The digital world has become the dominating one in this age and time where everyone is getting their information about what’s going on in the world through their laptop, tablet or smartphone or all of those devices. That is why digital marketing has become a major impacting factor on the buying decision process of prospect customers with all its digital marketing trends.
Given the fact that the world is drastically changing and many businesses are facing really hard times due to the corona-virus (covid19) pandemic, digital marketing has become the go to marketing method for many businesses to reach out to their prospect customers during travelling restrictions and home lock-downs.
Digital marketing has already been used for many years in the business world thus it has many trends to keep up with yet there are many myths around these trends that need to be cleared with the proper facts!
The Myth: Chatbots will replace humans
The Facts:
Chatbots have amazing abilities to help your business be available to assist your prospects and customers 24/7 and to answer any of their inquiries via chatbots. Yet these bots are installed by humans with ready made answers to frequently asked questions and at the same time, it can refer them to a human customer service representatives who can answer their unique questions, while getting their contact information.
This information can be used for your marketing,sales or services teams so they can contact them later on with further information or special offers and thus expanding your prospect and customer database.
Chatbots can also work as marketing tool that pops up to your website visitors where it can market them a suitable product and/or service according to a series of questions that's answered by the prospect customer.
The chatbot market is expected to reach $1.25 billion by 2025 according to Grand View Research, 2017 and 80% of businesses are planning to deploy some type of chatbot by 2020 according to Oracle, 2018 making it an important tool for businesses to incorporate into their marketing activities via their websites and different platforms.
The Myth: A Successful Influencer Marketing Campaign Requires Influencers With Huge Follower Counts
The Facts:
Contrary to that, Micro-influencers are influencers who have a smaller number of followers ranging from 2K up-to 50K on digital social network platforms. They have a great impact on their followers and how they take their buying decisions about different brands and their products and/or services.
Many companies are benefiting from this by collaborating with those influencers due to their impact on their followers buying behaviour and on the rise or fall of certain market trends.
Influencer marketing is a 1Bn $ industry on Instagram alone where, according to Dustinsout.com, Instagram currently has about 1BN users , with 600 million daily active users.and influencer marketing is not limited to instagram but it’s spread over other platforms like youtube, Facebook and Twitter , where its total worth will be up to $15 billion by the year 2022.
The Myth: Automated marketing is just for sending emails and newsletters
The Facts:
Automated marketing is so much more than sending newsletters and emails, it’s a helping hand in your digital marketing efforts where it uses AI(Artificial intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) personalizing and better targeting,the suitable customer.
This Marketing automation software can track the performance of your marketing efforts and help you make the right decisions regarding the allocation of your marketing budget.
Having said that, according to https://cmo.adobe.com/ on average 49% of companies are currently using marketing automation, with more than half of B2B companies (55%) adopting the technology. Which clearly indicates that marketing is part of the present and may dominate the future.
The Myth: Social Network marketing is for certain Industries only
The Facts:
Actually, all industries can benefit from social network marketing ,either they are B2B or B2C companies (business to business or business to customer) as there is a variety of different social networks that can be suitable for each kind.
As for example, LinkedIn and Facebook can be more suitable for B2B industries while instagram and Twitter can be more suitable for retail and B2C industries. According to wearesocial.com there are 3.80 billion social media users in January 2020. Making social media marketing an important tool for all industries who want to be exposed to a wide range of prospect customers who would be interested in their products and services.
Finally..Digital marketing is not a bubble that will burst at any time or a trend that will not return in style. It has become an integral part of many business’s marketing efforts. It is a science that is studied and applied in order to increase awareness about a company’s products and services and ultimately be part of its journey to great success and profitability.