If you operate an online business-to-consumer (B2C) operation, it’s imperative that you stay ahead of the key marketing trends. When launching my private aviation digital media company, I had to quickly learn how to create engaging content geared toward the right buying audience: millennials. Baby boomers traditionally lead the business aviation industry. My job is to bridge the gap between these two generations. Based on my marketing experiences, below I’ve provided four key marketing trends to help you improve B2C engagement. 

Create Engaging Content For Mobile Devices 

Whatever type of content you are putting out on the internet needs to grab the reader’s attention instantly. All it takes is a ping alert and their attention is directed elsewhere. So whatever your content is about, it needs to be engaging enough to retain readers. 

How can you achieve this in a world of ongoing digital information? 

Change Your Focus

Many online marketers develop a strategy that focuses on making the product and or service appealing. While it’s important to have a good product, it doesn’t do any good if you don’t have an audience to sell it to. Good marketers know that if they target the right audience, any marketing campaign they launch is going to render a higher percentage of conversions versus soliciting to a group of people who have no interest whatsoever in the service or product. Creating an online campaign and sending it out to into the internet without a target audience will be a waste of money and is an indication that there was no strategic effort to get the best possible results.

The work goes into researching the right demographic. Leave it to the designers to create an eye-catching content that’s visually stimulating. 

In my publishing company, my product is a consultative service. This means I have to invest time and resources into finding a target audience of buyers who will most likely need my services. 

Know Your Audience

Conduct a thorough analysis of the type of consumer you are trying to reach. The best way to do this is to generalize your audience into one customer. Are they male or female? What is the age range? Is the person married? Does he or she have children? Most importantly, can your product or service solve a problem that he or she might have? 

Regardless of your target audience, if you plan to be in business for decades to come, then you will eventually need to start communicating with the younger generation. The sooner you start directing your marketing strategies toward this audience, the better chance you’ll have of securing an entirely new generation of customers. 

Appeal To Your Audience’s Buying Preferences

Once you have established a general customer profile that represents your target audience, the next step is to create the type of content that will appeal to them. This step is easier than you think.

Every B2C company worth its salt is marketing their business online to get in front of their buying audience. Just in the e-commerce industry alone, sales have reached $2.3 trillion U.S. dollars. This impressive number can be attributed to the ongoing efforts to improve online access. Online buyers have short attention spans. They want their information fast and to purchase a service and/or product even faster. Making content more mobile friendly is key to increasing online conversions. It’s all about making the content easily accessible to readers in a format that’s structured for them to take action swiftly.

After building our company website, we had to make sure that the content looked good on other mobile devices. We found that the website appeared differently, so we had to make adjustments to create a site that’s more user-friendly for clients to navigate.

How Service-Oriented Businesses Can Benefit From These Key Trends 

Businesses that are more service-oriented can also appeal to a customer’s buying preference. The same e-commerce marketing strategies also apply to a highly consultative business. In my publishing company, my objective is to build a professional working relationship between my brand and my audience in order to build trust. I do this by first establishing the audience I’m trying to reach out to. I then conduct the research and learn everything I can about this generation. Finally, I create engaging content that will appeal to them. 

Changing your focus and doing the research to better understand your audience so that you can appeal to them is going to make all the difference in how successful your online marketing campaigns will be for 2018 and for years to come. 

Article written by: Chris Quiocho