ATSummit2022: Online Business and Marketing- What’s Trending Now?

Staying updated with the latest trends and technologies is a must for an ever-growing business. Just like the customers’ demands, business trends and the latest technologies also keep on changing with time. Gone are the days when the traditional business running culture was almost the same for every businessman. This is the era of being unique and creative while running a business and expecting tremendous profits.

To talk about these intricate issues, in a summit that has been hosted by ACCESSTRADE Global, the experts have pointed out the intricacies of questions that are arising with the evolutionary new trends. ATSummit MY & SG Country Session was held recently. The session started with the introduction of the experts by Mr. Cheam Zia Da. The moderator, Mr. Hayato Nakata, CEO of Interspace Malaysia & COO of Interspace Singapore, who himself has experience of almost a decade was accompanied by two other experts. One of the experts was Mr. M. Hazman B Zainal Ariffin, Performance Marketing Manager Qoala Malaysia, and the other expert was Ms. Perlie Kong-de Guzman, Country Head MGID Philippines. 

Digital media has given a commendable dimension to businesses and marketing trends. Changing times have witnessed changing online trends in businesses. The increasing digitalization has made it mandatory for every businessman to have an online presence for his business. Want to know more about the role of digital media in businesses and marketing trends? Read below the kernel of the conversation that has happened between the two leading experts accompanied by Mr. Hayato Nakata. 

What is the role of digital media in business and marketing?

No matter whether you are running a small-scale or a large-scale business, reaching out to a wider audience range should be your ultimate goal. Digital media lets your business and its products reach out to bulk audiences and earn tremendous profits within the minimum possible time. The online presence of your business ensures to attract new client traffic, bulk orders, easy tracking, and ever-growing sales. Both the experts agree that advertisers’ jobs are gaining more and more important as the role of digital media is increasing colossally when compared with traditional media. 

You won’t need to unpack and then pack again your products just to get huge orders from your clients. Digital media lets you display your products’ features and specifications on your website and easily grab bulk orders. Not only just the orders, but digital media also provides a convenient platform to track the orders from time to time so that you can ensure 100% customer satisfaction and earn great reviews.

Some great digital marketing ideas that promise to add up to the brand value and profits of your business-

• Make a Facebook page for your brand
• Make an Instagram profile for your business
• Start a Facebook group
• Publish your content on Pinterest
• Write informative and impressive blogs
• Try influencer marketing strategies
  

Top digital marketing trends of 2022

• AI in marketing – Artificial Intelligence has won millions of hearts with its features and impressive working tools. This AI industry has been predicted to be a $190 billion industry by 2025. Every digital marketer who aims to gain unimaginable profits can take benefit from AI’s cost-efficient, reliable, and precise marketing strategies.
• Augmented reality – Augmented reality is a magnificent interaction between real and virtual worlds. It gives an amazing three-dimensional interactive experience of real and virtual objects. Because of its impressive sci-fi and 3D experiences, AR is predicted to outperform VR in terms of online business and marketing trends.
• Voice search optimization – The present generation is becoming a great fan of voice search. Recent surveys reveal that nearly 55% of teenagers use the feature of voice search every day. The increasing popularity of voice search features can be seen in the fact that people are driven more and more toward buying smart speakers these days. Smart speakers like Amazon Alexa or Google Home are giving a new success dimension to the voice search feature.

• Programmatic advertising – Programmatic advertising saves your time from human negotiation, proposal requests, and quotes; and lets you purchase your digital advertising through software. In programmatic advertising, Artificial intelligence automates to target selected audiences for advertisers. This automation is very speedy and efficient in its working. 
• Chatbots – Chatbots are one of the biggest and the most efficient digital media trends in 2022. Chatbots use Artificial intelligence technology to allow advertisers to have a personalized chat with their customers and website visitors. Chatbots use instant messaging features to interact with customers through text or audio messages. Recent surveys reveal that more than 63% of the customers prefer to communicate with the advertisers through chatbots and clear all their doubts there and then only.

How are social media trends affecting online business and marketing? 

Mr. M. Hazman B Zainal Ariffin agrees that social media has taken a vital place in everyone’s life in recent years and Ms. Perlie Kong-de Guzman also collaborates with him on this. It is no less than a daily habit to check the news feed, like and share reels, and make social connections through apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. After TikTok, Instagram launched its reels in 2020, just to attract more audiences and challenge the online craze that people had for TikTok. 

Facebook also launched online shops in May 2020 and became a great platform for online business and marketing needs. Social selling has become the latest trend today where advertisers can upload their products directly on e-commerce websites and reach millions of users overnight.

Why is social selling becoming more and more effective?

People are drifting more and more towards the audio-visual content of social media. Ms. Perlie Kong-de Guzman puts forward some statistics to strengthen her argument. Studies show that people share social media’s audio-visual content 40% more as compared to other posts. The reason lies in the fact that audio-visual ads receive more engagement and attention from viewers as compared to audio and image-only ads. People easily perceive the right idea and make a positive image of the product in their minds. 

More than 80% of the consumers take interest in watching the video content of a business and its products. Social media experts also claim that more than 87% of the buyers believe that social media content, or specifically, social media videos help them make good buying decisions. So, social selling is gaining consumers’ trust as well as their interest, which can be effectively used by marketers and businessmen in earning high profits. 

Conclusion

The most important thing which both Mr. M. Hazman B Zainal Ariffin and Ms. Perlie Kong-de Guzman emphasized at the end of the summit discussion is that a company should allocate around 6.5-8% budget to marketing. This is important as it creates a dilemma among the business owners. No matter how small or large your business scale might be, you just need a great online presence and smart strategies for gaining profits. Digital marketing has a promising and flourishing scope in the future. All the latest technologies and online apps aim to be great platforms for marketing and selling. The increasing craze for online shopping apps and social selling has made it mandatory for every businessman to ensure his online presence. 

Numerous technical apps and websites are launched every single day to provide more and more for the marketing needs of businessmen. May it be AI, Augmented reality, or Chatbots, everything just focuses to let the advertisers fulfill their customers’ demands. So, being a smart businessman, take full advantage of the latest trends and marketing strategies of digital media.

ACCESSTRADE SUMMIT is an annual event that provides networking opportunities for performance marketers to help them mutually share, learn about, and discover new insights to promote healthy market growth.