The recent Google Partners Connect on 9/20 talked about different industry trends that have popped up over the recent years. As our customers change along with technology, the businesses have to change as well. Three industry changes that we analyzed from the event were: the customers are now in the driver’s seat, data is a game changer and how to drive marketing with machine learning.
Since customers are now in the driver’s seat, they created the shift in how decision makers make purchases. Since the death of b2b salesmen, research before purchase is now in the hands of the customer. B2b buyers are actually 75% into the purchase before they even go through the buyer. That means that not only did they do research on their desired product, but they also do not trust the information provided by sellers. They embrace digital and search before making purchases. In fact, they will make on average 12 searches on the product before purchasing.
Decision makers are becoming much younger, so the target audience must be lowered. Since millennials grew up with technology, they are using it to their benefit. It’s now a multi screen world, and millennials will use multiple devices before making a single purchase. Out of all of these young decision makers, 70 percent of them are engaging in video content. The businesses that keep up with the usage of videos are 25% more likely to have these customers engage with them. Engaging with millennials by making use of 21st century technology will help you to defeat your competition. 75% of mobile sites take 10 seconds to load, but a majority of the people will leave after 3 seconds. Be the business with quick speed and easy-to-access content, so your customers will enjoy their time on your site.
Data is important to keep creating, since more data is necessary keep up with millennials. Each minute, 2.4 million searches on Google are occurring and 142 emails are being sent out or received. Finding out data about customers allows a company to have more personal targeting, instead of targeting to just one large group.You can connect with your audience based on different likes, re marketing, etc. Technology is now changing the way businesses are marketing. Machine learning is being used by businesses such as: artificial intelligence, speech searches, recognizing search patterns, etc. 20% of all searches are now voice-based. This means that customers are in the driver’s seat, and by 2020 – businesses using machine learning will together amount to 1.2 trillion dollars in sales.
Finally, what we can take away from this Google Partners event is that customers are now changing the way we do business. More data is being created than ever, remarketing can be used to target similar people to your customers and machine learning can create dynamic ads and match customers to your type of business.