The World is Changing, How are you Marketing to a Changing Audience?  The average person now spends more than 12 hours online everyday! This is great news for marketers because by 2020 over 80% of the buying cycle will be under their control. It also means that marketers will need to better understand the the mindset of online users.

Every 60 Seconds:

98,000+ Tweets are sent

696,000 Facebook status updates

11 million instant messages

698,448 Google Searches

1,820 TB of data created

217 new mobile web users

168+ million emails sent

(Source HP Vertical)

Every 60 seconds over 98,000+ tweets are sent! Talk about a fast paced world! @BMAGlobal15 #BMA15 pic.twitter.com/KuhF7NsOID

— Marissa Pick (@marissapick) May 27, 2015

We need to understand what people want from their content.  We live in a crowded marketplace and we need to find innovative ways to put our customers first, cut through the noise, and deliver a good and memorable digital experience.

Is your brand ready? It better be with stats from the one minute snapshot above! We live in a world where people trust peer recommendations more than advertising, and users seek out information online.  You MUST ensure your brand has a digital presence, and a strategy for the future.

Below are six tips to keep in mind to help you recharge your marketing:

1) The User Is KING, your customer MUST come first:

Many marketers have always said Content is King, however this year the user is king, and we as marketers must ALWAYS put our customers first.  Often we forget that someone is on the other end receiving the experience that we are creating. Marketers often assume because they can do something, that they should do it. It’s important to think about what not to do while considering what we are doing.  These decisions matter.

We should focus on delivering clear messages, placing our customer first, and keep our brands messaging simple. Be honest, give them a reason to know you better.

2) Track Your Customers Journey:

Today, brands should be using information to deliver more personalized experience for individual users to help them along in their customer journey.  Cookie based tracking now allows a brand to better understand a users mindset and online behavior.  Now with the rollout of marketing automation more brands should focus on getting to know their customers and where they are within their buying process to better deliver messages customized to where they are within their journey.

3) Manage Unlimited Channels: 

It used to be a simple uncrowded space back in 1960 when there were only a few marketing channels.  In 2015 it’s become a crowded space with over 70 channels to choose from! The challenge marketers will face as we continue to expand is that now will have little control over the channel since the power will lie with the user and how they interact with one another without the brand’s involvement.

4) Organic Reach is Limited, Consider Methods to Stick Out and Reach Your Targets:

Research has shown that only 2-4% of a brand’s fans will see their content in an organic framework.  As a result brands now should look into investing in paid social media to further leverage their message to their targeted audience.  Content should be packaged with different images and messages to best optimize and leverage messaging.  It should also be created with a strategy to be shared across various social networks. All messages and paid advertising should point to the same end channel, but marketers must test & optimize to better reach their audience.

It’s important to review, tweak, reinvent and develop campaigns to enable your brand to stand out and cut through the noise.

5) Publish the Right Content with the Right Platform:

As marketers we have an end goal of creating shareable and compelling content to further expand our brands value. Often those within my role often find themselves with the challenge of ensuring it’s optimized as best as it can be to encourage sharing across social media.  We need to work to create a strategy before we create content. Chris Brogan said it best, “Content Marketing is weaponized storytelling.”  We must to turn the tables and use great media thinking to drive content curation, and not the other way around.  Remember, content is fire, and social media is gasoline!

6) Have a Visual Social Media Strategy:

The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text with 90% of the information transited to the brain is visual.  If you want to stick out on social media test video, images, and quotes.

People don’t engage equally with every tweet. Research by Media Blog, which analyzed the content of over 2 million tweets sent by thousands of users over the course of a month, shows that adding a photo URL to your tweet can boost retweets by an impressive 35%.

There’s a ton of tools to help you get started to develop free visual content, my favorite are pablo by buffer, canva, and quotr.

Hope you enjoyed this post, send me a tweet and let me know what you think, or leave a comment below!