The world of retail marketing is as ever-changing and unpredictable as the fickle shoppers it aims to please. To stay one step ahead of the curve, savvy marketers need to constantly be on the lookout for emerging consumer trends and new opportunities to drive sales. Making sure that your ideas are well-executed and truly have a demonstrable impact on your business instead of simply coming up with new ideas is what is challenging.
In this blog post, we give you eight tips for keeping tabs on current consumer interests, so you can leverage them in your next campaign or advertising push. Whether you're just starting out with your e-commerce business or looking to inject some new life into it, these pointers will help you capitalize on accessible market opportunities and stay ahead of things going forward.
1. Be on the lookout for new platforms
As you scan the broader market for trending topics and consumer interests, also keep an eye on platforms that are growing in popularity among consumers. If a particular platform is enabling people to easily interact or exchange goods, goods, and services, it's worth keeping tabs on that as well.
For example, if you notice that a lot of people are using a specific messaging app or that a large number of users are exchanging goods and services via peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb, you can try to capitalize on that with your own marketing efforts. Remember, you don't necessarily have to target the same audience as the platform in question. In fact, it's often more effective if you don't, as you can reach a more diverse audience. With the right strategy, you can also bring new users to the platform and help it to grow.
2. Listen to the conversations people are having
You can't manage what you don't measure, as the phrase goes. Marketers have been tracking engagement metrics for years now, but the most important engagement metric is actually a little bit more abstract. It's the amount of time people are spending on your site, the platform, or your store. Why is time spent a better engagement metric than page views or time on site? Because it takes into account the fact that people may be leaving your site before they've finished reading and clicking through your content.
It's a true engagement metric that takes into account all the different ways in which people may engage with your content, which is much more valuable than just the number of people who are seeing your site live.
3. Watch how people behave
As you track engagement metrics and continue to monitor the successes and failures of your campaign, you'll get a sense of what really resonates with your audience. After each campaign, take a moment to analyze how consumers are interacting with your content. Are they clicking on certain images or headlines? What are they clicking on the most? What content is getting the most shares?
If you notice that a certain type of content is resonating, push that content out more frequently. If you notice that a certain type of content is being overlooked, try to make it more prominent. Keep an eye on how your audience is engaging with your content and make adjustments as necessary.
4. Pay attention to how consumers feel about certain brands
Word-of-mouth marketing has always been a big part of the retail success story. It's particularly true for the e-commerce world, where the power of recommendation is even more important than ever. When people can see, feel, and interact with products, it's hard to trust a brand based on marketing promises alone. That's why companies have to be extra careful when it comes to creating successful campaigns and advertisements. They have to be authentic and trustworthy. When it comes to authenticity and trustworthiness, there's one important factor to pay attention to how consumers feel about your brand.
If you want to create campaigns and advertisements that will help build trust with your audience, it's important to know how they feel about the brands on which you're focusing. If you notice that people have particularly strong feelings about your brand, you can use that to your advantage in your marketing efforts. If you notice that people don't really care about your brand, you'll want to switch gears and focus on other brands that are generating more excitement and engagement.
5. Check-in on what products and services people are purchasing
This is the flip side of the word-of-mouth coin: What products and services are people actually buying from you? What are they clicking on the most? Are there specific products that are selling better than others? What do customers rate highest in terms of satisfaction?
By looking at your sales data, you can get a sense of what your customers most value in your products, as well as which products or services you should be prioritizing in your marketing campaigns and advertisements. If a certain product is flying off the shelves, you can try to increase its prominence in your offerings. If a certain product is not selling well, you can try to remove it from your catalog or create a more prominent space for it on your site.
6. Keep a lookout for accessible market opportunities
This is the crux of it all. After you've been keeping a close eye on the broader market, after you've started to notice patterns and trends, it's time to act. You've been paying attention to your customers, tracking their behavior, and keeping tabs on their preferences. Now you need to see what you can do to bring those numbers and stats to life with real, tangible results.
That means looking for opportunities to target specific segments of your audience, finding out what they want and need, and then providing that in a way that resonates with them. That could mean creating specific campaigns toward certain demographics, like mothers or millennials. It could mean finding out which problems your audience is hoping to solve and then offering a solution.
7. Leverage trusted partnerships
The best way to get your foot in the door with a particular demographic is to partner with an organization that has a strong connection with that demographic. Partnering with a trusted and well-known organization is a great way to introduce your brand to new audiences and to get your products in front of people who might not have discovered them otherwise.
Find out which organizations have the strongest connections with your target demographic, and then try to forge a partnership with them. You can approach organizations directly, or you can try to get in touch with the PR firms that represent them. Either way, partnerships are a great way to expand your reach and introduce new audiences to your products and services.
8. Test, test, and then test again
Once you've identified an opportunity and you've created the content needed to take advantage of it, you need to make sure that your efforts are actually having the desired impact. That's where A/B testing comes in: You create two different versions of a marketing campaign or advertisement, send them to two different groups of customers, and then see which one fares better.
By testing different versions of your campaigns and advertisements, you can find out which messages work best, what appeals to your audience, and what doesn't. You can make changes to the versions that aren't performing as well and make them more effective. That way, you'll make sure that your efforts are having the biggest impact possible.
Wrapping Up
In order to stay ahead of consumer interests and trends, marketers need to keep an eye on the broader market, as well as on the specific behaviors of their customers. By keeping tabs on these different factors, you can create successful campaigns and advertisements that speak to your audience and bring in new business. But in order to do so, you first have to know what people want and need and what problems they're trying to solve. Visit SYP.net to learn more about the latest marketing trends and effective promotional strategies.