Increasing competition on a global scale continues to erode profit margins and organizations are forever scouting technological solutions to maximize productivity, reduce costs, and maintain an edge over the competition. According to a report from MarketsAndMarkets, social media marketing and management solutions are playing a key role in this, fostering a market size projected to grow to $41.6 billion by 2026.
Analyze sales and markets to identify gaps
Enterprises now more than ever are striving to integrate demographic, competitive, and business information with customer data. As consumers have become more brand conscious, companies are setting out to understand the intricacies needed to outperform their competitors and analyzing sales and various markets to identify gaps.
Customers now demand premium quality, lower prices, and superspeed delivery of products and services. Marketing companies are playing a big role in delivering social media marketing solutions incorporating advanced analytics to help achieve market goals. These social media management solutions can be applied variously across a wide range of business functions: customer engagement, customer relationship management (CRM), publishing, advertising, sales monitoring, and real-time analytics.
Exploring unstructured social data and responding to dynamic market conditions helps boost sales and improve operational profitability. By harnessing social media issues and solutions effectively, companies can harvest a vast amount of data regarding customer sentiments towards brands and plan commercial and marketing activities accordingly.
A new report from 360 Research Reports indicates that the global market for digital content creation tools is expected to ramp up at a growth rate of 9.1% between 2020 and 2025 and is expected to reach $16 billion by 2025. The growing demand for content creation tools is spread across various business sectors as marketing professionals attempt to reach a larger consumer base.
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Social media use improves market presence
In addition, companies may use social media marketing solutions to improve their presence on the market and achieve a quite competitive goal by analyzing the competition and consumer behavior on social media platforms.
Prime factors driving the growth of the market include an increasing focus on market and competitive intelligence, an escalating desire for search return on investment (ROI) for social media strategies, enhancing the customer experience with social media, and burgeoning user engagement thanks to social media via smartphones.
The MarketsAndMarkets study finds that organizations with revenue of less than $10 million—small and medium enterprises (SMEs)—are contributing the lion’s share in the overall social media management market. Social media management is a low-cost solution for SMEs and can form the backbone of digital marketing and customer engagement strategies. SME revenue share, therefore, is expected to pursue its growth as these organizations deliver to specialized markets with limited resources and continue to strive to reach a global audience and expand their customer base.
SMEs especially in high-growth markets such as Asia-Pacific (APAC) and the countries of the Middle East is increasing, contributing to the growing market. Social media management tools afford marketers the ability to engage directly with their audiences across different social media platforms.
“Focusing on the right marketing investments for your business is important so that you don’t waste your efforts.” – as explained by Malkah Esther Glass, the content writer from 12Handz, in one of her recent blog posts. As she continued, “The right marketing channels can help you get new customers. And more than that – they can get you the right customers, which will help you build your business the way you envision.”
Video content creation doubles in 2021
As salespeople and marketers continue to look to digital marketing, they are increasingly turning to video content to get their message across. A report by Vidyard reveals some important insights in video content creation, engagement, and the attendant contribution towards business success.
Vidyard analyzed data from 750K videos published by over 1.5K businesses in 2020, shining a light on how video contributes to marketing efforts across a large variety of industries, enterprises, and personnel—all this relative to past statistics.
Part of the main takeaways is that the number of pieces of video content shared by companies rocketed 135% year over year, fueled by user-generated videos. The figures reveal that sales teams, tech firms, financial services companies, and professional services practitioners are shifting fast to video to market their goods and services.
Vidyard reports that the surge in video marketing was detected as early as April 2020, when sales went “remote” and digital marketing strategies began their ascendance under the influence of COVID-19 restrictions. Notably, organizations in the financial services sector steered up their video creation by 129%.
The education sector saw a 200% increase in video use. This upward trend dominates in industries in which in-person customer interactions were previously the norm. The shift to the digital economy is accelerating video for marketing, sales, and customer experience teams.
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Emerging video marketing trends
The Vidyard report finds that, of all videos published online, 40% were made in-house and uploaded to video hosting platforms. The technology industry produced the greatest number of videos for four years in a row, accounting for 583 new videos created per business over the period of a year. This was followed by financial services, professional services, entertainment, and education
Video adoption was highest in the financial services industry, which saw a 129% increase, followed by the education sector, with a 209% increase. Organizations with 200 employees or less created 75% of user-generated videos, and 45% of videos emerged from small, but also medium-sized organizations—evidence that video content marketing, for now, is much an SME game.
Videos averaged in the length of approximately six minutes, representing a 50% increase in the average length from the previous year. User-generated video reach 60% of the video content created and video creation grew steadily throughout the year.
The value of the global 3D video animation niche, meanwhile, is expected to increase from $16.64 billion in 2020 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.7%, according to a recent report from Grand View Research. This is accountable to the accelerating consumption of entertainment content, 3D mapping, and simulation technology ushered in by the demands of the COVID-19 sanitary situation.
Moovly Media emerges as a market leader
Moovly Media Inc. has emerged as a leader in the video creation field, announcing integration with Microsoft’s Excel. Their users are now able to make videos via Microsoft’s cloud version of Excel—and Google’s Gsheet—and feed data to Moovly’s Automator.
Moovly users are now able also to use Microsoft products in video marketing efforts, for example, by sending personalized videos to many recipients by engaging data in an Excel sheet. This innovation builds on Moovly’s previously announced integration with Mailchimp, integrations that are evidence of the desire for seamless video production with top-tier tech service suppliers and products.
Microsoft cements big tech role in digital adaptations
Microsoft continues to cement its big tech role in the adaptations towards digital marketing. The software giant reported a 21% “seat” increase to a total of 359 million remunerated Office 365 seats. By adding subscription flexibility, Microsoft stepped its count of businesses using Office 365 up to one million. Office 365 individual users continue to rise, especially amongst the SME market.
Microsoft has moved fast in many areas, bringing cloud computing products to support customers and partners as the digital landscape changes rapidly and radically. The healthcare industry, for example, has taken well to a product dubbed “Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare”. This new product is geared to serve the comprehensive and specialized needs of an industry that has experienced many upheavals and responded with fast digital transformation.
Adobe records growth of 26%
Creative industry darling Adobe for its part reported quarterly revenue of $3.91 billion in the first months of 2021, a record growth of 26%. Adobe’s digital media segment revenue was $2.86 billion, an increase of 32%. Creative revenue grew to $2.38 billion, 31% growth. The strong numbers continue to roll in, with document cloud revenue pegged at $480 million, 37% up year-over-year growth. Operational cash flow came in at $1.77 billion.
Sonos steps up soundly with Salesforce integration
Customer relationship (CRM) leader Salesforce has responded in its turn, announcing success in a team-up with sound equipment and software company Sonos. Sonos credits Salesforce with transforming digital shopping for the business by steering in more personalized, from-anywhere customer experience.
Hit by the many COVID-19 pandemics shuttering, many Sonos retailers closed, affecting how customers discovered products and shopped. Correspondingly, however, Sonos saw a surging demand for its wireless audio systems. This shift is accountable to many people feeling “trapped” at home and seeking to enliven the experience of working from home working and being entertained by enhancing their enjoyment of streaming films, audiobooks, music, podcasts, TV shows, video conferencing, and more.
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Oracle opens GoldenGate
Oracle Corporation has taken its offerings to new heights with GoldenGate, a highly automated, fully-managed cloud service giving customers the serenity that valuable data will always be available anywhere—ready when they need it—and analyzable in real-time.
