelling marketing videos present your products in a conversational form, creating a sense of human approach, which is why 57% of consumers say that videos give them the confidence to purchase online. In addition, 92% of mobile consumers share videos on their social network, making it the most preferred digital format with the highest CTR. This gives a chance to spread brand awareness to a large crowd in less time.

Master Storytelling 

Influential storytelling videos guide viewers through relatable narrative-based visual content that gets to the heart of their pain points, kindles an emotional connection and suggests a satisfying solution. When creating videos, start with a vision of the feeling you want your audience to walk away with and how your story will create the emotional undertone that will make viewers want to follow the CTA.

A content calendar helps keep track of reels/shorts you need to create and distribute over the year. You can repurpose these video ideas to communicate to your audience by addressing their pain points. Video case studies are a powerful marketing tool as they prove to prospects that your business has something valuable to offer. This factor is crucial in nurturing leads and converting them into buyers.

Strategies to Ace Video

Your video marketing strategy is every bit as essential as execution. You can use video to boost qualified leads in your sales pipeline and match ROI. The trick to making your videos count is to build purposefully. The most effective digital marketing strategy to captivate a loyal and involved audience is to impact them where it counts. It never hurts to begin creating that intimate bond and devotion to your brand as soon as possible.

Companies with consistent branding are more successful than those without. Your videos should link to your website or a landing page, with explicit, on-brand creatives and unified messaging across each channel. A/B testing video campaigns should help you figure out what elements are working out and what isn’t. Remember to test and test again to determine the optimal content and timing of your video campaigns.

Opportunities with Video

The world of internet marketing has been dominated by video marketing trends. As a result, marketers can utilise a wide range of videos to build their brand presence. 

• Facebook Live: It offers consumers an unfiltered, raw look at the content that a company wishes to promote. Additionally, viewers can remark and respond to the video on Facebook Live in real-time.
• Interview-style Video: By conducting brief, professional interviews with the appropriate workers, you may provide your customers with a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the essence of your company.
• Informative Video with Animation: It includes crucial statistics about a company while showing trendy photographs or brief video clips with amusing graphics and humorous transitions.

Go Pro with Video

Without diving too deep into theory, the best way to define the purpose of your video marketing is to determine its standing in the marketing funnel. A data-led approach will help you iterate swiftly, double down on what's working, and steer away from what isn't. Whether organic or paid digital marketing services, the opportunities are endless if you take the right approach. Video is a powerful platform giving you a tremendous opportunity to impact your audience and drive business results.

Businesses must maintain their applications updated with the newest technological breakthroughs in order to make them more engaging and consumable. Staying relevant and updated on the latest trends is essential for survival. Businesses need to pick a UI/UX strategy that resonates with their brand, is user-friendly and intuitive. The design trends are developed based on technological advancements each year, and you need to be on your toes, discovering and optimising on these latest trends. Let's dive into some of the top UI/UX trends for 2022 that will force constant progress, self-learning, and differentiation of products: 

Hello ScrollyTelling

Scrollytelling transforms a long-form story into an interactive experience. It is a completely new, innovative way of visualising a story or info flow and grabbing the viewers' attention. Take Google, for instance; they do an amazing job in storytelling and engaging users to stick around till the very last word. The content is much easier to consume as users feel like active participants in the event.  The entire narrative of web designing is thought out in advance and built in the most entertaining way possible, so it is easier for users to retain information and connect with the website. Scrollytelling is a multimedia experience, stimulating deeper reflection and highlighting what can't be articulated by words alone. It's a very realistic content consumption experience that stems directly from how users interact with computers. 

Contactless Search: Voice User Interface

The trend toward VUI has been revving as processors get more miniature, and more Internet of Things (IoT) devices come online. Even the most resistant users agree that technical innovations don't bite, and one can even say that they make life easier. Utilising VUI alongside the traditional GUI could facilitate a less cluttered and more tailored experience focusing on inspiring the users, while more specific searches could be accomplished vocally. VUI execution in mobile app development will likely be among the most notable UI/UX design trends in 2022. The immediacy and versatility of voice form link the user's desire to the device's response. To reap the benefits of VUI, marketers must begin by composing detailed personas, work on potential limitations of particular devices, and make the best use of all action triggers. In addition, VUIs help companies increase customer engagement on apps with an emotional component (like exercise or productivity), providing a hands-free interactive experience like cooking, driving apps, smart home devices, etc.

Configuring Mega-Footers

Having an extended version of your header in the footer section can prove to be critical in bringing in multiple customer engagement points. They help with conversion rates by acting as a safety net at the very end of your website and provide customers with a second opportunity to interact with your website. In addition, Mega-Footers ensure easier website navigation by being a flavourful extension of your header. This helps with the overall website and E-commerce experience. Well-optimised Mega-Footers with high-ranking keywords and call-to-action buttons promote customer interaction by prompting them to react and gain valuable information. As a result, Mega-Footers function brilliantly to enhance a brand's image and act as a 'not-so-subtle' reminder to reinforce brand value. This reduces bounce rates and helps with lead generation.

Brutalism vs Minimalism

Brutalism and minimalism are web design languages that can evoke many emotions in customers, thereby triggering them to act on the CTA buttons. It promotes curiosity and improves engagement rates. By not focussing much on aesthetics but more on ruggedness and simplicity, these websites have a very straightforward and simplistic design that avoids unnecessary confusion. These design formats primarily focus on all the major elements of a website and therefore draw a lot of attention by highlighting the fundamentals with a minimal approach. For instance, let us consider Google's material design, which promoted the concept of flat designing. While the design remains sleek and minimal, the depth of experience is enhanced with movements and shadow effects.

Inclusive Design For All

Inclusivity extends to gender neutrality, culture, race, ability, and accessibility. A website should be put together in a way that anyone can get access to the content, and people also see others who they can relate to on the screen. The inclusive design shall aim to accommodate diverse experiences of users in how they interact with the world, both in the final product and in the design process itself, resulting in a universal design that all can enjoy.  The inclusive design employs coding best practices, so deciding to build an accessible site will naturally result in a decline in maintenance costs for your company and better overall usability. In addition, integrating inclusivity can act as one of the parameters to test and look into all stages of the product development, from UX prototyping to user interviews and usability testing.

SPECIAL: Into the Metaverse

When Facebook turned to Meta and presented a vision of their future – things would turn into a serious trend. The curtain-raiser of Metaverse design is a development that will forever change our association with technology and how we think about design. We are at the brink of the Metaverse, and designers are racing to design experiences using VR, AR, and now Extended Reality (ER) that combines existing technology to give birth to an entirely new UX. To introduce an entirely new UX, Metaverse will combine common ingredients of games such as UGC, a persistent shared world, and unique digital identities to elevate the experience into something new. Brands need to build fully immersive, 3D virtual spaces from scratch. There are opportunities for brands to create virtual venues, worlds, and spaces to host events and experiences in the Metaverse.

Final Thoughts: What to Expect

Taking a deeper look into the world around us, as well as up-and-coming technological advancements, can give you a more accurate picture of what's to come in the future of UI/UX design. To effectively design solutions for modern-day problems, businesses need to have an in-depth understanding of the challenges and types of environments users encounter each day. Focusing on these genuine, industry-led insightful trends that encompass larger fields like work culture, developments in UI/UX practices, and big technological breakthroughs can give you the push needed to become an empathic, modern, and cutting-edge brand. Related Article :- Top 5 UI/ UX Trends 2018

Over time, your blogs or articles get stale, they no longer possess the SEO quality and capacity that they once did. Every marketer deals with the issue of stagnant organic traffic while reviewing metrics at some point. Sometimes, all your content needs is a little refreshing and repurposing to keep your audience interested.  Check out how Repurposing content can become a way to use your previous blogs and revitalise them so they work harder for your SEO!

What is Content Repurposing? 

Repurposing content is the process of adapting and modifying the same content in a different format. With this, marketers have the power to reach a broader set of audiences and make them appreciate your content more. However, it requires you to format content in a way that appeals to the platform's audience. It's one of the well-known growth hacking tactics businesses use to drive traffic without wasting time or effort that goes on creating content from scratch. Repurposing gives you an opportunity to convey the same content to your new prospects without becoming redundant to those who have viewed it before. E.g., you could transform an eBook into a detailed video and post it on YouTube or create a podcast series. It also allows you to reach and target people at different stages of the buyer's journey without creating content separately. You earn reputation and credit as an industry expert by increasing organic visibility for your content.

How do you Repurpose Content? 

Before you set off rushing to recycle content, strategise a plan of action. Not all old posts are good candidates for repurposing. For example, you don't want to reuse content that failed to elicit a response from your audience. Use tools like Google Analytics to pick the posts performing exceptionally well. By updating this cornerstone content, you can create opportunities for internal linking, which is great for climbing up SERPs.  Reformatting your content for various mediums means appealing to more audiences and expanding your reach. E.g. If you have a YouTube content strategy, producing a video from an old blog post information could fit into that strategy seamlessly. Moreover, having a consistent flow of relevant content on your webpage and social media platforms is a significant component of empowering your brand, establishing credibility, and proving that you're worth trusting as a potential partner.

Why do you need it?

Rather than including a topic once and letting it disappear into archives, repurpose articles to consistently deliver your message to the audience. This works perfectly if you're starting with high-value, authoritative content. Repurposing your content gives your hot new blog an additional chance to be seen in a flashy, innovative format. In the age of fragmented content – repurposing is similar to content promotion 2.0. It saves your resources and opens up possibilities to reach a new segment of your audience. Think of it as going green - 'OUT' with the outdated and 'IN' with the latest and improved, attracting search traffic. Organic search provides the majority of site traffic. A study found that organic search holds a 51% share among traffic sources. Thus, repurposing optimised content in various formats can give you a significant lift in organic visibility and traffic.

Advantages of Repurposing

Content repurposing as a marketing strategy comes in handy for several reasons. It enhances your business marketing, saves you time, helps with your online presence, and much more. From top-performing pieces to flops, all types of content can be repurposed. In addition, repurposing allows you to get accustomed to diverse forms of content on various platforms, making you a much more versatile marketer for your business, improving your knowledge and skill sets. Marketers get the chance to redeem less successful content. For example, a series of blog posts that aren't getting many visits might collectively make a great eBook, attracting a lot of consultation requests. Furthermore, repurposing content into multiple forms of media is a great way to expand your reach out to varied members of your target audience. For example, when some could be visual learners, others might prefer audio, etc.

The Added SEO Boost

Repurposing content is the upcycling trend of the content world. SEO is not a sprint; it's a marathon, so provided you don't republish content word-for-word, repurposing could earn you a spot in the good books. Search engines like Google prefer websites they can trust. The more pages of search engine optimised information you have, the easier it can recognise you as a credible source of information. Users love to share interesting content, like blog posts, images, and infographics. The more you put out there, the more opportunities you have to get your content shared, creating high-quality backlinks for your site. By adding off-page URLs of blogs in video descriptions or social posts, you increase the possibility of others curating your content, meaning additional SEO assets to attract search traffic on many different theme variations. 

Final Words

Beyond simply getting more traffic out of an older blog post, repurposing can actually be a valuable social media management tool too. Repurposing content allows you to reach people you missed the first time around. The best articles to repurpose are those which provide a gateway to your current goals. The more you post, the more precise your site analytics become. You possess several ideas to repurpose your content. All you need is a little strategy to make your content worthwhile on different digital platforms, including several creative ways to attract more audiences.

Converting potential leads into customers is one thing but retaining them is where the challenging work begins. Customer retention saves you more money than acquiring new ones. As per data, there is a 45% chance of purchase from a second-time buyer. This further moves up to 56% by the time they come around for their fourth visit. Taking good care of your customers, helps your business grow and thrive while retaining them brings in profits and enhances your brand image without any added efforts.

A small group of loyal customers can be vital contributors to a majority of sales.  Since retained customers make for such valuable assets, we bring you five effective strategies to make your customers return for those repeat purchases. 

Go for Multi-Channel Marketing

Businesses should analyse their consumers’ purchasing behaviour online and deploy this strategy to keep them engaged in the future. Time is of the essence when it comes to replenishable items. This is why businesses must segment their customers on the basis of products they buy on a regular basis and send across reminders via e-mails, in-app notifications, messages, etc.

The RFM Model (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value) should definitely be used for automated marketing to retarget customers, re-engage them, and ensure faster cart checkouts in the process. Further, businesses should run trigger campaigns to have an in-depth understanding of their customers’ response rates, as this will help immensely with personalised messaging.

Cultivate Effective CRM Plans

Ensuring a great customer experience is crucial for any business if they want retention to come into play. This is where Customer Relationship Management comes in. Businesses should use CRM software to centralise all customer data in one place, analyse it, and provide customer experiences that are consistent with their promises. 

They should also leverage CRM analytics to segment their customers on the basis of who is more profitable, who purchases more often, etc. This helps in making regular updates to their shopping requirements. Another interesting way is to create dialogues with customers through integrated marketing communications. This will improve brand positioning, build loyalty, and ultimately lead to retention.

Connect with Your Customers

Customers like to be a part of the brand family as much as they like the brand. Businesses should try and partner with them by sharing. This way, caring will automatically come in from their side. One method can include sending personal invites via effective channels for any big product launch or brand event. This will make the customers feel acknowledged and important, and they will feel a sense of belonging and obligation towards your business.

Genuine interest should be shown while taking feedback and reviews from your customers on ways of providing frictionless experiences. However, you have to be careful to not spam them in the process. Additionally, separate chat rooms should be made with the sole purpose of piloting strategies, beta testing, and experimenting with their customers.

Accessibility-first Customer Support

Providing impeccable customer service is an important and effective one-way ticket to customer retention. If the service is good, the business will surely have its customers’ long-term attention. Data suggests that around 92-93% of customers will engage in repeat purchase if they experience good post-purchase service.

Businesses should focus on having a 24*7 portal for addressing criticism and providing prompt and efficient service to their customers - be it via calls, mails, or live chats. A feedback loop system should be in place that works on collecting, distributing, and analysing customer feedback. 

Personalise Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are simply a way of letting your customers know that they are valued for their relationship with your business. Businesses should focus on building strong loyalty programs to turn customers into committed brand advocates and members of your brand community. 

Customised loyalty programs will provide personalised and brand-specific rewards to your customers. Furthermore, businesses must use reward gamification methods to motivate their customers to reach exclusive VIP tiers in their loyalty programs. Data reveals that around 92% of customers will take recommendations from their trusted friends. This is why businesses should give points to their customers for providing referrals. This will ensure both retention and acquisition.

Retaining customers is definitely an excellent way to sell more and create a hurdle-free road to achieving business aims and goals. Therefore, businesses should continuously try to garner their customers’ trust and loyalty through well thought out marketing strategies. It will ensure a proactive retention approach and healthy profits in the long run!

Marketing is all about change, and in these unprecedented times, brands have to keep adapting to the spiking expectations of their consumers in order to provide the best products and services.  Here is where Design Thinking for Digital Marketing is helping these brands in chasing ideas and implementing them to emerge as leaders in their domain.

It is interesting how a tool like design can help drive a brand’s name, image, and message. If implemented correctly, this process can help businesses come up with many unique and exciting solutions. It further saves brands from giving out the wrong solution to their consumers and empowers them to perform better. Here are five principles of Design Thinking you must implement to have a consumer-centric outlook, improve brand preference, increase loyalty, and provide impactful user experiences.

Empathise to Realise

To empathise with their users, businesses should be on the same wavelength as their consumers and figure out why they are facing a potential bottleneck. That is how they can step in and navigate their way through a probable solution. For that, businesses need to have a thorough understanding of their consumers’ pain points. Data reveals that around 62% of consumers appreciate content that directly addresses their pain points.

Therefore, it should be ensured that the advertisements that these businesses release have an empathetic approach  to the consumers’ requirements - whether the product is not affordable, whether it has become obsolete, and so on - to drive maximum response out of them. Social media posts and other digital content designed from this approach will enable businesses to engage their consumers better.

Define to Decipher

One of the core fundamentals of Design Thinking is that businesses should always focus on collecting and analysing all the user information they possibly can to figure out what problem they need to address. Defining the problem will enable businesses to be in their consumers’ shoes and look at products from their perspective. This will ensure a good relationship build-up with consumers in the future and also bring in new consumers via word-of-mouth.

It will also help improve their ideation methods and processes when making blueprints while also being able to tackle challenges in a streamlined manner. This will enable businesses to break down their plans/strategies into critical steps/stages to integrate their ideas and data better and create a detailed customer insight for better understanding.

Ideate to Create

This is the part wherein all the teams come together to brainstorm different ideas, pool them together, and start moving towards creating an ideal solution. Businesses should continuously gather feedback and data to trigger the ideation process as this stage enables them to ask the right questions, go beyond the ordinary, and tap into innovative solutions. This often helps in solving more than one problem and creates consumer delight.

Here, businesses can make use of different marketing concepts and gauge plausible outcomes for the near future. This helps them proceed with higher assurance as to how their product/s will perform in the market. Further, ideation enables businesses to tap into areas that are otherwise left untapped or unexplored, leading to better formulations and solutions. 

Prototype to Perform

This is a big time-saver for all businesses as producing a rough draft of the product helps in providing  a snippet of the trajectory it will take once it is officially released into the market. It can help businesses decide whether the product idea should be taken forward, modified, or cancelled. Initially, providing product prototypes at a lower price will help pull in meaningful feedback and enable businesses to create products that increase brand recall and brand resonance for the consumers.

Also, prototyping gives ample time to experiment with user interfaces and include elements that provide value to the customer. It helps businesses in avoiding mistakes that are either irreversible or too time-consuming to change. Massive cost cuttings can be achieved in this stage as unnecessary elements and ideas get eliminated from the process.

Test to Analyse

Once prototyping is cleared, Businesses should release the product into the market for testing purposes and patiently wait while the feedback, data, and market performance can be collated and analysed. The test product should be allowed to speak for itself rather than the businesses giving too much information in the beginning. The raw user experience will help with in-depth understanding and insights about what is missing or what could have been better. 

This allows businesses to pick back up from one of the five stages in the Design Thinking process depending on the conversion rate in the market. Also, this stage can be carried out alongside  the prototyping stage as it gives an open front row seat to consumer experience and enables businesses to better interact with them. This helps in breaking down the results and improvise on the required solution.

It is certainly possible that there might be several blips on the radar when this process is being carried out. There may be changes in the problem statement midway or developments during the process that might change the problem statement altogether. However, since it always boomerangs to empathising with the consumers, the final solutions are real and meaningful - and that is why Design Thinking should definitely be a part of your marketing arsenal.

The year 2021 will see many necessary and quick changes in the marketing landscape and Influencer marketing is expected to take over and be a vital element of this much-needed change. The nature of digital marketing and social commerce is ever-changing, and as it continues to create newer identities for itself, Influencer marketing is acting as a firm backbone to it. It is already very huge, and since businesses anyway map out their marketing plans days and months in advance, right now would be the best time to put your money into some influencer marketing trends. Here is our list of the top five trends that we think will be the rage this year, in 2021:

Increase in authenticity of ‘no-edit edits’

Today’s audience is smart and can very easily figure out if a post is natural or scripted. This is the reason why authenticity holds significant importance. Influencers have received criticism in the past for posting reviews that seem fake, and this, in turn, has a negative impact on the numbers. Since most can figure out whether a review is real or paid, companies will be more likely to show content that does not look too filmy or sponsored. Influencers will allow for a raw, unedited sneak-peek into their lives to have an honest connection with the audience wherein they are the truest version of themselves. The #nofilter trend will take over and owing to the originality of the content, the audience will act on the call-to-action.

Higher worth of value-driven content

Proper value-driven content can shift and change certain pre-conceived ideas and notions of the audience, thereby inviting more traffic. Generating and sharing quality content will also create and good brand image that will have a positive impact on the audience and drive brand sentiment, loyalty, and sales figures. This will also help in forming strong communities with ardent followers who will believe in what the company is trying to do and achieve. Companies too will focus on content that means something to the target audience, so that they can both relate and respond to it.

Growth and Expansion of partnerships

Rather than only doing basic sponsorships, companies will have a proper partnership with influencers wherein this relationship will continue for an extended time period. Through this partnership, the companies will create brand awareness via these influencers without trying to directly market or sell their products. This will make the audience believe that the brand cares about their needs and requirements and the results will be mutually beneficial to both parties. Since influencers are well-known and have a dedicated fan following, companies will collaborate with influencers to release a signature line of products to pull in more traction. With this kind of personal touch, brands will garner the loyalty and trust of their customers. Companies will also try and drive social-cause campaigns through the influencers to connect with the audience on an emotional scale.

Seamless integration of platforms for shareability

Since influencers are present across multiple social media platforms, collaborating or partnering with them would inadvertently imply that the reach will be there across these platforms as well. Since the follower base of the influencers trust them and value their opinions and judgements, their posts will add credibility to the brand and business. It will show that the brand is trustworthy and reliable. Influencer marketing will tap into highly shareable platforms and their integration for seamless reach and experience. More of data-driven analytics and infographics will be shared by brands and customers for a better understanding and awareness regarding usage and experience. Similarly, brands and social media platforms will be better connected as well to share updates and reviews across mediums.

An upsurge in micro and nano influencers

Micro and nano influencers will act as key brand partners in this year of 2021. These influencers will enable businesses to reach out to that audience which is otherwise unreachable, or a certain niche segment that can help improve the awareness of the brand as well as the sales performance. Micro and nano influencers will help companies create a strong foothold in the market as their reviews will come from personal usage that is open to the followers to see and judge. These reviews and posts will act as crucial drivers in the purchase decisions of the audience. The influencers will not merely help in amplifying the presence of the brand but also help in communicating important information regarding its products and services.  So these are the five influencer marketing trends that we believe influencers will shape the marketing landscape of businesses in 2021. By incorporating these into your digital marketing plans and strategies, your company will be able to perform its best by working in tandem with the requirements of both your business and your target audience, ultimately helping you to achieve the desired results.