The Latest Trends Shaping the Marketing Industry for 2023
The latest trends shaping the marketing industry for 2023 will impact how your business generates revenue.
Hosted by Kevin Dieny
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Links Mentioned & Helpful Resources from Episode
- Kevin Dieny’s LinkedIn Profile
- Handling Disruption Episode with Stu Heinecke
- Our Virtual Ride-Along Tool
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hello and welcome to the Close the Loop Podcast. I’m your host, Kevin Dieny, and today we’re gonna be talking about The Latest Trends that seem to be Shaping The Entire Marketing Industry. And we’re gonna apply this to the smaller businesses, medium sized businesses. The businesses that are out there, you know, to some degree, maybe using some marketing, maybe using quite a bit of marketing.
[00:00:22] Kevin Dieny: So what innovations are there happening across the board? Obviously, marketing innovations generally, you know, relate to how a business is growing, acquiring new business, expanding its outreach. Uh, you know, launching and releasing new services, offers, products. Being able to reach and connect better with its consumers, its patients, its customers, its leads.
[00:00:46] Kevin Dieny: You know, the faster a business can turn consumers, you know, just use that as a blanket term, into paying customers or clients or something like that. That’s kind of like the better they’re doing in marketing. Now, that could also be sales. Anything that’s going on there with the business and growing its sales numbers, its revenue, increasing its profit, right?
[00:01:08] Kevin Dieny: That’s sort of the overall business objective. Marketing aim in that is to do that in kind of specialized ways. So what is happening in the marketing industry? What innovations are there, right? What’s going on out there that is going to be shaping the way businesses do business in the future? So a few things is that no prediction is gonna, is gonna do, is gonna be perfect.
[00:01:31] Kevin Dieny: There’s no crystal ball for this stuff, right? So the things I’m talking about, do they even matter? Will they come to fruition? Are they true? The thing is, a lot of marketing trends have been going on for a while. They just haven’t peak. Others peaked and now they’re on the downhill, right. Others maybe just starting.
[00:01:49] Kevin Dieny: Are they gonna reach, you know, a healthy point to help businesses or are they just gonna, you know, putter out? That’s a lot of what’s going on and obviously we can’t predict the future. There’s no crystal ball here. Making predictions is tough. They’re most usually predictions are especially over, you know, making a prediction in the far future.
[00:02:04] Kevin Dieny: Generally you’re always wrong. Otherwise we’d be having flying cars and really cool hover skateboards and stuff like that. Like we’ve seen in the movies. So let’s, let’s go into a little bit of what’s, what we wanna get out of the way. First with marketing trends. The first is obviously no one can know the future, that predictions are usually flawed.
[00:02:25] Kevin Dieny: So we’re gonna be focusing on trends, things that have some leg to stand on, right? We’re not talking like, Oh, do I think that we’re gonna be able to have microchips in people’s brains and know everything that’s going on and their thoughts? That’s a little too far future. Okay, we’re talking just in the next, you know, five years or so, what marketing trends that have already started do we think are going to cause innovation or the innovations that have already started?
[00:02:51] Kevin Dieny: What do we think is gonna cause businesses to want to jump on board? Jump on the train, right? That’s what we’re gonna focus on. The other thing that we wanna get outta the way is the idea that marketing doesn’t really change over time. And… there’s a yes and no, right? Like on one side it’s like, well, marketing doesn’t change that much.
[00:03:14] Kevin Dieny: Businesses don’t change that much. The idea is just make money. That’s been a, that’s been a belief that’s been a value for businesses for centuries, millennia. So why would you know, why? How could there be new marketing innovation? We’re not talking about just the basic formula of how business works. We’re talking about how businesses are efficient with their time and their resources, right.
[00:03:37] Kevin Dieny: How you’re going to put money into whatever you’re doing, a marketing channel, uh, an idea, strategy, a tactic, anything like that. How’s it gonna make its return and what is the right way to do that? And should you be doing multiple things at the same time? Those things have have changed dramatically. The environment has changed dramatically.
[00:03:56] Kevin Dieny: Over millennia, it’s changed a lot in just the last couple years, right? There’s the pandemic that’s gone on. There’s economic crisis, there’s political crisis, there’s regulations coming in and out of states and, and counties and cities and technology innovations and devices and phones, and now watches and all kinds of fun stuff, right?
[00:04:13] Kevin Dieny: So, there’s a lot going on in marketing. Yes, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Right? Kind of idea is still there. The basics of marketing are probably still going to be there. You still want to have a positive ROI. So the last thing is, are we gonna be talking about trends that don’t apply to your industry, right?
[00:04:31] Kevin Dieny: So, you know, your business, your industry best, you know, maybe you have an idea of what trends are coming. So you’ll probably hear some, you know, talked about today. The other thing is I think a lot of businesses, think that the marketing shifts, the trends, the innovations are better off to be acted upon once they’ve really proven themselves, right?
[00:04:53] Kevin Dieny: So there’s the idea in marketing, the, you know, there’s a curve and at the beginning of anything, any trend, any new innovation, anything like that, the people who jump on board first are usually labeled the early adopters, right? So what are you? Are you someone who, ooh, this sounds interesting, let’s try it out.
[00:05:11] Kevin Dieny: Or are you someone who’s like, You know what, let’s just wait until everyone else has tried it. Hah. Let’s make sure that nothing catastrophic or terrible or, or crazy happens. You know, cuz that’s how some businesses can flop. That’s how businesses can find themselves in, uh, deep problematic waters, is they’ve jumped on board into an innovation, into an idea or a strategy.
[00:05:33] Kevin Dieny: They saw a conference, they read in a book and it just didn’t… It didn’t come together for them. Uh, it didn’t work out for them. The trend flopped, right. So what kind of a business leader are you? There’s still trends that have not reached their peak that may, that you may be wanting to pay attention to now.
[00:05:50] Kevin Dieny: Right, and I also believe wholeheartedly that the better a business can be right at identifying the trends that are going to work for their business, for their teams, for how they do business, how they grow, how they want to grow their business, the better the businesses can grow. Your business could literally grow surfing the wave, the trends of marketing and innovation and technology and all the other things that are happening in the market, right?
[00:06:18] Kevin Dieny: You could just do business. How you of businesses, of your type have been done for the last 30 years. Maybe in the last 50 years, a hundred years, uh, businesses like yours could have, you know, been going. But does that mean that they’re going to keep going the same that they always have? That success will always be just simply hard work and determination.
[00:06:37] Kevin Dieny: Right, is that gonna be the key to success we’ve seen? Tons of businesses rise to amazing statuses that didn’t just use those basic principles, but used other things like innovation or, or strategy or cunning, or being able to find a disruptive innovation technology, right? The thing that you want to capitalize on is how can you take advantage of this trend that’s going?
[00:07:01] Kevin Dieny: So we’re gonna be talking about that a little bit. We’ve had other episodes, especially, uh, our topic, uh, with Stu Heineke. He was really the whole episode’s based on How To Make the Use of Disruption. So if you want to, you know, jump back into that previous podcast episode, he, he was great having him talk about, you know, making use of disruptive times.
[00:07:20] Kevin Dieny: Trends can be positive, right? Surf the wave, or disruptive like a giant sinkhole just appeared. So what are we gonna do about, right. So your business has a playbook, has a way it wants to grow, way it wants to expand. But you want to either add more trucks, add more business, expand your territory, your consumers, you want to take more market share out of your area.
[00:07:42] Kevin Dieny: You wanna be able to increase your price, you wanna make more, have greater margin, lower your costs. All these things are levers. Okay? So that’s your playbook on how you’re gonna succeed, right? So think about these trends and how they may apply to your. Second, just because a trend sounds awesome, right? I want to grow my customers.
[00:08:02] Kevin Dieny: Here’s a trend on how to grow. Your customers can’t just end there, . You have to go, Okay, could I use the strategy? Could I apply that? You know, is my marketer on my team? Do I even have a marketer on my team who’s doing the marketing? Who’s gonna be doing this? Could I even pull it off? , that’s much, that’s sort of the, where the rubber hits the road for a lot of this.
[00:08:22] Kevin Dieny: So be thinking about. And finally, should you jump all in? I think everyone, most business leaders who’d hear this go, Yeah, right. I would never jump all in on like an untested, unproven, marketing trend or business trend. What is that? But there, there is just like the pandemic forced tons of businesses to rethink their brick and mortar status.
[00:08:46] Kevin Dieny: To go a little more virtual, to go more, you know, online. And if they didn’t, they sunk. There is. Possibility that a trend is going to be so impactful that if you don’t find a way to eventually adopt it, you know you’re do, you’re toast, you’re done. And those don’t, and I think, well, my industry has been solid for, I don’t know, forever.
[00:09:09] Kevin Dieny: It still may impact you. There are still disruptions that become so drastic that they hit every industry pretty heavy. Let’s talk about some of the predictions, some of the trends. We’ll go into some of those now. So the first ones. This, this is coming from, Okay. I did some research, so lemme tell you where I got this from, right?
[00:09:31] Kevin Dieny: I research recent conferences as as recent as last week for us. So that would be October, September, August, July of 2022. Okay. So we can maybe fast forward a year from now and see how these predictions, trends hold up. But , that’s where this information is coming from. It’s very, at least for me right now, very recent.
[00:09:52] Kevin Dieny: So here’s a trend that’s been going, I wanna say. It’s probably been going at least five or six years. It could be, could be closer to 10. Um, and that’s the event of I o T, right? So technology, internet of things, the technology that hardware, right, Like mechanical hardware that is talking to the internet.
[00:10:14] Kevin Dieny: Now. Now you might, what comes to what should come to mind is like smart devices. Internet connected, Bluetooth connected, uh, devices for measurement, for monitoring, for servicing that i o t world, like the connected, taking the, like the typically analog world and connecting it to a digital area is huge and has been rapidly increasing in consumer areas now for businesses.
[00:10:40] Kevin Dieny: You know, this has been going on for a long time. Probably trying to get a lot of analog into the digital, but in a lot. Areas in consumer, in consumer space that is making headway because it’s gotta be done in a different way, right? It’s gotta be, uh, helpful and make sense to consumers and it has to be able to connect.
[00:10:59] Kevin Dieny: So since most consumers have smartphones or devices or internet, um, that is now starting to really rise up. And so what do I, what do we mean by that? What are some examples, right? So he mentioned smart devices, light bulbs, outlet. Which is TV’s entire watering irrigation systems. Right. Uh, could be, could be like issue things like in plumbing.
[00:11:26] Kevin Dieny: It could be like mechanical servicing, like on a air conditioner. It could be expanding into, you know, it’s, it’s obviously gone outside security systems. There’s a lot of things that are now connected to the internet, connected to people’s phones than there ever was before. So, Kind of making it so that people want these things because they see the, the benefits of them being able to monitor and see when they maybe need servicing.
[00:11:51] Kevin Dieny: Being alerted when there’s something that’s wrong before it gets catastrophic. Right. So that’s impacting businesses cuz now they’re the ones who are gonna be installing these things. Uh, It could be that the average person doesn’t wanna install, you know, upgrade their thermostat to a smart one, right. A, a nest or whatever they are.
[00:12:09] Kevin Dieny: There’s a lot of things like that where people are like, I’d rather have someone else do it. Uh, do it right. So an entire. Area of consumer hardware is suddenly being innovated, right? Suddenly changing, and people are swapping it out. So that is huge to capitalize on. That’s a disruption, right? Being able to offer that service is an area where you could capitalize on that if that’s in your wheelhouse.
[00:12:34] Kevin Dieny: Another one that’s interesting too, which is us been probably longer now, 20 years going on, gosh, is. Calendar based, internet connected scheduling. So a lot of people have sort of, sort of a calendar plan or, or a planner or something like that. And so when businesses are scheduling with consumers either for that, it’s in a meeting, an appointment, uh, could even be with teachers, could be with, uh, psychologists, doctors.
[00:13:04] Kevin Dieny: A lot of things are now going online, virtual, right? There’s these virtual conferences like Zoom. And teams and all these things like that that are happening where people have the ability to, Now, it’s not maybe more than a phone call and it’s cuz there might be video involved. And they’re planning and scheduling and everyone’s being alerted.
[00:13:26] Kevin Dieny: People are showing up, like there’s, instead of just your appointment is that this time, here’s a business card. With it on it, it’s now like you’ll be texted, you’ll have it in your calendar. You’ll be reminded with an email, right? It’s pretty hard. To make up the excuse that you missed the appointment cuz you didn’t know , when you get assaulted by emails and texts and, uh, notifications and all these things.
[00:13:47] Kevin Dieny: And those are so helpful as a business to know that you’re getting your appointments to show, right? You’re getting your appointments to reach like, uh, the next stage. And that is a big deal. So online scheduling is now out there, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, I would definitely check that out better than a form.
[00:14:03] Kevin Dieny: Sometimes, um, sometimes it, it’s, you know, some people prefer forms. That’s the best thing about. Innovative things when they’re at another option. Cuz there’s some people who actually prefer chatting, Some people who wanna text, some people who wanna call, some people who would like to just go right into a scheduler,
[00:14:21] Kevin Dieny: Right. And book the time so that way that it’s done and they can forget about it. Um, there’s a lot of reasons that people may have not enough time or may have a preference for one of those or any other, but I think it’s a big deal that businesses can sort of adopt these without. Having to do it without having to pay a high cost to do it.
[00:14:40] Kevin Dieny: A lot of these tools and innovations have cut through the complicated integration setup and have just have an all in one package that’s really easy to make use of. So, I, I can’t drop any specific cuz they’re all over. And there’s some, I would specifically look for ones that are designed for your industry cuz they probably have thought of, you know, other considerations that you’d want to, um, make note.
[00:15:04] Kevin Dieny: Again, CallSource does not do the scheduling stuff at this point, so, uh, are not even touting any service that we have. All right, here’s another trend. Again, these are, I’m, I’m trying to start with the ones that are kind of obvious, but are also been going for a while. These are ones that are a lot healthier.
[00:15:20] Kevin Dieny: If you haven’t jumped on board yet, you definitely should. Right. Another one is remote assistance. So there’s two angles to this. One is quick. And I didn’t even know that this was something that was available for, you know, a lot more industries until recently. Um, I had an electrician who, who said, Hey, just take a picture of it.
[00:15:44] Kevin Dieny: Okay. Took a picture of it and then I said, Okay. Do you have FaceTime? Yes. Okay, I’ll FaceTime Union and then I can show you, and then you can walk through the steps so that you know, everything’s fine. You can make, you can show me what’s going on with the switch that wasn’t working. So I showed him and I had the FaceTime and I, I pressed the reset button on the GFC outlet.
[00:16:04] Kevin Dieny: It popped didn’t work. Your tails didn’t work. And it’s like, okay, yeah, that’s not working. So there’s a few other steps you could take, but you know, this is confirmed. I know, like I can see I have a better idea of what’s happening. I should be able to fix this. And so that’s sort of how that went. And I thought, wow, that’s interesting.
[00:16:20] Kevin Dieny: Quick help is an interesting way to provide remote access, but there’s other areas where this is happening, right? There’s doctor visits. Um, my wife was able to get a doctor or a nurse or someone on to just confirm, you know, whether one of our kids needed to go to the urgent care or not. That was provided remotely,
[00:16:38] Kevin Dieny: And they weren’t even there in the room, right. It was being able to assess the current symptoms, see the, you know, see our, our one of our kids and see how they were doing and be able to assess that right there. It saved us, you know, how it is going to urgent cares, and, and sometimes it’s a long wait and it’s a lot of a commitment to go do that.
[00:16:55] Kevin Dieny: So those are big. That was a big deal. and the other area that’s really interesting and remote assistance. Again, this is just a trend, so think about ways to capitalize on it is the virtual ride along. This is something that CallSource has been doing lately and this is something that I think is very cool.
[00:17:13] Kevin Dieny: So for businesses that have customer, consumer, right interactions in person, someone on your company is meeting with, you know, your direct consumer. And this is a lot of times where they go to their homes, where they go out or they’re in a store or they’re moving around in an environment, right? Anything like that where you want to know, well, what’s, what’s being said?
[00:17:35] Kevin Dieny: What’s going on? Like, you know, I’ve trained my team on this. You know, there’s a lot of things going on, a lot of things that our team needs to know, be aware of. But is there additional training and support I could provide them? So what we do, we have our application. It’s in the app store, Google store, play store, and you hit record, you know, you get permission with the consumer, you hit record, boom, and then you can be walking with them, talking to them, and it’s recording the conversation that’s happening.
[00:18:06] Kevin Dieny: It’s like a, a ride along, right? That’s what we call it, the virtual ride. Experience. And so the business leaders, owners can hear, Okay, this is what’s happening. But not only that, who wants to listen to a couple hundred or whatever it is? Interactions every month. That’s just a lot. How do you know which ones are gonna be valuable?
[00:18:26] Kevin Dieny: Which ones maybe contain, um, specific areas where. What was said might be problematic or an objection wasn’t handled as well as it could have been, or an area you could train them on, right? You see this happening across multiple of your reps or teams. You could go, You know what, Let’s have , Let’s have a powwow about, you know, price, objection, or, you know, winter related, seasonal related stuff.
[00:18:52] Kevin Dieny: Or how to handle this situation better. And those are really awesome opportunities to take from that. And we take the recording, we listen to it, right? We flag areas, we have people doing this. So you get really great, I think, pinpoints along, you know, a what could be a 30 minute? Interaction period. And it’s down to just, okay, here’s a 32nd bit across your 10 interactions that happen today that’ll be really interesting for you to listen to, or really interesting to train on.
[00:19:21] Kevin Dieny: Or here’s the areas that your team is failing on or, or needs more improvement on. And tho that is huge. So again, remote assistance, remote based. Being able to assist or be there either for your team or for the consumer is a big deal. If you haven’t, you know, if you haven’t thought about how to make use of some of this stuff, I think you should consider, hmm, how could that applies to my business or how can I make use of that?
[00:19:43] Kevin Dieny: The next one is third party services to replace, you know, a role or a managed service that you would, you would do yourself. So, This is a big deal because businesses are like, Oh, I can’t afford to hire more HR people or to hire more ex people. Right? I can’t afford to bring on a buy a marketing, you know, two person, one person marketing team here.
[00:20:06] Kevin Dieny: I don’t want to have to pay for whatever, right? Any role. Think about it. So there’s this idea of like an outsourced. Virtual roles, um, outsourced, you know, CFO outsourcing, HR outsourcing, accounting, outsourcing, marketing, sales support. Like all of these things have an outsourced branch. And for a while that maybe that has existed.
[00:20:28] Kevin Dieny: But now it’s reaching really interesting points because as a managed service, it aligns with your branding, with your service. Maybe, you know, you have call handle. That are outsourced calling on your behalf . Right? It’s not sort of like telemarketing, but it’s comes across more like they work in your office.
[00:20:47] Kevin Dieny: It’s very interesting, all the different ways that this sort of outsourced, managed third party service has, has gone. And for anything that you lack, right? Something that you’re like, I gotta get this off my shoulders, or I have to get someone to help me do this, does that mean, right? Here’s the question.
[00:21:03] Kevin Dieny: Does it mean you have to hire a full-time part-time person? Is that gonna. The way it goes. Or now that there’s these options, maybe it’s managed service right? For, you know, some amount a month, you have unlimited use of that person or, or that role, or you know, at this tier you now have access to five people.
[00:21:22] Kevin Dieny: What hun, You know, during busy times, that’s great. Instead of hourly based, or you do want, you do prefer an hourly base cuz you know it’s only gonna be here, here or there. It’s now branching out where you have the ability to really plug gaps in your business. Using this third party managed service model, these are popping up all over the place.
[00:21:44] Kevin Dieny: So , some of them may be popping up internationally. So make sure that there’s, uh, the language is congruent and that you’re very satisfied in the quality of the work that you’re receiving. Okay, so , I wanna put that just really simply and kind of move on beyond that. The last thing I wanna talk about is education and training.
[00:22:07] Kevin Dieny: It used to be you go to school in person. Hm. It’s all, it was. Uh, you had to go, you know, and you’re gonna go to the best school cuz they have a big library or they have the most books, so they have the best teachers or, you know, a really nice area. Now a lot of education maybe in vocational related basics are now online.
[00:22:25] Kevin Dieny: Maybe even some, you know, renew, renewing a license training courses, educat. Learning how to do something in marketing, learning how to do a business thing, you know, learning excel better, whatever it is, Those things are now really going online in math. So, uh, one, you know, to think about it like, would you like to learn something that might help your business?
[00:22:47] Kevin Dieny: There’s even team packages for a lot of these things, which are really cool. The other angle is, are there courses that you could offer? Is there any knowledge you have that you feel like you’re an expert at? But if you just put together some videos, someone else records, someone else came in, wrote up, you know, made it, uh, for you, and you just provided like the, the really solid wisdom in the content that it could be turned into a course.
[00:23:10] Kevin Dieny: That again, is another thing that is exploding. I would say it has been going for at least. 10 years, um, in the online space. And so I don’t know if it’s peaked or not yet, but it has definitely found its way into greater in, you know, wider, wider industries than just college based or, you know, I think it started a lot with marketing.
[00:23:32] Kevin Dieny: Mark Kuka is, again, marketing has so many things that are innovating and changing and there’s great courses to learn, Okay, what’s a new trend? What’s a new way to do marketing? ? So that’s been. So let’s go back to, let’s take a pause on at this point cuz we’ve gone over the trends, the healthiest trends. I could think of that.
[00:23:50] Kevin Dieny: And I found, you know, from research, which was looking at conferences, events, what experts are talking about. LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Twitter, case studies, businesses like that report on this type of thing. Forbes and Business Insider. Lots of, lots of interesting sources have pulled, and this is what was the most common types of trends that have been happening that are healthy now.
[00:24:16] Kevin Dieny: Okay, so now we’re gonna get into less healthy, maybe newer, innovative stuff. Okay. And for that, I want to kind of mention like a positive trend that could impact your business is something that you feel, again, you feel like you could apply in your business to take advantage. Sideways stuff. Disruptions are things you gotta be aware of.
[00:24:35] Kevin Dieny: You gotta be, maybe have a. A little bit more of a risk management hat on for how that could impact you. Right? Are there things, So generally businesses sit in a supply chain, right? You get whatever product, whatever service, whatever knowledge, whatever it is you get from somewhere else, you know, you use it.
[00:24:54] Kevin Dieny: Sell it, apply it, right? And then it moves on. So wherever you sit in that chain, it’s worth noting and thinking about disruption can come from below, can come from above, can come from the same level as you, right? A competitor of yours might have an innovation, or it could come from a supplier, you know, a distributor, someone.
[00:25:15] Kevin Dieny: Wherever you get whatever service or product you’re, you’re offering from, what if they decide to do something that impacts you? Right? What if a nearby business, um, what’s a good example of this? For instance, there’s McDonald’s. They make food, you know, they, they do food and stuff and then Starbucks propped up and they’re just about coffee.
[00:25:34] Kevin Dieny: And then they started to be about food too. And then they’re about juices and then, you know what I mean? Like they’re sort of expanding out besides just coffee and McDonald’s expanded out besides just burger fries. And, you know, they, they went out too. So sometimes it’s like a, a horizontal leap. It’s not too bad.
[00:25:50] Kevin Dieny: Uh, when it’s vertical leap it can be a lot harder . Right? So there’s a lot of. Angles to this. It could be that a company that has nothing to do with you at all decides, You know what? I’m gonna get into the same industry as you. And you think, Oh man, , they have nothing to do with this industry. You know, that’ll be harder for them to penetrate, but maybe they’re such a size, or if they, they have some other advantage that could help them.
[00:26:14] Kevin Dieny: So disruption is hard to look out for, but it’s gonna happen. So that’s sort of the difference, right? We’re talking about trends, we’re talking about disruptions. Those are sort of how they def. So here are some midway, maybe early, early adopter type trends you should be looking out for. One is that I found a lot is this term conversational marketing, and it’s a marketing trend, not just because it has marketing in the name, but because it is the idea that you’re gonna be connecting and engaging with your consumers.
[00:26:53] Kevin Dieny: On a little more real time, one to one nature, right? This is something kind of that CallSource specializes in because we’re all about having a real time conversation on the. Realtime chat, a realtime text, right? Um, having reviews responded to right away really quick, you know, to when they’re out there. So the person feels like, Wow, this business is really paying attention to me.
[00:27:13] Kevin Dieny: That’s what we want. The cons, That’s what, that’s what trends seems to be emerging is consumers want to feel connected to the brand. They want to feel like, okay, there’s not just a joint robot behind this brand. There’s people there, right? They may care about the quality of work they perform. They’re not trying to scam me.
[00:27:29] Kevin Dieny: Just take my wallet, and move on. So how businesses sort of simulate that often easiest is conversationally, right? You had, you talked to the owner that made you feel better. You talked to the person when they came and you know, took down your, you felt like, okay, I, I trust this person, I trust this business.
[00:27:50] Kevin Dieny: I see what, who they are, what they represent, their values, right? That’s still really important. And so conversational marketing is how do you take advantage? Right of those conversational touchpoints. That’s a big one. And again, I not just because it has something to do with CallSource, that just seems to be the number one early stage innovation that’s coming and that businesses are getting away from.
[00:28:16] Kevin Dieny: Making things so automated in the responsive type. And when a consumer really wants to talk to a person, they wanna make sure there’s a person there, , right? So that’s coming or that’s, that’s been coming. But you know, it’s still kind of early in how businesses are actually doing that affordably. So there are technologies, there are things, or some industries, again, if you are sort of.
[00:28:38] Kevin Dieny: Jump on, uh, seems like a, i, I kind of believe in this trend. Then, you know, start looking around at conversational marketing, um, tools, solutions for you. You can let, you can see if our solutions are a fit. Otherwise, you know, find one that makes sense for your business. The other one is social media. Now obviously people are gonna say, Ah, social media’s been around for since 2005, or whatever,
[00:29:00] Kevin Dieny: Um, yeah, but what we’re talking about here is social media is sort of like rolling upon itself and adapting and evolving itself, and that is causing businesses who may have looked at it like a waste of time, . Now it could be something worthwhile. So there’s a lot of opportunities in social media. There’s communities, there’s videos, advertising, there’s organic side of it, right?
[00:29:25] Kevin Dieny: There’s building that area where you can interact with your consumers. Again, conversationally. There’s just a lot going on. Um, it’s also a place for, for users to share user generated content, which is closer to what I think is the true trend. So user generated content is people making. Videos, posts about your products, your service, your brand, you know, the in like the general products or whatever services that you provide.
[00:29:52] Kevin Dieny: And those are connecting with other people, getting them to think about, Oh yeah, maybe I need that too. Maybe that’s interesting. Maybe I should try that. They’re kind of, it’s taking influencers, which were normally just celebrities, you know, and making everyday people the, uh, sort of advocates of, of the brands or products or services.
[00:30:12] Kevin Dieny: So that’s, that’s been coming. And I’m not talking about MLMs, I’m talking about, uh, businesses whose sort of advi advocacy area is strong. You know, they’re like, Hey, this person came over and fixed this. I recommend them type of stuff. You know, sort of, sort of similar to. Okay, now I’m gonna kind of go through the next couple of these a little bit quicker because I, I think they’re sort of self-explanatory.
[00:30:34] Kevin Dieny: One of them is media formats. It is being demanded, and this is again, sort of earlier in the trend that businesses offer not just a giant website of text, but they have a video that they put themselves in the. So they can be seen or their, their idea, their vision, their values come across in the video, right?
[00:30:57] Kevin Dieny: Um, their services are shown. How they operate is shown in a video format, in an audio format. Podcasts like this, who, who would’ve thought podcasts, you know, that, you know, radio, dj jockey type people would be coming up out of businesses all over the place. But here it is. Here I. So, um, there’s even audio on you only type content.
[00:31:16] Kevin Dieny: People just talk into like a mic and that shows up in social. It’s gonna be coming. Think about that. So how can your brand be, have a media presence? That’s a gonna be a big deal, right? Is your brand in the next five years gonna be putting out. How is it gonna do that? That’s something that I think consider The next one is this Metaverse idea, which is, uh, I think very similar to 3D glasses.
[00:31:43] Kevin Dieny: Um, basically, but you wear the headset and you’re in a virtual environment. It’s actually pretty cool. Um, it, it’s not for error. People who have, uh, maybe motion sickness, , um, but you know, they’re getting, it’s getting better. It’s getting to a point where it’s gonna be pretty cool. But the latest. Ideas is like this metaverse thing hasn’t taken off.
[00:32:01] Kevin Dieny: So will it? I don’t know. I think it’s too early to tell. That’s just one of those things. . Um, the other one is consumer privacy. It’s, it’s a topic that is all over the place. I don’t know if it applies to your business or industry, you know exactly, but if you’ve visited a website lately and seen that huge banner somewhere at the top, the bottom, sideways, wherever it is, that says, Do you accept these cookies,
[00:32:25] Kevin Dieny: I’m sure a lot of you are like, You know what? I liked it before where I didn’t have that. Even though you. My cookie information was shared. Now it’s not shared, but now I have to deal with this popup, right? It’s sort of a . There’s a trade off happening, and so there’s a big discussion about that, but consumer privacy is probably only going to get stricter for a while.
[00:32:43] Kevin Dieny: So there’s that. There’s consumer spending. I’m not an economic expert. Uh, I had Cal Griffon recently talk about this a little bit. Inflation, the economy, your consumers, whether it’s impacting them, whether it’s impacting your business or your supply chain. That’s something to consider. It’s sort of newish.
[00:33:01] Kevin Dieny: That’s why it’s sort of in the early phase, how you deal with it. But it’s definitely something you should consider, especially if it’s gonna last another year, two or three. Uh, the next one I have. Email marketing , and I laugh at this because, gosh, how long is this? This one’s like a 30 year trend, right?
[00:33:18] Kevin Dieny: But why am I talking? That’s in the early or beginning stages. Um, because everyone said email marketing is dead. And then it came back and then they said it’s dead. And then it came back again. and I heard it again. Just took a year or two ago, he’s dead. And then. Just this year, more innovations in email have come out, right?
[00:33:41] Kevin Dieny: Making it better, making it easier to unsubscribe, making it easier to follow a subscription, specific subscription. Or you’re interested in this type of content and then you’re not, and then you are, and then you wanna subscribe to these brands for a while and like making it a little bit easier to manage.
[00:33:57] Kevin Dieny: That has come about. So people are back on email again. so. I say beginning though of the innovation trend because there are some really cool things going on with this space. It’s not just, you know, write an email, send an email. There’s a lot of automation built into it. You write about 15 emails, you figure out how you want them all to deploy when specifically written for specific circumstances, and then you set it up and go.
[00:34:23] Kevin Dieny: So if you haven’t gotten into email automation, you definitely should. I think it’s really cool. Again, there’s a lot going on there and how it may apply to your industry. So it could be kind of new venturing into that territory. So, and then, okay. Here is one of the, the last ones I want to talk about before, uh, we kind of conclude, and that is mediums, sometimes ad mediums.
[00:34:47] Kevin Dieny: I have just been hearing businesses for the last, let’s see, at every marketing advertising conference I’ve been at, say more and more and more ads. Are going digital and that for the first time ever, I think it was two, three years ago, digital overtook traditional advertising for the first time in history, meaning more money was spent in the online marketing space than in the traditional marketing space.
[00:35:13] Kevin Dieny: Traditional marketing spaces like tv, billboards, print, magazine, uh, mail, signage, those types of things. For the first time, it digital overtook. . And so that, supposedly that spelled the end of traditional marketing , which, uh, I don’t know if you’ve driven in some areas there’s still giant billboards, there’s still ads in newspapers, there’s still magazines.
[00:35:36] Kevin Dieny: People are still, still have ma newspaper subscriptions or magazine subscriptions. Maybe they’re not as prevalent as they were, but maybe they’re more niche now. The thing is, is offline marketing debt. Probably not . So if it is dying, does that mean it’s a good opportunity for you? Is it getting cheaper? Is it affordable?
[00:35:59] Kevin Dieny: Is it, is it better and easier to track now? Can you see an ROI on it better? You know, I is the environment there for your business to take advantage of it? And that could be a big, maybe. I wanna also mention about this one, that there are ways to take advantage of. Something going downhill, right? Uh, it could be less cost, there could be less cost involved.
[00:36:25] Kevin Dieny: When more people bid on ads, you shouldn’t, Maybe you don’t know this, the cost per ad goes up. For instance, if I want to bid on the keyword call source and it’s a dollar, and then a lot of other people want to bid on it, the bid may actually rise to $2, $3, four, and now it’s just more expensive for everyone because it’s the higher demand, right?
[00:36:46] Kevin Dieny: That’s just how a lot of times marketing works. So if demand is dropping for these offline ads or channels or mediums, does that mean it’s now really effective and affordable for you to do? You know, I would check that look and see how much some of those things are, cuz they may have changed in the last couple years since this trend is has happening.
[00:37:08] Kevin Dieny: That’s the downhill trend it, if it’s just in the last three years that it’s been happening, or maybe a little while longer, it could be too early. I don’t know to hop on, but I think it’s something worthwhile for you to invest. There are video options in online that are now all over the place in Meet the online.
[00:37:27] Kevin Dieny: Now we’re shifting to online, right? There’s shorter video ads. There’s ads that are, you know, in apps now, there’s. Video ads that ha that are designed without any sounds. You just read the text on the screen. , there’s AI stuff coming into play where an artificial intelligence is going, I bet this person is interested in your service because of all these signals, which is kind of changing the game in far as far as who you advertise to, right?
[00:37:52] Kevin Dieny: Uh, cuz the better, it’s getting better and better and more accurate than your ability to say, Oh, I just want. 40 year old people who own homes, it might be much more precise at being able to get people who are interested in saving money and get you more leads. So there’s just a lot going on in the marketing sphere.
[00:38:10] Kevin Dieny: I think the biggest ones I mentioned at the beginning, right, like some of the digital remote areas of innovation that I think businesses should, they’re at a healthy point, they should be jumping on before it’s too late. These latter ones. I would consider if something jumps out to you, right? You haven’t thought of something, and all of a sudden you’re like, Yeah, that sounds really interesting to me.
[00:38:31] Kevin Dieny: That could really work. Let me go check it out. The, so the last thing I wanna mention is how to capitalize on a trend without syncing your ship. . So, you know, everything has a requirement. Let’s take, uh, billboard ads, for example. An offline thing. You first have to figure out. Okay. Who, who do I, who do I find out who’s advertising on billboards then?
[00:38:59] Kevin Dieny: Okay. Where would I, you know, what Billboard would hit the audience I want then is the billboard gonna be effective? Right? What’s it gonna look like? How are I gonna, how are people driving? Gonna feel able to. You know, see my brand or see the phone number or the website or whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish, and perform that action, contact you.
[00:39:18] Kevin Dieny: You know what I mean? There’s a lot to consider there. And you take all those requirements into account what it, what cost, what you need. Okay? You need images. Does that mean you need a designer? Does that mean you need graphic help? Will they, Will the billboard company provide all this? How, you know, how effective does it need to?
[00:39:34] Kevin Dieny: Or minimum costs always come into play. , right? It’s like, Oh, to advertise here, it’ll be a 5,000 minimum. It’s like, okay, is that too much, you know, in a month per month for a business, for your business? Or is it whatever? You know, you figure out if you have, you write all your options down and you figure out, Okay, here’s what’s required for each one.
[00:39:57] Kevin Dieny: Here’s my confidence in them. Here’s what I think will happen. That’s just, that’s just sort of how it has to go. But if you try to jump in all the way you might sink, so the best thing you could probably do is put a grounded foot in there without having to go all the way in and be super involved in whatever trend it is.
[00:40:19] Kevin Dieny: For instance, is there a billboard you could advertise on for cheap for a little while and just see if it. You know what I mean? See if, see for what you get, you get something out. Now, obviously they may recommend, look, one billboard or five billboards or whatever the minimum is, is just not going to do as well as if you spent, you know, a million dollars.
[00:40:37] Kevin Dieny: But that’s just focus on, okay, I just want to test the waters right. How much can I lose? Right? So, Risk capital, how much of the risk capital can I put here, learn from, and then decide if I wanna do that. And maybe you try three things or two things in a year and go, Okay, this one worked, this one didn’t.
[00:40:57] Kevin Dieny: or both, these didn’t work or both of these worked, but which one works better? Right? . And that’s just how you’re gonna kind of go. Maybe you hear at an industry event like, Oh yeah, everyone’s jumping on chat these days, or This virtual ride along thing is super cool and man, our, our reps are doing so much better in the field.
[00:41:14] Kevin Dieny: And you think, you know what? Like, I just keep hearing this. Like I might as well try it, see what the entry is, see what’s required, what it costs. That’s the best measured way to go about. That’s how I’d recommend you investigate and research this topic and take it from. So, and do it without it costing a lot, without it requiring a lot.
[00:41:36] Kevin Dieny: Uh, if you can, uh, if you need suggestions or ideas, that’s why a lot of these communities exist, these associations, uh, feel free to ask questions too. You know, if you have a question about anything I’ve talked about in this episode, feel free to reach out. Uh, you can find me on LinkedIn and my call source.
[00:41:52] Kevin Dieny: My name is Kevin Dieny, so yeah, that’s, that’s it. Uh, thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you heard some trend or something you thought, Yeah, that’s interesting or, Yeah, I’ve heard all this, you know, but, but is there something to revisit? Cause in some ways these things have changed. Some of these have changed drastically in the last year or two.
[00:42:10] Kevin Dieny: So I hope it helps you grow your business. And that’s it for the Close of Loop podcast today. Thank you for listening.