In the digital age, customer communication preferences are always evolving, and marketing teams need to remain agile to keep up. Understanding marketing trends is crucial to helping brands evolve their marketing communication strategy to meet customer expectations and stay ahead of the competition.
Below, we’ll go over seven marketing communication trends every marketer should know about.
What is marketing communication?
Marketing communication (or marcom) is the use of messaging to shape brand perception and drive business strategy. Advances in technology can help brands improve their marcom strategies by optimizing content personalization, targeting, and customer interactions across their communication channels.
7 trends in marketing communication
1
Personal multimedia storytelling
Storytelling is a classic marketing strategy that uses a narrative to communicate a brand’s message. In the age of social media, brands are becoming even more personal and personality-driven in an effort to foster loyal relationships with customers. Using media-rich storytelling in marketing can help humanize your brand, engage your audience, and build a loyal customer base. Your brand’s story can also make it stand out from competitors in a crowded market.
For example, a sustainable skincare brand might want to emphasize its eco-conscious value proposition. To do this, it can share its origin story: how the founder created the skincare line after struggling to find products with environmentally friendly packaging. By building a story around this message and the founder, the brand not only highlights its sustainable packaging but also builds a narrative that resonates with its environmentally conscious customers.
2
Omnichannel communication
An omnichannel communication strategy integrates various marketing channels to create a cohesive brand experience. This approach ensures customers have a consistent, positive experience with your brand whether they engage with it via email, social media, the mobile app, a physical location, or elsewhere. Omnichannel marketing strategies include the following:
- Consistent messaging across channels
- Synchronized promotions
- Multi-platform content distribution strategies
- Integrated customer support across all touchpoints
- Cross-channel analytics and attribution modeling
To further explain, here’s an example. A clothing company sends its customers the same messaging regardless of where they connect with the brand—on the app, on its website, via email, in a physical location, or through an influencer campaign. This helps create a unified brand experience, strengthening the brand’s identity by emphasizing key messages across different interactions.
3
User-generated content
User-generated content (also known as UGC) is brand-related content created by consumers. This includes reviews, social media posts, blog posts, and testimonials. Companies leverage UGC to show proof of their quality and reliability, humanize their brands, and establish brand loyalty. UGC has also been shown to increase conversion and ad click-through rates, making it a powerful tool for driving marketing effectiveness.
To incorporate UGC into your marketing communication, start by encouraging customers to share their experiences with your brand. Then, strategically integrate their content across your marketing channels. This is known as user-generated content marketing, which can include featuring customer testimonials in advertisements, sharing user photos on social media, and incorporating reviews into email campaigns.
4
AI and its influence on marketing communication
Artificial intelligence (AI) is perhaps the biggest disrupter to marketing since TV ads, and a new study reveals it’s already a major part of the workplace. Such developments highlight the importance of implementing secure, responsible AI technology.
The power of AI lies in its ability to analyze large datasets, such as user demographics and behavior data, to create hyper-personalized marketing messaging. For example, a streaming service might use insights generated by AI to recommend personalized content based on a user’s viewing history and preferences.
To leverage AI in your company’s marketing communications, try applying one or more of these AI-driven personalization techniques:
- Tailoring email campaigns based on individual preferences
- Recommending products based on past purchases and browsing history
- Personalizing website content for a unique user experience
- Adapting social media messages to align with user interests
- Customizing push notifications with relevant information
- Creating dynamic website landing pages based on user demographics
- Offering personalized discounts or promotions
- Adjusting content recommendations in real time
- Adapting messaging to suit different stages of the customer journey
- Optimizing ad targeting based on user behavior and interests
Your brand can also use AI’s predictive capabilities to anticipate and meet evolving user needs. AI can analyze emerging trends and consumer behavior, enabling your company to adjust its strategies to meet—and even exceed—your customers’ evolving expectations.
Of course, the increase in personalized marketing messages also increases the need for quality writing across every touchpoint and customer group. AI writing partners can help marketers efficiently complete copywriting tasks.
5
Chatbots and automated interactions
Using marketing chatbots is another way to leverage AI in marketing communication. Chatbots can simulate human interactions by analyzing user inputs and responding accordingly, helping your company engage in more one-to-one communication with its customers.
Chatbot interactions provide valuable insights, such as user preferences and frequently asked questions, enabling your company to tailor its responses and content more effectively. More advanced AI chatbots can even ensure that every interaction reflects your brand’s tone, values, and messaging strategy. This can help your company deliver a cohesive and on-brand message in every interaction, regardless of the channel or the scale of its communications.
6
Predictive analytics in communication strategy
Predictive analytics uses data science to help companies predict consumer behavior based on historical data. Brands can apply predictive analytics in their marketing efforts to anticipate customer needs and tailor communication strategies accordingly.
For example, your company might analyze customer behavior and preferences to predict the kind of content that’s likely to interest its audience. It can then apply these insights to ensure that each email a customer receives aligns with their anticipated needs and preferences.
Email is just one example. There are many other ways brands can use predictive analytics:
- Optimized ad targeting
- Customized content recommendations
- Real-time messaging adjustments
- Personalized push notifications
- Tailored social media campaigns
- Adaptive website content
- Predictive customer segmentation
- Targeted product recommendations
- Automated lead scoring
- Proactive customer service notifications
7
Agile marketing experimentation
Taking an agile approach to marketing communications means experimenting with messaging strategies to help your brand understand what is and isn’t resonating with its customers. As people’s content consumption continues to rise, adopting an agile strategy can help your brand ensure its communications are relevant to its target audience and impactful.
For example, a tech startup might use chatbots to conduct A/B testing on different messaging tones and product features. By analyzing user responses and engagement metrics, it can quickly update its chatbot scripts to optimize customer interactions and drive conversions.
Adapting to generative AI marketing communication
Generative AI (also known as gen AI) is a branch of AI that creates new content, such as images, text, music, or other media, based on patterns and data learned from existing examples. It can be a powerful tool that aids your marketing team’s adoption of any of the trends above and one that helps your brand drive true marketing innovation.
Follow these steps to integrate gen AI into your digital marketing communication strategies:
- Define your objectives: Whether it’s content creation, ideation, or personalization, having specific goals will guide your team in selecting the most suitable approach and model.
- Select the right tools: Explore various generative AI tools available in the market and choose ones that align with your objectives. Consider factors like ease of integration, scalability, and compatibility with your team’s existing systems.
- Invest in training: Equip your marketing team with the necessary skills and knowledge to leverage gen AI effectively. Provide training programs, workshops, and resources to help team members understand best practices for implementation.
- Develop a testing and optimization framework: Implement iterative processes to analyze performance metrics, gather feedback, and refine AI models to continuously improve results and drive better outcomes.
When leveraging AI for your marketing communications, it’s important to ensure that it enhances—not replaces—the authentic connection between your brand and its audience. To find the right balance between AI and the human touch, establish guidelines to ensure AI-generated content matches your brand’s voice and have a team member review and approve all content before it’s published.
Marketing communication trends FAQs
How can small businesses leverage AI in their marketing communication?
Small businesses can use AI in their marketing communications to improve customer engagement, streamline processes, and gain valuable insights into consumer behavior. For example, they can implement chatbots for customer support, utilize predictive analytics for targeted campaigns, and employ AI-enhanced tools for personalized content creation.
What is the future outlook for AI in marketing communication?
The role of AI in marketing communication will continue to grow as this technology becomes more sophisticated, enabling businesses to deliver highly personalized and efficient interactions, gain deeper insights from data, and streamline various aspects of their communication strategies.
How do we measure the effectiveness of AI-driven communication strategies?
Measuring the effectiveness of AI-driven communication strategies involves tracking engagement metrics, conversion rates, and user feedback. Assessing content performance, brand alignment, time efficiency, and adaptability through A/B testing provides a holistic evaluation of AI’s impact.
What are the key challenges in adopting these communication trends?
Key challenges in adopting marketing communication trends include budget constraints, navigating technological complexities, ensuring organizational alignment, and overcoming potential resistance or skepticism among team members.