Latest Updates in Marketing

Marketing evolves quickly, especially in the digital era. With the increased use of social media to generate sales, it is becoming easier than ever to market a product or service, but harder to make it stand out from the crowd. Here at HRS, we pride ourselves on staying on top of the latest trends so that we can deliver the best marketing campaigns to help your brand come out on top. In this blog post, we take a look at the latest updates in marketing and offer our predictions for where things are heading.

The Latest on Social Media

The use of social media has become one of the most popular forms of digital marketing and is increasingly being used in business strategies to increase sales. Initially created as a way to connect with friends, social media platforms have come a long way since the creation of MySpace in 2003, and apps are constantly evolving.

Last month saw Meta’s new app ‘Threads’ make headlines for its similarities to Twitteri. Threads is a text-based microblogging app linked to Instagram. Although it had 100 million subscribers in its first five days of launch, the numbers have fallen, and Meta is already making changes to the apps featuresii. Twitter itself has rebranded as ‘X’, including changing the bird logo to a white cross on a black background.

However, even with all these updates, Facebook remains the most popular social media app worldwideiii. It is no surprise then that it is the platform used most by marketers, closely followed by Instagram, then LinkedIn and YouTube. The use of these platforms offers a huge audience and potential customers to businesses: As of April this year, there are 4.8 billion social media users worldwideiv.

How these platforms are used to market products and services has been changing too. The use of key people of influence or KPIs is a huge way to increase consumer awareness of brands and draw in sales, and global influencer marketing has more than doubled since 2019v. This market is so successful because KPIs have huge numbers of followers and have spent time building trust, whether through their knowledge and credentials or through their openness and honesty in what they share. The use of a KPI in a marketing campaign allows brands to showcase their products and services to a wide audience who have the potential to buy.

Video marketing has also become one of the most effective ways to advertise. Short videos, such as Reels on Instagram or TikTok videos continue to increase in popularity, and it is no surprise that YouTube launched YouTube Shorts in 2021 in order to keep up-to-date with this digital trend.

This year has also seen further developments in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI has been used for a long time in automated chat boxes on websites. It works by responding to keywords with preprogrammed answers. However, chat boxes now can produce responses that are almost human-like, as well as being much more accurate. This is due to the number of words they are programmed with. One such example is ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, a company on the forefront of research and development of generative AI. The ChatGPT uses a Generative Pre-Trained Transformer learning model which enables it to use natural language modelling, so it can deliver human-like language.

Other brands are also following suit. Google launched its own AI powered chat box, Google Bard, earlier this year. These kind of chat boxes provide a much easier experience for the consumer, as well as being more personable.

However, AI is used for more than just answering questions. It can be used for original content creation, such as writing blogs using keywords, creating websites, and creating images. For instance, DALL-E, from OpenAI, is a tool for creating images from text descriptions. There are plenty of writing generating tools for content creation such as Jasper AI and Copymatic AI, and the platform Frase specifically creates copy for search engine optimisation.

AI features are also being added to popular content creation tools so that it is easier than ever to create marketing content. In March of this year, the popular web-based content creation platform Canva launched new AI ‘Magic’ tools. For instance, the ‘Magic-Design’ tool can generate templates from an uploaded image. There is also an AI assistant that can write copy for you. One of the best features of the update is the possibility of translating text to more than 100 languages, opening up more possibility for global marketing.

There are concerns that AI such as this will take over jobs that are now performed by humans. However, incorporating AI tools could save digital marketers time for creative thinking and planning, leading to greater efficiency in the workplace.

The future of digital marketing will take us even further than generative AI. An immersive digital universe named the ‘metaverse’ has the potential to alter how brands market and sell their products. One such example is that the universe could allow consumers to access virtual shops and attend virtual events, such as a product launch, with the use of a virtual reality headset. Currently there are uncertainties as to exactly how this metaverse will become a realityvi, however there have been significant investments by stakeholders in order to develop this idea. Some brands already offer consumers a virtual experience. Vans opened a virtual skate park in Roblox in 2021 which allows people to perform skate tricks, as well as customise the clothes and skateboard of their avatar.

Conclusion

Marketing has come a long way from simple paper-form advertisements. With digital marketing opening new doors for businesses and brands to advertise, and with the possibility of being seen by a global audience, it is important for brands to build credibility and trust in order to stand out. It is also important to embrace changes in marketing and utilise them to build a successful marketing campaign. The use of generative AI tools could lead to greater efficiency for digital marketers, and, who knows, in a few years time, we could all be shopping in the metaverse.

Find out more about the use of artificial intelligence in scientific writing in our previous blog post, Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) the future for scientific content creation?  – HRS Communications‘

i The Guardian (2023) We tried Threads, Meta’s new Twitter rival. Here’s what happened [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/06/we-tried-threads-metas-new-twitter-rival-heres-what-happened [Accessed 07/08/2023] ii BBC News (2023) Mark Zuckerberg: Threads users down by more than a half [online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66336058 [Accessed 07/08/2023] iiiStatista (2023) Leading social media platforms used by marketers worldwide as of January 2023 [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/259379/social-media-platforms-used-by-marketers-worldwide/ [Accessed 08/08/2023] iv Statista (2023) Number of internet and social media users worldwide as of April 2023 [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/ [Accessed 08/08/2023] v Statista (2023) Influencer marketing market size worldwide from 2016 to 2023 [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1092819/global-influencer-market-size/ [Accessed 08/08/2023] vi Zalan, T., Barbesino, P. (2023) Making the Metaverse real, Digital Business, 3(2).