The year 2016 is one hectic year in the digital marketing industry. There were a lot of changes, with Google releasing a new algorithm update every now and then and the shifting of marketing priorities to name a few. We have already left it behind, but that does not mean 2018 is going to give us some slack. This year, the competition will become even more fiercer as business owners and marketing experts are finally figuring out how they can properly execute their digital marketing strategies and where they should redouble their efforts.
Below are the things you should be looking out for when you’re planning your digital marketing campaigns for this year.
Mobile IS necessity
The phrase “opting for a mobile-friendly website” is something you have probably heard or read on articles back then. Now, mobile isn’t something that is highly recommended; it has became a venture that you should take. You need to put mobile on the forefront of your digital marketing campaign by opting for mobile-optimized content.
Google seems to have caught on to mobile optimization as they have put “mobile usability” as one of their webmaster tools. Statistics have also proven that mobile have also surpassed desktop in terms of number of usage. It also has the fastest growth compared to other digital marketing channels, garnering about 10% of the total budget alotted for digital marketing on various businesses.
If you haven’t opted for a mobile-specific approach, then it’s about time you do so. Pick up responsive web designing for your website, make your content mobile-friendly, and don’t forget to put out some mobile ads for your business as well.
Quality content is king
Content has always seen its fair share of importance in digital marketing strategies. Now, we need to emphasize that even more. A research from B2B marketing shows that 93% of the B2B marketers employed content marketing strategies and almost half of them said that the campaigns on that field were successful. To have an effective content marketing strategy, you need to understand two things:
First, content marketing today prefers quality content over numbers. Your viewers don’t visit your website just so they can read your low-quality posts. They visit it for your highly quality content that will provide them with the information they need.
Second, the best thing that a low quality content can provide is an ineffective search engine optimization factor. At worst, it can even bring your online reputation down and damage your SEO.
Social Media Marketing will be one of the main focus
The social media platform has become an integral part of the digital marketing trend. Their contributions to increasing traffic, brand awareness and sales are clearly visible. For that reason, companies will be reallocating their marketing budgets to social media marketing.
Facebook ads and the new advertising option at Twitter are just some of the examples of utilizing your budget for social media. You can also share your content here, interact and engage with your viewers. For this year, it is vital that you focus on social media the most as it is the one that is making the biggest impact on digital marketing.
Humanizing brands is a must
Gone are the overly promotional messages that you automatically send out to your followers, whether they are your site followers or the ones on your social media account. What you want your viewers to picture your business is something that engages and interacts with them, not an answering machine. Businesses that are able to make their marketing approach as human as possible will quickly gain the trust of their viewers.
How can you do this? Simple – put your interactions with them first and sales second. Create a relationship between you and your viewers and always be on their good side. The perfect place for you to accomplish all that is on your social media platform, where you can directly connect with them.
Strategic Email Marketing
Email marketing back then was simply sending out promotional emails to every possible recipient you know of. Now, that kind of notion will only bear negative results on your business. Now, you need to invest more time and effort on email marketing for it to succeed.
The best way of going about this is to provide your recipients with relevant information that they want. You may also want to add more offers, like eBooks and other sort of effective lead magnets. Just like with content marketing, what matters is not the sheer number of mails you are dishing out, but rather the quality of each one that you are giving to your target audience.
Paid ads will be ventured even further
Twenty-five percent – that’s the share allotted for digital marketing expenses by various businesses. And according to a statistics research by eMarketer, most of those will be spent on Facebook and other social media ads. These paid advertisements have been a very effective tool in drawing out target audiences and increasing the business’ brand awareness.
This year, that bar will rise even more as brands will try their best to make themselves more visible on social media.
SEO and SEM will still play vital roles
Search engine optimization will always remain as the backbone of your business. It’s what makes you visible on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. With search engine marketing (SEM), you can bolster your visibility even further. This year may have focused around content marketing and social media, but nevertheless, SEO will still be a factor that you should not ignore.
Paired up with SEM, most of the online marketing budget goes to these two. That should be proof enough that these are still the core of your digital marketing campaigns.
Google+ for Local Optimisation
SEO makes your website visible for everyone. However, it is Local SEO that will make it more visible for the people who are searching for it within your vicinity. In other words, Local SEO targets your local audience. And one of its main components is Google+.
Google+ is Google’s social media platform. Optimizing it will greatly help your Local SEO marketing campaigns as it will put you on Google’s radar for relevant local search.
Online videos will be a game changer
The use of online videos as a marketing tool is already a proven fact. And this year, with the rising popularity of social media, using videos would greatly complement your social media marketing efforts. That is because it’s another way of interacting with your viewers. Linking them to Youtube, which is owned by Google, would be also be a great addition to your digital marketing strategies and will add value to your website.
As for engagement, Opsixty.com projects a more robust engagement in the use of video for engagement via Facebook Live.
SEO, content marketing and social media will get even more intertwined
Search engine optimization and content marketing are two different ideas that Google has perfectly matched up together. When they decided that one of the main factors that can affect page ranking results will be based on the quality of content on the website, that was when these two met and got intertwined. They simply coexist with one another – SEO is useless when traffic redirected to the site has no content to see and quality content is useless if it won’t be seen by anybody because it lacks SEO.
And then social media entered the fray, greatly complementing the relationship of the two. With a great content marketing strategy, one can create high-quality content. Paired with SEO, this will be optimized to have the necessary keywords so that it’ll get indexed by Google for relevant search. And social media will act as a catalyst that will share this content to places, reaching a lot of people faster.
The only constant is change. That phrase defines digital marketing perfectly as it is a constantly evolving subject. And since you are tackling this subject, it is important that you keep a close eye on it so that you can easily adjust your marketing strategies whenever something happens.
References:
How to Use Targeted Content Marketing for Real Results
Stock footage international business people interacting in a meeting
Email Marketing
Google Local Optimization
Video Marketing
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