Since its inception as a business practise, digital marketing has continually been changing in terms of both how it is defined and how it is executed. The best digital marketers will happily admit that they are constantly re-educating themselves about their craft as new technologies change the nature of the game on a routine basis.
If you’re a business leader or owner, then you’ll understand that the majority of today’s business is conducted online, so it makes sense that digital marketing is a major focus for your company. The scope of digital marketing is immense and goes far beyond the kind of social media posts that ignorant businesses associate it with.
Effective digital marketing strategy falls under the expertise of a leading SEO agency that is able to perform optimisation work on behalf of your business. Outsourcing your digital marketing work to a 3rd party consultancy is a cost-effective way to take care of that element of your business.
Regardless of how you choose to go about your digital marketing efforts, the following information will be essential to preparing future strategy. Let’s take a look at some emerging digital marketing trends and how you can prepare for them.
Smartphones are now the primary focus
Ever since the introduction of smartphones with the ability to connect to and browse the internet from anywhere, the relevance of desktop browsing has waned. Nowadays, mobile usage has overtaken desktop usage in terms of internet browsing, engagement with marketing and purchasing of products and services.
Regardless of your industry or business size, mobile is where you need to be. With Google’s 2015 mobile friendly update and their latest mobile-first indexing algorithm, it’s absolutely essential those websites that want to rank are optimised for mobile viewing.
Mobile friendly optimisation is its own topic that requires some expertise to execute. Above all, the mobile version of your website should provide users with a comparable experience to the desktop version and should load quickly when they visit it.
Voice search is becoming adopted at higher rates
With the rise of virtual assistants like Google Assistant, Cortana and Siri, people are now taking advantage of voice search capabilities to perform their product queries. It is predicted that, by 2020, more than 50% of product searches will be performed via voice search.
In terms of digital marketing, this means that SEO strategy will need to shift in order to target long-tail, conversational phrasing in spoken search queries. Words like “my” and “I” are now being targeted in keyword phrases for the most popular products and services.
Video killed the image star
As hosting technology and download speeds improve, video content has become far less cumbersome as a digital marketing tool. Nowadays, video content has been proven to be the most effective when it comes to garnering engagement in the forms of likes, comments and shares on social media.
By 2021, it’s predicted that video will account for 82% of all digital traffic. This is approximately 1 million video minutes per second by the time we get to 2020.
Needless to say, your business should be exploring what it can do with video in order to enhance its messaging. Include relevant video content across your landing pages, product pages and blog posts to give your SEO a significant boost.
People are opting for personalised content
Even the most niche audiences are made up of a diverse group of individuals with their own personalities and preferences. The best digital marketing campaigns are taking this into consideration and are providing their audiences with highly personalised content that is tailored specifically to them.
A common example of this comes in the form of IP targeted landing pages which show a different version of the page for different geographic regions.
As our second lead editor, Brit Martinez provides guidance on the stories The Marketing Folks’ reporters cover. She has been instrumental in making sure the content on the site is clear and relevant to the readers. Brit received a BA and and MA from University of Alaska Anchorage.