Happy New Year

As this year starts to come to a close, I want to take a second to reflect back on what happened last year. Now as far as my podcast goes (BaconPodcast.com), I had a blast. I had the chance to interview a whole bunch of CMO's, CEO's, CFO's, a whole bunch of O's. They were people from different companies that really helped me get a sense of what the trends in online marketing were going to be last year.

The software included Evernote and Animoto (which is a video tool) and Nimble (a CRM tool), and Acuity (a scheduling tool). A lot of it revolves around trying to figure out what people need to do in order to get their messages out to the right audiences.

I want to spend some time today talking about what I think will be the most impactful, new marketing trends for the next year.

What’s Old Is New

Let's start with the first one: what's old is new. I think one of the biggest changes is going to be that we've got to start to get back to the basics. I've seen so many trends of people online marketing, webinars, social media marketing, all of this other stuff and what I'm starting to see is people are just getting overloaded with messages.

Think about it for a second; social media used to be social communications, and now it's just advertising. It has become just a whole bunch of ads coming at you. Email marketing is all advertising; hell, the phone keeps ringing with all of these damn robocalls and it's all advertising.

It just gets annoying as heck. Here's what I see: the one-to-many model has lost its luster. It's lost its ability to communicate with people. Can you get some people to act on it? Yes. It's going to become less and less and less, which means you have to focus more on the one to one marketing aspect of stuff.

Find somebody targeted who needs what you have and really spend time nurturing that. The second piece is that listening is going to be much more invoked than ever before, which means you're going to have to spend more time giving somebody else an opportunity to explain what they want, rather than you just broadcasting your messages out there.

Here is the other piece of the puzzle of what's old is new: mixed media is going to become more important than ever. That means that you're going to have to use some old techniques like picking up the phone, mailing out post cards, whatever you can do to get people to remember you and pay attention. When they're ready, they'll take action.

Social Media Is Under Fire

The next thing I see is that social media is under fire. As I said before, it is an overload of advertising but there's even more to that. Facebook is a huge scrutiny because of their data sharing practices.

Everything that they're doing now is pay per view. I'm predicting that probably groups are going to end up being paid in some way, shape or form. With Facebook Advertising, the only way your business pages get seen now is when you buy ads. No matter how targeted it is, people are not on there; they're on Facebook for entertainment.

There's going to be more of an entertainment factor that you're going to have to focus on, and less on the business side of things. That seems to be a trend that definitely is starting to creep into the next year. The next piece is LinkedIn. Less people are accessing it because it's just a bunch of people connecting trying to pitch and sell you something.

You're not getting as much value out of it, so what you're going to have to do is provide more educational stuff and less entertainment. You want to make sure that you're providing more educational and more conversational kind of content and less of the plain, “Hey, here's my head and I'm going to talk to you for a minute and a half.” Right?

Twitter needs to focus. They need to get a way where people can pick just the content that they want in a newsfeed a lot better without having to go in and say, “Here are trending topics, here are hashtags.” They've got to come up with a way that helps you to personalize the experience a little bit more in order for it to become more relevant.

Targeted Relationship Marketing

The third thing I see happening next year is more targeted relationship marketing. What do I mean by that? You're going to have to spend more time nurturing relationships and people are going to want to get information on a need-to-know basis, when they want to know it.

Yes, you can create awareness, but people are going to be laser focused on searching for the answers to their problems. Less people will be coming to webinars, so what you want to do is you want to make them shorter, to the point, less salesy, less pitchy.

Less people will read your emails because there's such an abundance of junk out there that you've got to make them shorter and to the point and make sure they have just one single call-to-action to them, don't overload people.

Finally, there's going to be less trust on social media. Which means you you're going to have to create more direct contact. You're going to have to target people, get to know them better and then connect up with them via messenger or get them to go over email or on the phone. You're going to have to do more of that one-to-one nurturing and less of just the broadcast messaging.

The Death Of The Talking Head

The next thing is what I call the death of the talking head, which means that video use is going to increase, but the Facebook Live person standing there, mentioning what they want to do is going to start to shrink down.

People have a very, very short attention span and they're going to want to-the-point marketing videos that really say, “Hey, if you have this problem here's the solution, learn more.” Now that's advertising 101, but it's going to be more so involve building the trust before people are going to pay attention.

Make sure that your videos are short. Basically start off with a bang and stay to the point, then drive people somewhere. The next thing is you're going to want to make them shorter so that people will want to consume them. It used to be that three minutes was kind of the max, now it's going to be more like 10 seconds, 30 seconds, maybe 90 seconds.

That's about as much attention you're going to get out of people, and it has to be killer content that really hits them between the eyes. The last thing in this category I want to talk about is I think on-demand audio is going to grow, which means things like Alexa, more podcasts in cars, more audiobooks.

I think that people not sitting down at a computer having to watch something and people listening in different ways is going to become more of an en vogue thing. It's getting back to the old days of radio and less of having to sit tethered to a device. They can get it on their phone, their car, wherever.

Change Is Inevitable

The fifth and final trend I want to talk about is change. Change is inevitable and change is going to happen at an even more rapid pace than it's happened before. It used to be when you got the iPhone 1 and you went to the iPhone 2, it was like, “Oh my God, it's amazing.”

Now you can barely tell the difference between them because the changes are a lot more subtle but they're happening at a faster pace. It's no longer that wow factor. Think about that for a minute. Here are a couple of things I want you to think about doing.

Final Thoughts

Number one, mine your data. You've got a ton of data, you've got it in your contact manager, you've got it your QuickBooks, you may have it in your email program, whatever it is. Take a look at reinventing the way that you're using it, in a way that's going to create more of those personal touches.

The second thing is that you're going to have to invest more time and money in yourself. Meaning that if you want to earn you've got to continue to learn. Invest time in yourself as much as you're doing in other activities. The final piece of this is strap on your seat belt because it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Change is going to happen fast and you need to make sure that you allocate time to deal with it.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?

To learn more about this and other topics on Internet Marketing, visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/