If you’ve been wondering how the marketing industry is going to evolve this year, or how it’s busy evolving, then it’s best to keep up with the latest trendy terms that have been buzzing around the digisphere.

Curious to know which buzzwords will be making an impact on your business?

Then let’s not waste any more time!

Here are seven marketing buzzwords you should know about:

1. Artificial intelligence

Although this technology has been around for awhile now, artificial intelligence (AI) is only continuing to expand and improve as time goes on. And its use as a marketing and PR tool is only becoming more and more pertinent to the industry.

In the context of media monitoring, this technology allows brands to protect their reputation. Through the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), this tech picks up on the sentiment of your brand messages to determine whether customer feedback is positive, negative or neutral, allowing you to see exactly how your brand is perceived in the media.

This is vital information to have, as we all know how negative perceptions can skyrocket, negatively impacting your business’s reputation.

Additionally, having access to positive sentiments assures you as to what’s working in your brand strategy, allowing you to take the right steps going forward in terms of you using it again or even improving on it.

2. CRM

CRM — or customer relationship management — will only continue to grow this year, as the customer’s journey becomes a pivotal role in marketing strategies. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this terminology, a CRM is a system that helps you to manage, organise and store your customer’s data.

This system is highly beneficial to brands’ marketing campaigns as it allows you to:
  • know exactly who your audience is — Because the system is able to gather data about any potential customers or lead, you’ll be able to fine-tune your brand messages to cater exactly to your audience’s needs.
  • enhance customer segmentation — The system allows marketers to sort out their customers into various groups based on similar needs, interests and characteristics. You can also sort your audience according to “recent activities, buying history, personal preferences and daily social media activities.”
  • allow for more personalised brand content — Due to the information gathered about your consumers, you can now personalise your content and messages to your audience. For example, instead of saying ‘Dear customer”, you can address them by name, which makes them feel important and valued.

3. (The) customer journey

Both a trend and a buzzword, many brands are placing their core focus on the ‘customer journey' in order to gather insights into what makes their audiences tick at each moment of their voyage. So, what exactly would this customer-centric strategy entail? Well, this is essentially the journey the consumer takes from the ‘Awareness’ phase of the ever-famous sales funnel, right up until the ‘loyalty’ phase.

Brands normally start by creating a customer journey map, which involves the following steps:

1. Set objectives and targets that you would like to achieve
2. Create a buyer persona that sums up your target demographic
3. Identify any pain points that your customers might experience along the way
4. Note the various stages of the buyer journey to make the experience more personalised
5. Maximise all of your channels to their fullest capabilities so the experience is unique to each potential consumer
6. Find your ‘moments of truth’. Be your own worst critic and also take any negative feedback from your customers as a learning experience.
7. Revise your strategy, as it won’t always be 100% perfect the first time around.

4. Google Shopping

With more people driven to work from home due to lockdown, e-commerce has emerged as a massive trend in the retail marketing sector. This includes the use of Google Shopping — a Google service that allows brands to showcase their products inside the service’s massive list.

This list enables consumers to purchase any products they desire and gives consumers the benefit of choice. The channel displays a photo of the product, the price, the store name (and more) on the chosen website, allowing users to select their purchase from a variety of brands.

So, is this service paving the way for e-commerce in 2021? Only time will tell. But at the moment, the service is a huge hit. “Google Shopping Ads now make up 76.4% of retail search ad spend, and win 85.3% of all clicks.

So if your retail brand hasn’t considered placing its products on this service before, now might be the time to do so.

5. Phygital

Phygital — or the combination of the words ‘physical’ and ‘digital’ — refers to the once physical way of doing things that are now done digitally. For example, it has become a lot more common for people during lockdown Level 5 to do their shopping online instead of physically hopping into the car and going to the shops.

In terms of marketing, this buzzword is associated with the customer journey (see point three) in terms of accommodating the customer in accordance with their exact needs. For example, if you’re a brand that normally requires consumers to do in-store pick-ups, it might be time to forgo that for a delivery option, as well as a service delivery app.

6. Snackable content

Consumers’ attention spans are getting shorter by the year, and brands currently have eight seconds to hold their interest. That’s why the trend of creating short, easy-to-consume content has become increasingly vital to marketers’ strategies.

So, how do you keep your audience addicted to these bite-sized pieces of information? You can start by doing the following:
  • creating relatable and shareable content
  • keeping track of the latest trends in the media and social media
  • giving consumers a ‘behind-the-scenes look at your brand
  • sharing content that is positive, uplifting at, if appropriate, humorous

7. UGC (user-generated content)

UGC — or user-generated content — is the sincerest form of flattery for any brand this year. This is when consumers create content surrounding your brand, or even just repurpose or share your brand’s content with their own personal inputs. All in all, UGC proves that your marketing game is on-point.

That’s why many brands are making it their aim to create videos, infographics, quotes, memes, reviews, articles, podcasts — or anything of the like — that are shareable and that reflect the brand.

Marketers can incorporate UGC by, for example, sharing a popular photo on Instagram of someone using their product or service. This content would have, of course, been initially created by a follower or customer, so permissions may come into play here.

What’s so great about sharing UGC is that your audience has basically done all the legwork for you by creating the content — all you need to do is know how to use it!

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