Digital marketing goes through a series of trends. Since it’s tied to technology (hence the “digital” in the title), it makes sense that things change pretty rapidly. After all, technology advances all of the time. What does this mean for you, marketer or business owner?
It means that you need to stay informed of these trends so that you can change your tactics in order to follow the trends and gain your consumer’s attention. If you don’t do this, then your company will seem outdated. For example, several years ago, one of the biggest trends was crowdsourcing.
Companies had big crowdsourcing campaigns where they asked their fans to send in artwork and other things. These campaigns are no longer as trendy, so doing one now will not get the right kind of attention. Thankfully, there are plenty of new digital marketing trends that you can take advantage of. Here are several of them.
Videos Are Popular
The statistics for videos in digital marketing are pretty impressive.
For example, over 70% of all people have shared a video with people on their social media feed. When you look at the number of companies that have proven that creating videos has helped their sales revenue – 72% of all businesses, to be exact – it’s clear that the video content is latest digital marketing trend.
However, you need to keep in mind that these videos aren’t the same as traditional commercials. Many of them share behind the scenes details that make the company look more approachable. You have to get a little creative when developing this video content and give the consumer views of your products that they haven’t seen before.
On top of this, these videos need to be disseminated in a number of different ways, including on social media platforms, where they can be shared and spread around.
Artificial Intelligence Is Incredibly Useful
This isn’t the kind of artificial intelligence that you’re thinking of.
Instead, of robots creating digital marketing campaigns for you, these AI programs examine your followers, interactions, and the general behavior of your customers in order to help you target them appropriately.
On top of this, there are chatbots that can be used to respond to customer’s questions on Facebook. Some of them are deployed through Facebook messenger or general website chat features, saving you time and money, while satisfying your customers and clients at the same time.
Influencers are Still Useful
Many of the experts believe that influencers are on their way out.
However, they’re still around and many companies are paying them (either in cash, in free product, or in both) to promote their products. The trick is that you need to find influencers who produce more than just a curated product feed.
For example, the best influencers are “real,” or as “real” as it gets on social media, and fit the overall market segment that the company wants to reach. The trick when finding the best influencer is to do some research on the person to make sure that there are no scandals or someone who is not looked at positively.
While no one is perfect, you don’t want that targeting market segment turning against you.
Images Matter
In the past, the words on the screen mattered the most. If you wanted to attract buyers, you had to develop content that sold what you wanted it to. Now, images are important.
We’ve become a more visual society. This is evident through the popularity of videos, and it appears that searches for images instead of words are on the rise. What does this mean for your digital marketing strategy?
It means that you need to develop professional-looking images that show off the product in a real-life setting. You can no longer get away with using just stock photos or even ones that essentially look like stock photos. And then, once you upload them to your website, you need to attach the right alt tags and keywords to them.
Otherwise, your target markets won’t find them on Google’s image search results.
Create Stories for Your Social Media Accounts
It’s incredibly important that you don’t just use your social media accounts to send out a text or non-visual messaging. Instead, you need to use the stories feature on both Instagram and Facebook.
Even YouTube has gotten into the game. These stories can align with your video content, or they can be shorter snippets on different topics that relate to what you’re selling. Since many of these stories are savable and then shareable, you need to produce content that sells your products or services.
Some ideas include panning over close-ups of your products, telling a short origin story, and even doing some behind the scene stuff in smaller segments than your longer videos. It’s clear that video marketing is the way to go!
Digital Cell 