Digital marketing has grown by leaps and bounds in the past couple of years with every major company in the world recognizing the importance and potential of online presence.
The internet gives you the opportunity to reach out and put yourself in front of virtually the entire global online audience. The power that internet bestows a marketer with is immense, giving you the potential to build a worldwide market. So how can you let go of that opportunity and fail to market online?
Digital marketing trends change quickly and what is effective today may not work in the same context tomorrow. But what stays unchanged is that you should cater to the interests of your audience, keep them engaged and drive user interaction. As better methods of measuring user engagement and activity come up, you realize that some of the things you are doing are not that effective and that you need to focus on a few other things that are doing the job for you.
As you delve deeper and understand better, your digital marketing practices get streamlined. As with any other skill, digital marketing needs constant work to get better till the time comes when you can intuitively gauge what will work with your audience and what will not.
Trends in digital marketing are practices that have worked for a large number of businesses and are getting adopted by others. So here are the top trends that are working for digital marketers as of now.
1. Mobile Is the Most Critical Channel
Mobile users have overtaken desktop users and as per a RetailMeNot report, more than three-quarters of senior marketing professionals expect higher ROI from online marketing initiatives.
Marketing outreach initiatives tailored for mobile customers will not see success if you just limit yourself to just creating mobile-optimized website and videos.
Messaging apps and mobile internet have integrated our smartphones into virtually every aspect of our lives. In 2015 Black Friday and Thanksgiving saw sales totalling $4.5 billion of which about 34% came from mobile users.
If you truly want to tailor a mobile-optimized marketing campaign, then it is important that you optimize all marketing outreach activities to cater to customers on the go. A fast loading site is essential and if yours is a WordPress site like more than half of the websites on the Web, then you also need to have the best WordPress hosting service that enables a better performance.
Mobile preferred ads are necessary if a lot of your customers find you that way. These ads are different from desktop ads and are optimized to cater to the needs of mobile users. A clear, concise and succinct ad copy is preferred for ads targeting mobile users. Since you have limited space and words, it is important that you make as good an impression as possible within the first 35 characters of copy.
If mobile ads are not critical for you, then you can make suitable mobile bid adjustments through Google AdWords. You can increase visibility by about 300% and you can also completely remove your company’s ads from mobile devices by making mobile bid adjustment of -100.
Effective CTAs are imperative and do make use of call extensions. There is virtually no excuse now to not to make use of call extensions when most searches happen over mobile. In a majority of instances, users will be tempted to call you and it makes every bit of business sense to have your call extensions, local ones if required, in your ad copy.
2. Personalization of Pay per Click Campaigns
PPC has been amongst the most effective marketing strategies to be employed by online marketers.
PPC ensures that your ads pop up in front of a relevant audience. But for this strategy to work, you must have a highly targeted set of keywords that are relevant and 100% accurate. Even then many businesses experience irrelevant clicks and site visits, and low conversions. It is to remediate this that Google AdWords have come out with Customer Match last year that allows you to target your ads to a set of users whose email addresses you upload.
This feature is also available on Twitter and Facebook which makes it possible to use social media to run targeted marketing efforts along the lines of email marketing campaigns. This also allows you to target segments of customers in various stages of the sales funnel.
3. Going Native Becomes Inevitable
Native ads do not appear promotional and are natural and relevant. You can consider them as a form of advertorial where targeted and useful content is delivered to a niche audience through a third-party publishing platform. In many instances content creation is outsourced by brand to create content that is similar to that on publishing platform and merges seamlessly into the existing site content stream.
Native ads are carefully created content that appears in a user’s feed contextually and in no way hampers his or her user experience. The paid content is not jarring and fits into the wider definition of what a visitor expects to see on the site. A user interacts with the native ad in pretty much same way as with other content on the site, thus driving better user engagement than banner ads on the same site.
Native advertising is not content marketing, but it is a way in which you can carry out content marketing. It differs from pure content marketing in that it is through a third-media platforms and is not placed on brand-owned platforms. In other words, you are renting a place to advertise your brand through a native ad, ever so subtly.
A joint study carried out by IPG Media and Sharethrough has concluded that users view original editorial content (1.2 Sec) and native ads (1 Sec) for roughly the same amount of time. Users will also look at native ads about 53% more frequently than at standard ads. Now you can see why there is no way you can ignore native advertising in 2016.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is a billion-dollar industry and is growing at breakneck speed. There are new trends being created and old rules being re-written almost by the minute. If you want to stay on the top of your marketing game you need to ensure that your online presence is noticed by your customers. Customer engagement is the prime requirement for content marketing campaigns to succeed, so ensure that your content is potent enough to drive that.
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