Forget Your Crystal Ball – Learn the Real 2013 Marketing Trends
by Chelsea Sisson
Each New Year, it appears that everyone finds a magic crystal ball to predict the future. In marketing, however, you really can predict the future—when you base your predictions off of trends and analytics.
Allow me to introduce you to my own personal crystal ball for marketing trends, a recent webinar that we did with a NAFCU Services Preferred Partner, NCR Corporation. The webinar, eMarketers Exclusive—Top 10 Trends of 2013, forecasts where marketing is headed and how credit unions specifically can improve their eMarketing strategy. Sundeep Kapur, Author, Digital Evangelist and Director of Strategic Marketing for NCR Corporation, led the eMarketers Exclusive—Top 10 Trends of 2013 webinar, and I encourage you to watch the recorded webinar because I truly cannot fit all the great tips from it here.
Many of the trends in marketing leading into 2013 will probably not surprise you. For example, content marketing continues to grow. Why? Because it works. Your members do research before selecting a product or service. If your credit union has educational content for members, you position your credit union as a trusted source and become part of the research process for your members. This gets you in the sales funnel sooner (which means more conversions), and allows you to build a relationship with your members by providing them the information they seek. Content marketing also helps you from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective—the more quality content you create, the higher your rankings from search engines are likely to be. So you’ll snag more of those unaffiliated future members searching on Google and Bing. Furthermore, online content marketing improves not only the quantity but the quality of traffic to your website. According to this recent case study from Brafton, a content marketing agency, visitors lured in from content had a 42 percent higher goal conversion rate than other visitors.
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