Top Digital Marketing Trends and Opportunities

I recently attended a webinar on the title of this post moderated by Kevin Taylor, Communicate by Design.

Speaker Bill Shaheen, Vice President, MultiView, highlighted eight trends based on an association leadership study they recently conducted.  For a copy of their 2021 Digital Marketing Trends & Opportunities report go HERE.

He made the general statement that the biggest pain points for organizations to do better in their digital marketing are lack of time, resources and knowledge.

 

Here are my notes based on his presentation:

 

Digital Content Consumption – prior to Covid, people would spend on average 3 hours and 17 minutes consuming digital content, post Covid that jumped to 6 hours and 59 minutes per day.

 

E-Learning Has Skyrocketed – Google searches increased by 100% for online courses.

 

Connected TV (CTV) – using the Internet for TV programming, not your cable company.  Think Netflix, HULU, Apple, etc.

 

Video is the Most Popular – YouTube is right behind Google (parent company).  93% of brands acquire new customers because of video on social media.

 

Digital Ads – remains strong.  The younger generations consume through social media while the older generations consume through TV.

 

Contextual Ads Perform Best – these are ads that are related to the content you’re looking at on the Internet in real-time.  It’s not a static ad on a landing page.

 

Marketing Personalization is Mandatory Not Optional – give your members what they want when they want it.  Today’s databases easily allow this to happen.

 

Virtual Events Are Here to Stay – at least for 2022 and part of 2023.  Once people feel comfortable with in-person events, they will come back strong.  We’re already seeing this now.

 

Bill then pivoted to talk about digital marketing opportunities and suggested the following three things you should be doing: 1) increase your digital investment; 2) spend more on digital vs print; and 3) spend 5-6% of annual revenue on marketing each year.

 

He went on to talk about the top three places to invest your digital dollars: 1) website; 2) social media; and 3) email marketing.

Other areas he mentioned were search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing.  When it comes to social media, find out where your members are consuming their digital content.

 

Final suggestions:

 

• Target your communications to your different audiences within your membership.
• Video marketing through testimonials and e-learning promotion.
• And don’t forget to make it personal.  You want to speak to them as you really know them, based on their past participation with your organization.

Engaging and Retaining New Members Using Drip Marketing

Amazon has 22 benefits - they introduce you to a few at a time through weekly or monthly emails.  I'm a member and I've personally experienced these onboarding emails. That's how I learned about e-books, prime music, etc.

I recently attended a session led by Larry Guthrie and Leslie Whittet, both from the Association for Corporate Growth where they talked about how to market the benefits of your organization a little bit at a time with your members.

If you're an Amazon customer you're familiar with their monthly email that talks about a specific benefit or two.  What they are doing is putting their benefits in bite size messages.

They spent a good amount of time discussing the difference of onboarding versus an orientation?

Onboarding improves retention rates - period!  An orientation is just the beginning of a true onboarding process.  The onboarding process could be the first 90 day period of your new members interaction with you.

This is where drip marketing comes into play. You communicate with them on a regular basis over this 90 day period by introducing the different benefits of your organization.  You might want to communicate on a biweekly basis.

The value proposition is a major part of your onboarding process.  Advocacy, education, networking are benefits that you are providing your members, are you doing a good job of communicating those benefits?  Your communications should always be member focused not chamber focused.

Maybe your onboarding (90-days) communications might be:

• Welcome kit
• Communication on an advocacy effort you're working on with a link with more information
• Communication on how to participate in your next networking event
• Communication on a couple of benefits that they might not be aware of

 Your goal is to have your members "learn it and use it!"

Drip marketing is showcasing your member benefits in your communications in a strategically planned out process.

I also think it's important that in these communications you are not asking for more money.  Remember, they just paid you a sum of money to join.

Think of drip marketing as a guided tour of your chamber.  You're breaking up your value proposition into small digestible bites of information. Make your communications clean and concise.

Biweekly emails focusing on a different set of benefits is a plan worth considering.

Once you've finished your 90-day onboarding with new members you might want to check in with them at the 6-month interval. Remember, at the 9-month interval you'll be sending your first auto-invoice.  That three-month window before an invoice is sent will be a great time to fix any problems from the information you might get at that 6 month check-up.

Good luck!

Digital Marketing Essentials

At a recent breakout session I attended on digital marketing by Aidan Augustin and Jeff Bunkin of Feathr was focused on retargeting, geofencing and lookalikes.

Retargeting - someone visits a website and you get an ad later when you're on a different web pages (Facebook, papers, etc. - banner ads or a video ad).  This is all about getting you to purchase a product once you've left a site where you were browsing.

Retargeting is all about paying to reach a warm audience and you don't need their email.  They've just visited your website.

You can use segmentation to dig deeper in what they viewed on your website and then you can decide what ads they may get from you to make sure you're delivering relevant information to them - think an exhibitor versus an attendee and giving them the right information to sign-up.

Another example is the shopping cart abandonment, where you can retarget them with the registration process and get them to check-out and finish the process.

An ad exchange is an auction site to decide what ad is shown at the higher price on the webpage that is being loaded in real time.

Geofencing - showing ads show within a specific geographic area, think a 4 block radius.

For a great resource on the specifics of retargeting go HERE for an article by Social Media Examiner.