We can all agree that we don’t know what the future has in store for us. So, when it comes to digital marketing, new trends will show up out of nowhere. That’s why our whole planning is tightly connected to the facts that we know so far and that will last only for a short period of time. But in order to survive in the vast sea of competition, we need to plan ahead and predict the future development of things. But is it possible to plan things based on only a guess? Maybe it is up to some point, but we can rely on our customer’s cognitive composition in order to find certain things that are fixed. Psychological heuristics can be our crystal ball because they haven’t changed much during millions of years, so it’s safe to assume they won’t be changing next year. The key is to build our marketing strategies according to the way the brain interprets stimulus, and that is pretty constant. That way you’ll create a decent startup and some nice advantage, but you also need to be up to date with upcoming trends that will enable you to keep that advantage in 2018.
Satisfy their needs instantly
One element of psychological heuristics that will probably never change is a so-called instant gratification. In plain words, that is our desire to get what we want exactly when we want it. Yes, nobody likes to wait, we all know that. But not everybody knows that the pleasure of satisfying our needs is at the biological level. And we don’t mean just social and psychological needs, but also material. If your brand is not able to satisfy the needs of your consumers instantly it will produce anxiety among them and they won’t embrace it. You need to build a startup that will be able to meet their needs quickly in order to produce the positive evaluation of your brand. In other words, you need to prove your value right away. It might seem impossible at first, but you need to keep in mind that your value is not just in the end product – it is also in information. Same as in the film industry – tease the hell out of them until you have a final product. With transparent product information and quick feedback, you’ll earn their trust and interest, which you can deepen with instant communication channels and downloadable resources. These on-demand startups are not a new thing, just think of Deliveroo, Airbnb, and Uber. They are still highly present on the market which proves that one of the certain ways to attract customers is to deliver your products and services as soon as they want them.
Make their lives easier
The rhythm of today’s life is growing rapidly by every day, the number of everyday obligations is continually increasing and our lives seem to grow more difficult. That’s why our tendency to take the easiest way is stronger than ever. We want products, services, and machines to do our job for us, while we monitor their work. In psychology, this is called automation bias and is closely connected to products we use to make our lives more easier. In order to use this psychological characteristic, you need to promote the efficiency of your products that will impact your customers through their subconsciousness. The key to that efficiency is in solving the pain point in your startup. Your messaging should be explicit in naming the efficient advantages of your product that will have a strong impact on their everyday lives, like saving time, for example.
If you really want to improve the efficiency of your operations you need to prepare for Artificial Intelligence that will be the main thing in 2018. Remember when Facebook AI programs flammed the nation before they shut it down when the robots started inventing their own language no one could understand? Well, that was just the beginning. Next time they won’t be shut down and will be fully controlled to send extremely contextual and hyper-targeted marketing messages. People who embrace this technology will have their company’s efficiency hit the roof. You can already see some examples in Spotify, where they use an AI algorithm that can find out what you like. If you think that’s kind of creepy you should definitely check out Phrasee where they use artificial intelligence to make the content feel more human. Although this may sound weird, there is no doubt that the use of AI can create a completely new user experience.
Build emotional involvement through personalization
If we want to be completely honest, in most cases we pay attention only to those things that are directly relevant to us. Only that way we develop emotional attachment that is crucial to the valuation of products and services. In order to make your products relevant to your customers, you need to allow them to customize by personalizing them. You will do that by simply letting them choose. So, when you build a startup, you should always include designable aesthetics, optional features and a variety of add-ons. Besides the feeling of uniqueness of every product, these options will also make your customers go through an experience of creating the product themselves. This need for self-expression is your psychological tool that can increase your customer’s investment in your brand.
In 2018 this content marketing will have a massive impact because of the need to stand out. You won’t be able to create any kind of content, you will have to make it valuable and relevant to your customers in order to captivate them. In other words, you will need to diversify it. Try to turn your blog posts into videos because this type of content is gonna engage your users much more than text and images. Allow yourself to be creative and explore various ways to use video in your marketing. If you think this requires a larger investment, just take a look at the quality of video shot on an iPhone. Also, you need to keep in mind that people don’t like to read that much anymore, so it would be a good idea to turn your longer content into a series of blogs that you will send via emails.
Besides the fact that you must make your content various, you must also make it smart and dynamic. Being the HubSpot user can be very helpful in this case because they provide you with an option to adjust the content on your website based on your visitors. That option will allow you to create highly personalized user experience, which you can additionally enhance with responsive web design that is becoming more important every day. This approach in design is based on your website’s development that completely responds to the behavior and environment of your users based on orientation, screen size, and platform. So, when your users switch from their iPad to their laptop, your website will automatically accommodate scripting abilities, resolution and image size. Plainly speaking, this type of web design provides you with the technology that can automatically respond to the preferences of your users. You will have all the gadgets covered with only one design and development phase, which will make your users feel that everything is created just for them.
You need to establish your company as a relevant one in order to stand out from the competition, but what’s even more important is to make it stay that way. That is the tricky part since the is no recipe how to achieve this. Old methods are getting replaced by new and more inventive strategies, which makes you in the position where you must foresee the future. Your biggest tool in this is the psychology of your users that shows that you need to be more customer-centric in upcoming years. Your audience takes the first place, and then your services and products are adapted according to them. You need to enhance their experience and to provide them with quickest possible solutions for their real-life problems. You need to make it real and in order to do that, you need to build a bridge between in-store shopping experiences and the digital shopping ones. If the information they find on the internet is not consistent with the messaging they get when they make their trip to the store they will become irritated, anxious and will feel tricked. You need to make this connection perfect in order to provide them with a quick and easy road to the products and services made especially for them.
Personalization is a very important aspect you should not neglect.