From a consumer perspective, it’s good to be aware of what’s hot in the digital marketplace in order to find the most helpful as well as entertaining solutions to enhance your daily life. From a business perspective, it’s smart to stay on top of consumer digital trends for business planning, helping you make decisions that will best position your organization in your marketplace for improved revenue as well as optimized marketing and selling opportunities. Tracking current and future consumer digital trends can even help you target and develop a completely new niche for your business, creating a new space and generating an innovative competitive advantage.
1. Mobile
While mobile technology in general isn’t new, there are many mobile innovations that have led to mobile outpacing desktop search in 2015 for the first time. Online Marketing Solutions, LLC. reported that “currently 79 percent of mobile phone consumers and 81 percent of tablet consumers use their devices to conduct local searches.” This growing number of mobile users places a heavy emphasis on the need for businesses to adapt their websites to a mobile-friendly architecture.
As more mobile capabilities are made available to consumers, the more mobile-friendly access they expect. To put this in perspective, some readers will remember the days when it could take a few minutes just to get online. As soon as high-speed Internet came sprinting into our lives, we were just as quick to become extremely impatient when it took over five seconds for a webpage to load let alone over a minute to access our beloved Internet. So, as the share of mobile web grows, so is user dissatisfaction with websites who’re slow to catch up with their mobile needs and desires. ReachLocal noted that 72 percent of consumers want to visit mobile friendly sites, and 74 percent would revisit mobile friendly sites. Not only that, but Google has actually been penalizing businesses for non-mobile friendly websites. It’s now officially unescapable—go mobile or wither away.
2. On-Demand Buying Opportunities
The ever rising mobility trend also underlines consumers’ deep desire for convenience. They want to be able to buy when, where, and how they want. But this isn’t a bad thing for businesses. Thanks to mobile technology, you have more selling opportunities than ever before. This is one of the top trends you shouldn’t want to fight. Nor should you have the slightest inkling to want to. You need to nurture this mobile trend and make it possible for your customers to buy from you at a moment’s notice. Unless you have the most unique product or service in consumer history, there’s more than enough competing solutions in your saturated marketplace that your need-it-now, would-be customers will move on to their next option in mere seconds. Don’t give them that opportunity.
In the name of convenient, on-demand buying, there’s also been a growing trend towards incorporating more Buy Buttons. You can use Buy Buttons to sell your products wherever you’ve already built an audience online. The Buy Button sales channel lets you easily add ecommerce to your blogs, websites, WordPress, Squarespace, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, email campaigns, and much more by using Buy Buttons that connect with a Shopify checkout. Google has even started integrating buy buttons into ads so users can make purchases directly from their search results. Buy Buttons are quick and easy to integrate within virtually all of your selling platforms. And they make it easier and faster for your customers to buy from you, which naturally increases your likelihood of generating more sales. With virtually no drawbacks, adding Buy Buttons to your business is essentially a no-brainer.
3. Social Buying
Considering that the trend for individual consumers demanding opportunities to buy when, how, and where they want is very strong on its own, then we must look at social buying as an exponentially stronger trend—mammoth marketing creature on steroids. Social media started off as a means to connect with past and current friends and family as well as create new relationships. People love sharing updates about themselves and keeping current with the lives of friends and family. As a part of this process, they naturally love posting and viewing images and videos. With social platforms already set up for businesses, they just needed to find ways to integrate their products and services. Some businesses still rely on the more classic marketing, buying static, clickable ad space on social pages. What’s proving to be exponentially more effective is incorporating interactive social media, including highly sharable content.
What happens when you deliver content that people naturally share of their own volition? Boom goes the dynamite! Enter the perpetual-motion social-selling machine for businesses. While Facebook was just a one-year old baby and Twitter was still in the womb at the time this video was uploaded, and the video uploaders probably weren’t thinking about social sales at that time, all you have to do is look at the almost 10 million views it’s received. This demonstrates the awesome power of sharable content. Let’s say, according to even the weakest of conversion rates, that one in every 50 views creates a sale. Would your business enjoy 200,000 sales?
The tricky part is researching the nuances that promote sharing in a natural manner. Getting one of your social-selling messages to go viral benefits you two-fold: 1) You sell exponentially more than you would with static selling opportunities, and 2) you quickly recover your up-front marketing and advertising expenses because your perpetual-motion content eventually starts selling for you, without you having to continuously reinvest time, money, and effort. Unlock all-star revenue by keeping it natural, funny, helpful and entertaining. And yes, even the most serious business products can leverage humorous messaging—your customers will appreciate the breath of fresh, funny air.
Speaking of entertainment, social celebrity endorsements have helped take countless business to a whole new level. The influencing power of just one celebrity, tweeting a single tweet or posting a single product-placement image on Facebook could be enough to set your business for a year.
Think you’re a small business who’d never be able to get a major celebrity endorsement? Not true. First, you can always start small by getting a local celebrity endorsement. Besides, most consumers would still rather buy local because there’s a higher trustworthy factor in buying local. People also like the idea of supporting their local businesses even if it means spending a few more bucks. Moreover, once you get a local celebrity, you improve your chances of getting a bigger name endorsement because that helps validate your company and convince bigger names to sign on, making it seem like a smaller leap of faith endorsing your product or service.
In addition, even the smallest of businesses have been able to gain major celebrity endorsement by attaching their business message to a worthy cause. Find a way to way make money while genuinely supporting a charity. Most celebrities love the opportunity to give back. Omaze provides a brilliantly innovative example of focusing your entire business on charitable giving. For approximately $10, Omaze’s customers can enter for a chance to win a “dream experience” with a mega star. These dream experiences have included a chance to be an extra in a Star Wars film and have John Legend sing at your wedding. Omaze takes a cut of the profit, while the rest goes toward designated charities.
Polls and quizzes represent another upward social trend. Quizzes have shown that providing a simple way for consumers to relate to others allows businesses (publishers of the quizzes) to generate many shares, which is a vital metric that challenges even top companies. Quizzes were the most shared content type on Facebook last year, and continue to hold top spot. Furthermore, 96 percent of users who take a sponsored BuzzFeed quiz will complete it. Why specifically is the completion statistic significant? Aside from not finishing to completion being extremely unsatisfying, you don’t get statistically significant information from an incomplete quiz, poll, or survey. Perhaps more importantly, failure to complete means failure to share, which in turn means failure to convert to buying customers. The most successful quizzes encourage users to share their quiz results immediately upon completion. A majority of quiz and poll takers will share their results because A) they like to feel as though they’re part of a bigger group, and B) they enjoy showing off, feeling as though they’re in the top echelon if they scored high.
4. Security
Online security continues to be a rising concern for consumers. With cyber threats, such as data breaches, ransomware attacks, identity theft, credit card fraud, increasing in sophistication, persistence, and pervasiveness, it’s really only a matter of time before a consumer gets hit. To delay the inevitable as long as possible, consumers would rather play it as safe as possible during their online buying experiences. For example, even if they absolutely love your product or service, and even if they’re extremely loyal customers who’ve been buying from you for years, you’re virtually guaranteed to lose their business if you suffer a publicly known cyber attack.
Let’s look at the infamous Target data breach. While Target’s stock price took a dip, and lines at checkout were shorter for a while, their crisis management, including discounted prices for a period of time, deftly handled the situation. However, chances are, you don’t quite have the clout or resources in your legal department like Target does. You likely don’t have the means to deal with penalties imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Trade Commission like Target did. And if you’re a small business, your profit margins are likely already razor thin, and you might go out of business if you had to offer significant discounts for any lengthy period of time. Apart from the legal fees, most businesses simply can’t weather that degree of bad media.
The lesson here? Your business can’t afford to delay fortifying its cyber security. Plus, businesses have learned that customers like the warm and cozy feeling of a safe buying process. Once you get your cyber security beefed up, make it well known through a dedicated webpage on your site. And be sure to blast a press release about it. Use the necessary expenditure on your security as a means to market and advertise your business.
Consumer Digital Trends Conclusion
With all these trends in mind, it’s important to remember that they are trends, the very definition of which is “a general direction in which something is developing or changing.” Some trends are solid enough to maintain long-term momentum, and have a high likelihood to stick around indefinitely, such as digital mobility. However, there are countless variables subject to change within even the most rock-solid trends. For example, while we’re likely not to shift away from mobile consumer-based products and services for at least another hundred years, there are virtually infinite granular changes that can occur within the overarching trend. These can be catalyzed by any number of local and global market influencers. Maintain this perspective when planning, developing, and adjusting your business model. Adaptability is key in weathering the volatile storm of the collective consumer mind.
