Adopting New Marketing Trends: Is it Better to Switch or to Integrate?

Marketing is always changing and innovating. With that change, there also comes a sense of urgency to go all in on the latest trend. In fact, if you didn’t pour your entire marketing budget into the newest trend three weeks before it existed, you might as well close your doors. Considering the dozens of marketing trends over the last 20 or so years, you know that sentence is barely an exaggeration. 

The pressure to shift your attention to the latest technology, platform, or tactic is strong. Even the most seasoned and discerning business owners usually grapple with uncertainty about how to approach the latest phenomenon. Today’s trend that is trying to capture your full focus is AI. How do tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity make your business visible to your ideal clients, and is it worth a full redirect of your marketing strategy?

Keep Up With Marketing Changes that Affect Your Audience

If marketing is how you communicate about your business, then of course you need to know which methods of communication work best to reach your audience. This is an ongoing research endeavor that requires business owners to pay attention to changes and trends.

The people who make up your audience will rarely make an instant switch from one communication channel to another. Therefore, it is not advisable for businesses to completely abandon marketing channels they have built up over time in favor of shiny new innovations.

The far more reasonable approach is to:

• Evaluate the trend to see how it applies to your business and how people in your audience are interacting with it.

• Test the new channel according to your existing marketing principles so that any new efforts align with your brand.

• Add or reallocate resources to give the new channel a fair chance at producing results.

• Integrate high-performing trends into your overall strategy, adjusting all activities based on new evidence about their effectiveness.

The goal is to keep leveraging proven marketing tactics while broadening your strategy to keep reaching your audience where they are.

Examples of adopting new marketing trends

Email marketing has been around for decades. As much as we may complain about it as consumers, it’s a downright effective marketing activity. Emails can earn around $40 for every $1 spent on average, which far exceeds the ROI on other marketing activities.

When SMS text message marketing became the brand new trend, businesses were offered a new way to quickly get in front of potential customers. Modern consumers check both emails and text messages on their phones, and they get notifications for both methods of communication.

Did every major company suddenly abandon email marketing in favor of text message marketing? Of course not. My own inbox is still constantly full of emails from brands I buy and service providers who help me.

Text messages can be very effective in marketing, but each business has to evaluate the channel with their own ideal client in mind. Then they need to test the channel with sufficient resources to get solid data. At the same time, they need to continue communicating with their audience through email, because they need to maintain that proven ROI strategy. As they measure engagement and conversions with sms marketing, they gain enough data to integrate it into their full marketing strategy. The next annual budget can be allocated with the appropriate investment in each marketing activity based on its proven performance.

How Should AI Marketing Fit Into a Marketing Strategy?

Content Marketing is a current proven strategy for optimizing search results and converting paid ad clicks into discovery calls and signed contracts. When small businesses invest in SEO by having well-structured websites and a robust blog routine, they tend to perform well in search rankings. This leads to more users on the website who learn what they need to know and take actions that hopefully result in sales.

SEO marketing is not going away because of AI tools. In fact, what we are seeing in the marketing industry is that users are adding AI tools as a new layer in their search activity. People visit their favorite AI chat bot to get more clarity around their actual pain point or need, and then they use what they learn to perform traditional internet searches.

With this in mind, it’s clear that completely abandoning content marketing for AI marketing will sabotage a marketing strategy rather than improve it!

In reality, focusing on AI visibility only works when it is considered within the context of an overall content marketing strategy. Here’s how adopting this new technology works in the integration approach:

• Evaluate your ideal audience to find out what kind of questions they are asking AI tools.

• Test your website using your own favorite AI tool to see if it is picking up on the information, values, and offers that benefit your ideal client.

• Add or reallocate marketing resources to improve your website with new pages, targeted blogs on relevant topics, Frequently Asked Question sections, and high-quality technical design.

• Integrate AI visibility principles into your marketing strategy, knowing that your content may start to take more time to produce, and therefore might need more resources.

In this approach, adopting AI into your marketing strategy is a natural development. In fact, it should increase the clarity and focus of your current SEO strategy because you have gained new information about what your audience truly wants to see.

Marketing Strategies Are Made to Adapt

Every marketing strategy has to adapt to changing conditions. Everything from technology to audience behavior to economics is always changing. Businesses must keep up by appearing where their ideal clients will find them and by offering the services they really want. But there is a big difference between throwing away every previous plan to adopt the new trend and making an informed and measured effort to enhance and improve visibility.

If you have ever made a full switch and experienced negative consequences, you may be nervous to try anything new. Or, if you have ever ignored the changing conditions to stick with your existing plan and lost a portion of your audience, you may be tempted to give your entire budget to this new trend.

Obviously, neither of these extremes will truly support your business or marketing strategy. If you are trying to figure out how to stay relevant, help your audience find you, and grow into new marketing tools the right way, reach out to me. At Marketing to Mission, we support business owners from a strategy-first perspective, which means we develop your marketing plan based on which activities will best serve your ideal clients. Before you throw away what you’re currently doing, or you hide under your desk until AI goes away, give me a call. We’ll help you find a good fit for your marketing strategy so you can stay on mission.