What Are The Best Digital Marketing Trends For POD

The print-on-demand industry is growing with online businesses springing up quite often nowadays. Nevertheless, not every business owner knows about the latest digital marketing trends and how to use them cleverly. Here are the best digital marketing trends for print-on-demand businesses.

#1 Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is still the primary source of exposure and traffic for many online businesses. It can help you with many things including building your community, improving brand awareness, getting additional exposure, and so on.

Having a well-planned social media marketing strategy can help you start your business actively rather than passively. This means that you will kickstart your online marketing campaign correctly and grow your business faster. Here are some things to keep in mind about social media marketing:

• The social media platform you choose matters a lot, so decide whether you want to be on Instagram, LinkedIn, or somewhere else.
• Social media marketing should be integrated with other elements of your digital marketing campaign such as content marketing, email marketing, and so on.
• Posting regularly and creating high-quality content are the two most important things when it comes to a good social media marketing campaign.

#2 Chatbots

Chatbots are a part of a much bigger trend which is the expansion of automation. Many manual tasks can be done automatically by various programs, so various businesses have opted to automate these tasks and reduce the workload of their employees.

Chatbots can help you to develop your customer support department and create a more productive environment where every customer gets the special treatment they deserve. However, you need to keep in mind that chatbots can’t be a complete substitution for your customer support employees because they are not humans and can’t do all human tasks.

#3 Live Chats

Live chats are a continuation of chatbots, so to say. Some say chatbots are the future of ecommerce. While chatbots help your customers get started, live chats with real customer support employees are the ones who take on the job to continue the conversation and ensure that all of the customers’ problems are successfully solved.

Think of it this way: chatbots lay the foundation and customer support employees working through live chats build on that foundation. This way, you can manage relationships both with your potential customers and with your existing customers looking to get some help. Here’s the usual plan of action:

• The customer gets on your website looking for information. He or she gets a notification from a chatbot asking if it can help them.
• The customer asks a question from the chatbot. The chatbot provides the customer with information. If it is not enough, the customer can request to talk to a customer support employee.
• After the request, a customer support employee joins the chat and continues the conversation with the customer.

#4 Personalized Offers and Promotions

Personalization is one of those things that has been around in recent years and eventually became a standard. That being said, personalization can come in different forms and sizes which means that it is quite possible that you are missing out on some of the most important aspects of this practice.

Personalized offers and promotions, for example, are becoming more and more popular with print-on-demand companies because they help attract new customers while also retaining the ones you already have. Such offers and promotions cater to the needs of each of your customers specifically and don’t demand a lot from their side.

To create such personalized offers, promotions, and discounts, you need to collect data about the products your customer viewed or bought and then send them discounts and offers for these or similar products.

#5 Content Marketing

Doing your research about your target audience is only part of the job because the next step is about using this knowledge actively in your digital marketing campaign. This is when content marketing comes in.

Content marketing can be viewed both separately from your social media marketing and email marketing campaigns, but it can also be considered as a greater collection of social media marketing, email marketing, and other types of marketing.

#6 User-Generated Content

User-generated content or UGC is all the content created by your customers or potential customers including reviews, testimonials, articles, blog posts, social media posts, and so on. UGC can be used for improving your digital marketing campaign to get closer to your audience and have social proof.

UGC can be especially helpful for print-on-demand businesses that have social media accounts. Actively seek out UGC on social media platforms and interact with it. You can also repost UGC as long as you get permission from the person who posted it in the first place.

#7 Live Streams

Live streams are useful not only for print-on-demand businesses but for any kind of brands that want to improve their social media engagement. Live streams can significantly improve your reputation and show that you are interested in engaging with your customers and potential customers via social media.

Regular live streams with important announcements, free seminars or workshops, giveaway and contest winner announcements, updates, and product reveals are proven to be the most effective of all.

#8 Email Marketing

Last but not least, email marketing is still very popular with businesses of all kinds. Though there are some who argue that it is no longer efficient, the opposite is actually true. A good email marketing campaign can help you increase your sales exponentially. Here are the latest trends in email marketing:

• Personalized emails increase the chances of your readers interacting with the content in your emails.
• Subject lines that went through some tests before being sent out with emails massively usually work better for increasing the email open rate.
• Visual content in emails often helps to improve text even if the text already has enough valuable information in it.

Final Thoughts

All in all, knowing digital marketing trends will help you create a better marketing campaign for your print-on-demand business. Use the tips in this article and you will realize that improving your online marketing strategy is easier than it seems.