5 Marketing Trends Every Startup Needs To Tackle by 2017

Startups aim at growth with a minimum cost. One of the most important things as a start-up is understanding how to utilize the right marketing techniques. It’s easy to get overwhelmed in a start-up with everything that needs to be done, and let's face it, most of the time our budget is scarce. In this post, I will go over the importance of integrated customer experience, Cross Platform advertisements focusing on mobile devices, Marketing Automation, Native Advertisements and the evolution of Virtual Reality Marketing. Follow these 5 trends that will change how you market in 2017!

Integrate Customer Experience

It’s not a secret anymore, today marketing professionals are using integrated tools (Such as Trendemon Kissmetrics, and other awesome tools), that help them keep track of the buyer’s behavior, measure loyalty and attentiveness, and generate personalized outreach emails to meet their audience needs. As a business owner you should always aim to understand your customers better, and react vigorously.

Here’s an example, after you have figured out who your targeted segment is you can start implementing different CTA popups on your landing page. Through the understanding of user behavior and A/B testing you can optimize your conversions and reach higher sales.

Marketing Automation

We all know what it’s like to have a full day at work and still have things to do once we’re home. Sometimes things are not organized or prioritized and we find ourselves swimming through deeper and deeper water. Marketing automation refers to software that makes you more efficient. It is there to help you organize and prioritize marketing tasks. It will let you target and meet your goals faster and automate the process based on parameters you set (events or triggers). Over 75% of executives at high-performing companies say the most convincing reason to use marketing automation is to boost revenue. Consider this, when a user first registers as a lead / downloads a white paper / completes a transaction you can setup the system to automatically send a follow up email based on templates you set. How does it boost revenues? In three key areas: converting traffic to leads, making those leads clients and sustaining a healthy relationship with your customers. Campaign Monitor offers a very intuitive marketing automation solution.

Here’s an example: your website receives visitors on a regular basis, some of them are relevant prospects, but how can you know if a specific firm has showed interest in your product or services when your tracking individual users and not a group of them. Consider using lead forensics to identify when an IP address of a firm has visited a page more than 3-4 time in the past week. When this goal has occurred lead forensics will notify your Marketing Automation tool to send a reminder to your Account manager that it is time to follow up or reach out. Think outside the box and create more opportunities!

Cross-Platform Advertisements

As you’re reading this you probably have a couple internet-enabled devices hanging around, maybe a smartphone, iPad or a smartwatch. There are more devices and more objects that are becoming attached to the internet as time goes by especially with the popularity of IoT. This means that in today’s day and age advertising has to be flexible and dynamic enough to work on any device. According to a report done by SmartInsights the average american spends over 50% of their internet time on devices other than a laptop. By optimizing your content and landing pages to any device you are maximizing your conversion rate by 129%. Log-into your analytics and understand where your users hang out the most and at which times of the day, make sure to configure your adwords campaign to these devices and hours of the day, again to optimize your results for every dollar you spend. Follow this read to better understand landing pages optimization.

*Quick Tip - Progressive Web App is becoming very popular. What is PWA?

Progressive web apps are mobile interactions that combine the best of online web pages and the best of native apps. As the user builds a relationship with your web page or PWA over time and engages on a constant basis, they become very powerful; loading super fast even on bad networks, allowing you to send push notifications, and many more!

Virtual Reality (VR) Marketing

VR is a big buzz word at the moment. And for good reason. VR offers a completely immersive way to engage with the digital world. You might be used to it in the context of video games or engaging experiences. But, it also has huge consequences for the marketing world. With VR marketing advertisements will be far more immersive, impressive, impactful and memorable. The marketing team will have a new platform with which to unleash their creative powers. Advertisements have the potential to become experiences. Once they become experiences people will remember them and be impacted by them far more than right now. There has been significant investment into this area and is expected to hit $150 billion disrupting mobile by 2020.

Native Advertisement

Most companies today have different marketing departments aiming at SEO optimization and Inbound and Outbound Marketing. Through the creation of content, companies gain, with time, a wide range of followers and achieve high ranking on different search engines (AKA Organic Traffic). Native Marketing is a developing form of paid digital marketing, where the ad position follows the natural form of the UX and the environment in which it is served.

What does this mean?

Because ads are disguised as an extension of the webpage (“You might also like..”) the user feels very comfortable clicking your advertisement. As a matter of fact 33% of consumers said they would share a native ad with friends, and 51% showed a higher intent to purchase with native ads.

Hopefully these techniques will be able to guide you through the, sometimes overwhelming, world of a start-up. By giving special attention to customer experience you’ll be able to monitor your customers’ behaviour and respond accordingly. Whilst, at the same time methods such as marketing automation, VR, cross-platform and native advertising will boost both reach and efficiency. It’s difficult to imagine anything going too wrong with such an effective approach!

About the Author:  Nadav Olmert is the Director of Business Development and Marketing at DiscoverCloud. Nadav has contributed on sites like The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post and Geektime Magazine. He is passionate about Entrepreneurship, Startups, and all things Digital Marketing. You can contact Nadav on LinkedIn.