The New Year is a moment to reflect on your earlier strategy and embrace upcoming changes – Katrina Bell presents 4 digital marketing trends you need to know about now. Are you ready for the next chapter?
1. It’s AI or the highway
Love it or loathe it, the pressure for constant social content creation is going to drive a greater need to use artificial intelligence – in other words, AI as an extra team member. If you have at least 3 social platforms and are aiming at the optimum number of posts, that could add up around 10 unique stories personalised for specific apps, leaving you very little time to then interact meaningfully with reactions.
AI may have an authenticity issue, but it can be incredibly swift at tasks such as writing captions, suggesting popular and relevant hashtags, drafting email proposals for partnerships and automating direct message replies. In-office, centralise one log-in so your AI platform interacts with a single persona. This is so it can organically learn more about your business and produce better results.
2. Goodbye UGC, hello entertaining EGC
Influencers are some of the best marketers around, so it makes sense to mimic their more successful tactics. TikTok and Insta story devotees are showing a growing displeasure at cheesy user-generated content (UGC) that comes off as being on-script but not authentic. Watching the 7th content creator output the exact same routine in an hour is a soul-crushing route to irrelevance. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.
The good noises are emanating out of employee-generated content (EGC) simply because these are the very people that are intrinsically invested in the brand, and are also the most knowledgeable your products. However, there is a caveat, in that you will need a cast-iron agreement for the use of their likeness and you need to establish whether participation comes with any remuneration.
3. Outward-bound sociability
It’s OK for brands to engage with creators proactively without being seen as trendjacking, and it allows you to build relationships with potential new audiences. If you see content that resonates with your products, an easy-breezy interaction that isn’t a hard sell could be just the way to get more eyeballs and establish your tone.
For instance, Specsavers continuously appears in relevant comments sections on Facebook and TikTok – the company has an expert eye in acknowledging that its meme-friendly status is the golden goose that keeps on laying. Specsavers' timing shows it is keeping up with the freshest trends and has a light touch when it comes to chiming in.
There are 2 key habits that can get you onto the right side of the comments sections. Firstly you need to interact within 24 hours and also embrace brevity. Aim to reply with between 10 and 99 characters (including emojis). Current best practice stresses aiming to get a reply from the original poster (OP), which bumps up your interaction score even more.
4. Battle of the socials
The confusion over who is winning over X-Twitter’s quitters will rumble on for some time. Given how Threads has a strong dose of Instagram DNA, it makes sense its 2billion active monthly users will want to try it out. Those wanting a pre-Musk, newsy feed that you alone can curate, including deciding who gets to see your posts, will continue to slope off to Bluesky. For both, it’s wise to maintain a dignified presence while feeding your engagement data into your overall digital marketing plans.
