Digital Marketing Tips 2024 | Your Questions Answered

Summary

In this video, Cat Warboys, APAC Marketing Director at HubSpot, addresses the challenges marketers face in a crowded digital landscape. She emphasizes the importance of understanding growth objectives, conversion rates, and audience preferences to increase visibility. Warboys also discusses balancing creativity with strategy, leveraging personalization, and the impact of AI on marketing. She predicts that generative AI, video content, and messaging platforms will be key marketing trends in 2024.

Takeaways

• 🌐 The digital creative landscape is increasingly crowded, making it challenging for marketers to gain visibility.
• 🎯 Start with a clear growth objective to understand what success looks like for your marketing efforts.
• 📊 Conversion rate is a key metric to track, calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors.
• 🔍 Identify where your traffic and visibility are coming from to optimize your marketing strategies.
• 👥 Understanding your audience is crucial for creating content that resonates and drives engagement.
• 📈 Use tools like makemypersona.com to create detailed personas to better understand and reach your audience.
• 📈 Target a wider demographic without alienating your existing audience by addressing their needs and interests.
• 🎨 Balance creativity with strategy by focusing on execution and production while staying aligned with your strategic goals.
• 🚀 For a successful marketing campaign, define clear objectives, understand your audience, and choose the right channel mix.
• 📱 Personalization is key to connecting with an audience; tailor experiences based on where buyers are in their lifecycle stages.
• 💡 Ensure the entire customer journey is easy and delightful to encourage engagement and action.
• 🤖 AI advancements will level the playing field for marketing strategies but cannot replace the creativity and unique perspectives of humans.
• 🔮 Top marketing trends for 2024 include generative AI, video content, and messaging platforms for real-time audience engagement.

Q & A

What is the current challenge in the digital creative landscape?

The digital creative landscape is more crowded than ever, making it difficult for marketers to get their work noticed and for tactics that once worked to remain effective.

How does Cat Warboys suggest marketers navigate the new marketing environment?

Cat Warboys suggests starting with defining growth objectives and then focusing on conversion rates, understanding where traffic and visibility are coming from, and really knowing the audience to engage them effectively.

What is the significance of understanding conversion rates in marketing?

Understanding conversion rates helps marketers set targets for the number of visits needed to achieve their growth objectives, such as new client inquiries.

How can marketers know what is currently working for them?

Marketers can determine what is working by analyzing where their traffic and visibility are coming from, whether it be paid advertising, email subscribers, or social media.

What tool does Cat Warboys recommend for understanding the audience?

Cat Warboys recommends the tool makemypersona.com to guide marketers through creating a comprehensive understanding of their audience.

Why is it important for content to appeal to a wider demographic without alienating the existing audience?

Appealing to a wider demographic helps grow the audience base, but it's crucial not to stray from what the existing audience likes to maintain loyalty and satisfaction.

How can marketers create content that appeals to an audience not yet aware of them as a solution?

Marketers should change their content strategy to help answer questions that their potential customers are searching for, such as how to solve a problem, rather than just talking about their product.

What is the role of strategy in balancing creativity in marketing?

Strategy provides direction to focus creativity, ensuring that efforts yield the best results in terms of business growth. It's important to spend time revisiting strategy to ensure it's right from the start.

What are the key steps in creating a successful marketing campaign?

Key steps include defining the strategic marketing objective, identifying and segmenting the audience, deciding on the channel mix, planning the content mix, and setting a time frame for the campaign.

How can personalization be leveraged by a creative freelancer on a smaller scale?

Freelancers can leverage personalization by tailoring experiences based on the buyer's lifecycle stage, using segmentation to create relevant content for each stage, from awareness to post-purchase.

What is the most valuable marketing advice for creators according to Cat Warboys?

The most valuable advice is to ensure the entire process is easy and delightful for customers, making it clear how they can progress from engagement to action.

How will the advancement of AI affect how creatives promote and make money from their work?

AI will commoditize many technical aspects of marketing, leveling the playing field and emphasizing the importance of creativity. It will also take away manual tasks, making creators more efficient.

What are Cat Warboys' top three marketing trend predictions for 2024?

The top three predictions are generative AI, the increased use of video content, and the rise of messaging platforms for audience engagement.

Outlines

00:00

🚀 Navigating the Digital Marketing Landscape

Cat Warboys, APAC Marketing Director at HubSpot, discusses the challenges and opportunities in the current marketing environment. She emphasizes the importance of understanding growth objectives and conversion rates to increase visibility online. Warboys suggests starting with defining growth objectives, such as new client inquiries, and calculating the required website visits to achieve them. She advises marketers to analyze their current traffic sources and audience preferences, and to use tools like makemypersona.com to better understand their audience. Warboys also stresses the need to balance creativity with strategy, suggesting that a well-defined strategy at the beginning of the year can guide the rest of the marketing efforts.

05:04

🎨 Balancing Creativity and Strategy in Marketing

The paragraph focuses on the balance between creativity and strategy in marketing campaigns. Warboys advises spending time revisiting strategy if it's not yielding results, suggesting that the strategy may not have been properly defined initially. She recommends a significant investment in strategy at the beginning of the year, with clear execution plans. The rest of the year should be dedicated to aligning with this strategy and focusing on execution and creativity. Warboys also discusses the importance of channel mix in marketing, including paid, owned, earned, and shared channels, and the need to tailor content formats to each channel. She advises setting a time frame for campaigns to monitor progress and performance, and to be willing to adjust strategies if certain channels are not effective.

10:06

📈 Marketing Trends and AI's Impact on Creativity

In this section, Warboys shares her top marketing trends predictions for 2024, including generative AI, video content, and messaging platforms. She believes that AI will commoditize many technical aspects of marketing, leveling the playing field for brands and emphasizing the importance of creativity. Warboys suggests that AI will take over manual tasks, allowing creators to focus more on creative work. She also highlights the need for creators to make the entire customer engagement process easy and delightful, from initial contact to post-purchase interactions. Warboys encourages creators to think about how they progress engagement to turn it into action.

Keywords

💡Marketers

Marketers are professionals who promote products, services, or ideas to consumers. In the video, Cat Warboys discusses the challenges and opportunities that marketers face in the digital age, emphasizing the importance of visibility and strategy in a crowded digital landscape.

💡Growth Objective

A growth objective is a specific, measurable goal that a business aims to achieve, such as increasing the number of inquiries or clients. In the script, Cat Warboys suggests starting with a growth objective to guide marketing strategies and conversions.

💡Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. Cat Warboys uses the conversion rate as an example to illustrate how marketers can measure the effectiveness of their strategies.

💡Audience

The audience refers to the people who are targeted by a marketing campaign. Understanding the audience is crucial for creating relevant content and effective marketing strategies, as discussed by Cat Warboys.

💡Persona

A persona is a fictional representation of an ideal customer or user, based on market research and real data about existing customers. Cat Warboys mentions a tool called makemypersona.com to help marketers create detailed personas for their audience.

💡Content Strategy

Content strategy involves planning, creating, and managing the content a brand publishes to engage its audience. Cat Warboys talks about changing the content strategy to address different stages of the buyer's journey, such as awareness and consideration.

💡Creativity

Creativity in marketing involves the use of original ideas to create engaging content and campaigns. Cat Warboys emphasizes the importance of balancing creativity with strategy to achieve business growth.

💡Strategy

A marketing strategy is a plan for reaching a specific marketing-related goal in a focused and achievable way. Cat Warboys discusses how strategy should guide creativity and how it should be clear and focused.

💡Personalization

Personalization is the process of tailoring marketing messages or content to individual consumers. Cat Warboys explains how personalization can be leveraged on a smaller scale, even for a single creator, by understanding the buyer's lifecycle stages.

💡Lifecycle Stages

Lifecycle stages refer to the different phases a customer goes through when interacting with a brand, from awareness to purchase and beyond. Cat Warboys uses the concept of lifecycle stages to explain how to personalize content for different segments of the audience.

💡AI

AI, or artificial intelligence, is the development of computer systems to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. Cat Warboys discusses how AI advancements will affect marketing, particularly in automating manual tasks and leveling the playing field for brands in terms of SEO and paid strategies.

Highlights

Marketers are facing a pivotal and challenging time with new opportunities.

Marketers need to navigate a crowded digital creative landscape to increase visibility.

Understanding growth objectives is crucial for effective marketing strategies.

Conversion rates are key to measuring the success of marketing efforts.

Identifying the source of traffic and visibility is important for marketing success.

Understanding the audience is essential for effective engagement.

makemypersona.com is a useful tool for creating audience personas.

Content should target both existing and potential customers at different stages of awareness.

Changing content strategy to answer customer questions can unlock a new audience.

Creativity needs to be balanced with strategic direction for effective marketing.

Strategy should be clear and focused to avoid losing focus during execution.

A successful marketing campaign should start with a clear strategic marketing objective.

Defining the target audience and considering segmentation is crucial for marketing campaigns.

Channel mix is important for reaching the audience through a combination of earned, owned, paid, and shared channels.

Content mix should include a variety of formats suitable for different channels.

Setting a time frame for campaigns helps monitor progress and performance.

Personalization is integral to connecting with an audience and can be leveraged even on a smaller scale.

Tailoring content based on the buyer's lifecycle stage can enhance personalization.

AI advancements will commoditize technical marketing expertise, emphasizing the role of creators.

AI will take away manual tasks, allowing creators to focus more on creativity.

Generative AI, video content, and messaging are predicted to be top marketing trends for 2024.

Transcripts

I think this is a really pivotal time for marketers, but

it's also presenting a lot of challenges and questions.

So, I do hope to play a small part, at least in helping marketers think about how

they navigate this new and challenging, but very exciting environment.

[MUSIC]

Hello, my name is Cat Warboys, I'm the APAC Marketing Director at HubSpot, and

I'm here today to answer your marketing questions.

So, first one, the digital creative landscape is more crowded than ever,

how do I make my work more visible online?

Great question, this is definitely a trend that we are seeing,

when I speak to brands, when I speak to marketers,

many of them are saying that it is definitely hard to get cut through,

and the tactics that were once working for them just aren't as effective anymore.

So I'd actually start with, what is your growth objective?

So, an easy example we can think about is maybe new inquiries from clients, right?

Once we know what that growth objective is,

we can then think about conversion rate.

So the way I think about this, and will keep it simple, if you get 1000 visits to

your page and 100 of those turn into new inquiries, your conversion rate is 10%.

If your objective or your growth objective is to get 200 new clients per

month inquiries, you know that you need probably 2000 visits.

So now we know what good looks like,

you can then start to have a look at what is currently working for you?

Where is most of that traffic?

Where is that most of that visibility coming from?

Is it coming from paid?

Is it actually your email subscribers?

Is it social media?

Now, I could tell you what works really well for us at HubSpot, but

really the key to success here is understanding your audience,

knowing where they hang out, what they're into, what they're gonna find interesting,

how they want to be engaged with?

If you can't answer that,

I highly encourage you to rethink about your audience, who are they?

There's a really great tool called makemypersona.com that will guide you

through the exact questions you need to know,

to create that sort of one pager on who your audience is.

And this is what you wanna use every time you think how do I reach my audience?

How do I get my work out there?

I have a small but loyal audience, how do I grow that audience and appeal to a wider

demographic without straying from what my existing audience already likes?

When I take a look at most brands or content creators' websites, their assets,

they're really speaking to people who are already at what we call the consideration

stage, these are people who are aware of the solution that they're looking for.

So there'll be searching for

things like, if you're selling website templates, they'll be searching for

the best 20 WordPress responsive templates, something like that.

And when I look at brands,

the chances are a lot of your content is talking about website templates.

There is a whole other layer of your ideal audience who are a great fit for

your product, but aren't yet aware of you as a potential solution.

So what I mean by that is they are searching for things like,

how do I generate more leads?

Why isn't my website performing?

So when we change our content strategy to help our customers answer those questions,

you might create content such as how X brand 10x their business through a website

redesign.

So it changes your angle, it changes your approach to content, and so it's the same

audience but you're actually able to unlock a whole other layer to people who

don't yet know that you and your product have a great solution to their problem.

Next question, an easy one, how do I balance creativity with strategy?

Creativity without direction is probably not gonna yield the best results in terms

of business growth, and I think that's really the role that strategy needs to

play, it needs to be very directional to help you focus creativity.

In terms of the balance or that time split, I would actually say,

if you're spending a lot of time revisiting strategy,

you probably didn't get your strategy right from the get-go.

So for me, and for many brands, strategy really happens more periodically, so I

would put a lot of time and investment in the start of the year into your strategy.

It should be really clear, articulate, with maximum two to three things on how

you're actually gonna execute on that, any more and you're gonna lose focus.

If you get that piece right, the rest of your year should really be about alignment

to that strategy, and you're putting a lot of your time into the work, the execution,

the production, the creativity part.

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>> How do I create a successful marketing campaign to promote my creative work and

grow my audience?

What are the key steps?

All right, so with a campaign I would think about the overall strategic

marketing objective first.

So that could be you have a new product or service to launch, maybe you

would love to get 50 new inquiries from a client as a result of that.

Step two, define your audience, is this new product or service a great fit for

your existing customers, or

are you actually targeting a new type of customer with this?

I'd also encourage you to think about segmentation.

So, for example, if your product or

service is currently tailored to B2B marketers, can you go by industry,

B2B marketers in hospitality, or marketers in finance, for example?

So really define your audience and your group of who your product or

service is for.

Step three is actually more tied to the question,

here you wanna think about your channel mix.

Again, it comes back to something I said earlier, know your audience first,

know where they hang out, how they like to be engaged.

So when we think about this, we think about pay channels, so paid advertising,

paid social.

You want your owned channels, these are things you own such as your website,

your own social community, your own email newsletter.

Then we have earned, if you're not doing things like media,

it could even be as simple as reaching out to Industry bodies or

associations who might be willing to collaborate with you or promote your work.

We then have shared, this could be marketplaces that are gonna help amplify

and help you find places to get your work into in front of more audiences.

So channel mix is really, really important, a mix of earned, owned,

paid and shared.

The next step is to think about content mix.

For each of those channels, you'll probably want a variety of formats,

think about video, blogs, social posts, audio, podcasts even if you're feeling

particularly ambitious and maybe even leveraging your community.

And the final step is to set a time frame for your campaign so

you can accurately monitor progress and performance.

And don't be afraid to pivot, if a channel isn't working for you, kill it,

reinvest in one that is working better for you.

Next question, personalization is now integral to connecting with an audience.

As a creative freelancer,

how can I leverage the benefits of personalization on a smaller scale?

So, if we break down personalization, we're really talking about the ability to

create an experience, or tailor your product or your service or content even to

somebody in a way that makes it feel like it was created specifically for them, and

is directly relevant to them.

The level of personalization you can achieve will depends on the access and

volume of data that you have, and also the technology that you have to execute.

But on a smaller scale, a really great place to start can be to tailor or

personalize the experience based on where your buyer is currently at in their

lifecycle stages.

In lifecycle stages, we're referring to the awareness stage, consideration,

decision, and post-purchase.

At the awareness stage you wanna think about tailoring content that's really

gonna help build credibility, and attract your buyer to your brands.

Segmentation can help a lot here, so if your target audience are B2B marketers,

an SME company who don't have internal creative resources,

break that down into further segments.

Once you have your segment,

you can think about the type of content that is suitable at the awareness stage.

This could be how to for the hospitality industry,

it could be example templates and designs that you have for FinTech.

At the consideration stage, your buyer needs to become more educated about how

you may be uniquely positioned to help them.

So think about an email campaign that could showcase your product

recommendations for them based again on their industry, you could showcase how

other customers have been using your work in the wild as well.

At the decision stage, we're really personalizing content to make our buyer

feel confident that you are the right person to do business with.

Think about surfacing reviews from previous customers.

Our last stage is post purchase, do not forget about your customer,

it's really easy to focus on getting new ones that we forget about the old.

We wanna tailor and

personalize our content to this group by keeping them up-to-date with your work.

If you can stay top of mind for those existing customers,

they have no reason to go anywhere else.

What's the most valuable marketing advice you think every creator should know?

I think for creators and content marketers, what we're really,

really good at doing is creating great content, great storytelling at the top

of the funnel, videos, blogs, website assets, social communities.

What we don't wanna forget is making the entire process easy and delightful for

your customers.

Think about how you're moving them down, if I engage with your website, if I engage

with a social post, what is the next logical step I can take to get in touch?

I think many creators and content marketers miss a huge step here where they

don't think about how they're progressing that engagement so it turns into action.

Had to be a question on AI, how do you think the advancement of AI will affect

how creatives promote and make money from their work?

We are seeing such an interesting shift in the type of marketing that we need

from the advancement of AI.

If we think about history, a little history lesson here, before

digitalization, we really relied a lot on brand marketers and content creators.

With the digitization of marketing, that kinda shifted more

into the scientific area, so we needed deep technical expertise

to work out how to make channels like SEO and paid work for our business.

AI is going to commoditize a lot of that and really level the playing field for

brands to have excellent world-class paid and SEO strategies,

that's really gonna help all brands get discovered.

This means the role of creators is gonna become increasingly important and

emphasized.

What AI cannot do is replace humans' ability to be creative,

to bring unique perspectives, to entertain, and this is where

creators are going to be extremely important, so I think it's a great time.

Another big piece of AI is actually how It is taking away a lot of those manual tasks

that we don't love to do.

I think many creators may be thinking, is it gonna replace their role?

I think it's gonna make us more efficient, so think about AI as more of an assistant

to you to take away some of that manual repeatable tasks that you do, so

you can focus on more of the creative work.

What are your top three marketing trends predictions for 2024?

Okay, well obviously generative AI, companies using this and

integrating it into their daily processes is definitely gonna be one.

Second, video, in a recent state of marketing report run by HubSpot,

we found that our audience rate YouTube and

short form video as one of their highest ROI performing content channels.

Thirdly, and it may surprise you,

but messaging, I think in Australia we are quite behind the rest of the world in how

we think about engaging with our audience via SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger.

These channels offer instantaneous connections with our audience, and

it's what buyers want moving forward.

Really great use cases for these channels include reminders of meetings that you've

booked, keeping your audience up to date with new products, content, and offers.

That's it, we're back to one.

>> Amazing.

>> Right. >> Impressive job.

[MUSIC]