The hype and trend of digital marketing are growing exponentially in South Africa like their international business peers. Digital marketing has the ability to grow a business despite the size and make them able to compete with big brands in the industry.
As this industry is known for being ever-changing and goes through continuous updates in terms of algorithms and new trends, one needs to keep up with the changes to be ahead in the game. While chatbots, hyper-targeted advertising, and marketing automation were considered to be the new bias in 2020, let us look at some of the marketing predictions you need to adapt in 2021 to stay ahead of your competitors.
Artificial Intelligence
The dominance of Artificial Intelligence in businesses has already started to rise last year and you can expect more organisations and corporates will incline towards this technology in 2021 as well. AI has already started taking over simple jobs by providing utmost efficiency and is slowly becoming the heart of the global business market. According to studies, relying on AI will allow businesses to obtain a competitive advantage of up to 80%.
You can analyse consumer behaviour and certain search patterns by using data from different social media platforms and online searches by relying on AI. This feature will enable businesses to understand their customers and make predictions based on their purchasing behaviour. Some of the areas that have already started using AI include product recommendations, basic communication, e-commerce transactions. Email personalization and more.
Programmatic advertising
Programmatic advertising also relies on the technology of artificial intelligence as it lets you target a more specific audience. Programmatic advertising provides real-time bidding which is much more efficient and delivers higher conversions along with lower customer acquisition cost.
Conversational marketing
With the rise of chatbots, marketers are more inkling towards conversational marketing as this lets brands interact with the customers and builds a sense of trust through the one-to-one, real-time connection. The primary goal of this kind of marketing is to improve the user experience through a feedback-driven marketing strategy that ensures higher engagement and customer retention.
Voice search
While it is not something brand new trend in search trends, marketers are focusing more on the strategies that favour voice searches to get more traffic. With the progress of technology, the numbers of errors made by various voice assistants have reduced drastically and people have started relying on smart speakers that work on audio content only. Optimizing your content for voice search will let you rank better in the search results along with increasing your brand awareness.
These trends certainly don’t represent the complete list you need to follow but it surely gives an idea where to start to stand out from the crowd and take advantage of the new updates to grow in this industry.
However, it is important to understand how digital marketing is different from traditional marketing. It is quite unfortunate that even with the boost of digital marketing, many people are still not aware about the differences.
In fact, I have come across people who ask – online marketing and sales – are the same?
Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing – Are there any differences?
We are all aware that marketing strategies in today’s era are rapidly evolving, and the market has shifted from conventional marketing to digital marketing in recent years. Digital marketing channels such as e-commerce websites, Google ads, emails, and others are now being used more often by marketers to promote their products and reach their target audience.
Rather than focusing their marketing efforts and resources solely on conventional marketing methods, marketers, businesses, and organisations are increasingly turning to digital marketing channels and South Africa is no exception. You will find tons of companies that specialize in providing quality services to grow your business effectively.
Traditional marketing
Traditional marketing is the conventional form of marketing that uses different offline advertisements and promotional strategies to reach out a semi-targeted audience. Traditional marketing is a hard-to-ignore type of marketing that involves the traditional advertisements we see regularly. Many of the most popular and tried offline marketing strategies fall into one of five categories including print, broadcast, telephone, direct mail and outdoor. Traditional marketing has changed over the years, but the fundamentals have remained consistent till date.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing refers to the marketing approaches that are related and applied to the various digital platforms to grow the online presence of a business. Any business, irrespective of its size can use digital marketing to reach out to its target market, interact with prospects, and turn more of them into customers or leads. Since the Internet is becoming one of the most widely used resources, digital marketing is essential for any business today. People are increasingly using the internet to manage their daily activities, including buying goods and services.
Key differences between Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing
Having a clear idea of the key differences between these two marketing strategies will help you take the right approach to grow your business more efficiently.
Target audience: Traditional marketing strategies make it easy to reach out to local audiences or potential customers. But digital marketing enables you to meet your target audience/consumers/customers from all over the world.
Marketing approach: Where traditional marketing relies more on developing the person-to-person relationship. in promoting the brand’s name, digital marketing follows more of a virtual approach. This differs from the traditional one. This enables digital marketers to reach a larger number of customers easily daily.
Marketing cost: Now, traditional marketing is expensive because it involves printing and radio/tv commercials. The fact is that both of these add to the company’s costs. But in the case of digital marketing, since everything is done online and the use of social media platforms is basically free, it is far less expensive than conventional marketing.
After evaluating all of the points including factors like the real-time result, strategy refinement, marketing analysis and more it is clear that digital marketing is surpassing conventional marketing. This is due to the increased number of benefits and services available to the customers and thus preferred by most of the businesses today.
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