This month’s HighRoad U topic is near and dear to my heart. As a former economist, I do love my pivot tables, but the marketer in me is the one that loves to ask all those questions and hunt for insights and patterns. Marketers and Analysts will always enjoy hunting for data or information that provide insight into questions such as:

I’ve been singing the praises of persona development since the day I started at HighRoad and I’m seeing that the market is starting to pick up that same message – I see a lot of conference sessions reference the value and importance of persona development, which is fantastic! Organizations (not just the marketing team), need to know who they’re targeting if they want to be able to market effectively. More importantly, and this is why personas matter, you really need to understand what motivates and drives your target audiences. What are they interested in? How do they spend their day? What are their pain points? How do they consume the information you send them? What information do they consume? Are they extroverts or introverts? Are they likely to respond to social media outreach or do they prefer traditional email? How much free time do they have? Are they Baby Boomers, Millennials or Gen X and does that matter when it comes to promoting your programs?

The themes of change, rapid evolution of technology and the need to innovate aren’t new themes from today’s perspective. What is new is the rate at which this transformative change is happening and the certainty of how it will affect associations. Fusions Productions put together another great conference this year, Digital Now 2016, to not only highlight these themes but truly focus on how to move past the fear that comes with rapid change and embrace the opportunity to innovate the traditional association model.

When I look at websites I’m often driven by the need to essentially find or do something that solves my pain point. I didn’t really “surf” sites until I got a smart phone, and to be honest, it was a way to kill time while traveling. So it’s taken a bit of a mental shift to be on the lookout for websites that illustrate the examples I refer to during my HighRoad U or Inbound Lunch Bunch sessions. Imagine my delight when I stumbled onto another example of an Interactive Call-To-Action (CTA) that may further inspire association inbound marketers looking to convert those visitors into leads.

Marketing is constantly evolving. There is always a new way to reach people and sell a product. Digital marketing changes quickly. Every year brings new and exciting trends to the digital advertising industry. Here are some trends you must use this year. 

Marketing strategies of today are completely different from what they were just a decade ago. Before the term inbound marketing was first introduced by Hubspot, the efforts that businesses put into the marketing process were rather different. Ads were placed on television and billboards, fliers were sent out in the mail and people would receive multiple email offers from businesses eliciting their business.