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Digital Marketing Trends

Digital Marketing Trends & innovation are usually of great interest to all marketers as it is an ever-evolving field. A famous saying “Change is the only constant” stands true in the case of emerging trends of technology & platforms in the Digital Marketing trends year over year.

In the past years, there is a paradigm shift observed in the field of marketing where businesses have started adopting marketing practices based on consumer behavior & interest. The customer experience is of utmost importance to businesses. Technology is evolving at a fast pace influencing consumer behavior & interest. Businesses have to adopt technological advancements in digital marketing to stay competitive in today’s online landscape.

Digital Marketing activities that can be harnessed by businesses to drive growth through:

  • Improve your brand awareness via digital channels
  • Increase digital engagement with your target audiences
  • Better managing digital marketing to integrate it into marketing

I am presenting here some of the key Digital Marketing trends that may help businesses not just survive, but thrive in this age of innovation.

Content continues to dominate SEO

Content Marketing & SEO Image

Traditionally, SEO has been focused on the fundamentals like keyword research, on-page or off-page optimization, and structured data. However, the content plays a big role in driving your organic search strategy.

A major search engine Google has changed its search algorithm; the algorithm is now designed to understand the natural language that people use in their search queries. This technological advancement has increased the value of a well-written content.

This clearly indicates that Content Marketing remains a reliable, powerful way to attract new customers to your site & build relationships with them in real, quantifiable ways that deliver long-term value to your business.

As the stats shared by Content Marketing Institute:

  • Content marketing generates over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing & costs 62% less
  • Small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth
  • Content marketing rakes in conversion rates six times higher than other methods
  • Websites with blog content have 434% more search-indexed pages
  • Businesses publish 16+ posts a month get almost 3.5 times more traffic

With search engines continue to value well-researched, regularly updated articles many leading businesses will continue to invest heavily on content marketing.

Increase in Voice & Visual Search

Voice & Visual search is now trending high with a penetration of IoT devices & smartphones in our daily life’s.

Voice search plays an important role in providing all the relevant information that people are searching for through audio content. AI is getting smarter and the number of errors made by voice assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google has reduced greatly.

It is no longer a voice search anymore; we are also seeing other innovative methods like visual search to rise the top digital marketing trends.

Visual search can take the user experience to a totally new level: People can upload an image to conduct a search and get more specific results. There are several platforms like Pinterest Lens, Google Lens, Bing Visual Search, etc. are evolving their visual search algorithms daily to make it more advanced.

Also, as per Social Media Today “62% of Millennials are more interested in visual search capabilities than any other new technology”.

More and more brands are already including voice & visual search in their digital marketing strategies to deliver value-based content effectively to their customers. Keep in mind that audio or visual content is jus not to create brand awareness; but ads are likely to be on their way next.

Hence, businesses adopting voice & visual search strategy isn’t just about staying relevant, its also about giving your customer a unique & optimized experience that will enhance brand loyalty.

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic Advertising is not a new concept in the field of Digital Marketing; but continuous improvements increased the reliance on automated bidding tactics. A simple definition of programmatic adverting is “The use of automation in buying and selling of media”.

Programmatic has rapidly developed since it’s much more efficient for advertisers and media agencies who manage their budgets. Programmatic advertising helps to target more specific audiences by leveraging artificial intelligence & machine learning algorithms to automate the process of buying ads. Automation makes it more efficient and faster, which means higher conversion and lower customer acquisition costs.

According to Forrester research & report, marketing automation technology is expected to grow at a 14% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years. The highest growth for “through-channel marketing automation” platforms will reach 25% annually, with “lead-to-revenue automation” platforms at 19.4%.  

Programmatic advertising is not limited to a single goal and can be used to achieve different results. Even though programmatic delivers the highest conversions due to fine-tuned personalization, in fact, it can be used in every stage of the customer’s journey.

Chatbot or Conversational Marketing

Chatbot Image

Chatbot or Conversational are increasingly becoming an important trend in the field of Digital Marketing. The reality of marketing is becoming clear: it’s more conversational. People want it that way, and so brands are reacting. When consumers have a question, they look for an “immediate” response. This is the reason for chatbots & conversational marketing to get the popularity as it is available even during non-working hours of a business.

Chatbots are essentially an AI based technology uses instant messaging to chat in real-time, day or night, with your customers or site visitors. Chatbots are popular virtual assistants that offer an outstanding customer service by meeting customers’ expectations and automating repetitive tasks – which means that you can focus on more important work. The research report published by Digital In the Round states that “80% of customer queries can be handled by Chatbots; and Chatbot is expected to have a market size of $9.4 Bn”.

Conversational marketing facilitates a one-to-one, real-time connection between marketers and customers. This form of marketing is now available across multiple channels, allowing brands to meet customers on their terms: on the devices, platforms and time schedules that suit the customer best.

Ultimately, the primary goal of chatbots & conversational marketing is to enhance the user experience through a feedback-driven model that fosters higher engagement and greater loyalty.

Social Messaging Apps

Social Messaging Apps are gaining immense popularity to connect people with friends & family. It is a misconception that these apps are just used to send emojis to your friends. However, the businesses are using the social apps to create brand awareness & enhancing customer satisfaction by allowing personalization and add value to the user experience.

Social Messaging Apps

The average daily social media usage of internet users worldwide amounted to 145 minutes per day. The businesses are looking to harness the power of social media & messaging apps.

The popularity of the Social Messaging Apps can be assessed by the statistics below:

  • 1.3 Bn monthly users are active on Facebook Messenger
  • 10 Bn messages are sent between people & businesses on Facebook messenger every month
  • WhatsApp has 1.6 Bn active users & 55 Bn messages are sent every day

With current exposure of messaging apps, people expect businesses to have a presence on messaging apps because it’s a direct and easy way to interact with them.

Influencer Marketing / Live Streaming

Influencer Marketing offers the potential of increased audience and the power of endorsements & recommendations which we know are potential reason for a purchase. It is a type of word-to-mouth publicity that focuses on using key leaders to amplify your brand messages to a larger market.

Social platforms like Instagram & YouTube are gaining lot of popularity where niche celebrities can be seen spread the word about a business or product.

Live streaming by the social influencers is trending very high than ever in the past. The influencers are creating a hype on the social platforms to premier their videos endorsing the brands & businesses.

Influencer marketing is not a new concept as we have all grown up seen celebrities recommending certain products or services on television. It is just the same concept is now trending in the field of Digital Marketing. Hence, influencer marketing is considered to be more authentic than corporate advertising, consumers trust influencers more than what brands say about themselves.

Social Media Stories

Social Stories Image

Social Media stories is another emerging trend in Digital Marketing. This is a concept brought in existence by Snapchat, which was later followed by Instagram & Facebook. Even Twitter & LinkedIn are no longer behind in this race and came up with the same concept.

Story is a temporary photo or video of up to 10 sec that you can post separately from your feed. There’s no limit to how many stories you can post, and together they form a slideshow that any of your followers can view.

Since stories disappear after a set period of time, this is a great opportunity for marketers to make good use of fear of missing out and use them to increase a brand awareness or influencing potential customers with specific marketing tactics like discounts or sale.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of, if not the, most important marketing trend today and likely for the next 5-10 years. The biggest challenge posed to the marketers is that of a growing shift to mobile devices, which is making it difficult to read the content on small screens. Whereas, video can deliver the same information in a format that works perfectly regardless of the devices.

The short-form videos are gaining popularity from applications like TikTok. Developing short-form videos may seem deceptively simple, but balancing branded messaging with the carefree tone associated with short-form videos will require customer research, strategy, and creativity.

If marketers include videos on sites, it’s 50X more likely to drive organic search results compared to text because people find video content more compelling and search engine ranks them higher. Also, the way shoppers research brands and products on social media is evolving, and we’ll likely see social shopping become more popular on these short-form video platforms.

Conclusion: Digital Marketing revolves around PEOPLE

Omnichannel marketing is a great place to close this article on digital marketing trends. Omnichannel marketing captures what we think will be the guiding high-level trend in Digital Marketing: putting people at the center of everything you do.

While marketers continue to work on Digital Marketing strategies, there will always be new trends and external market conditions to keep pace with. But the success of it all will really boil down to how well we treat people—how well we’re able to empathize, recognize, and serve their needs. When a brand incorporates empathy into its marketing strategies, what it’s doing is validating its customer base. The more validated a customer feels, the deeper a relationship that the customer will build with the brand.

We at ascendIT Consulting is an emerging partner for Digital Transformation. Our unique & autonomous business model makes us different from other players in the industry. Our objective is to provide one of the best experiences to customers. We believe in true collaboration between business & technology to innovate a solution tailored for your specific need. We offer a full range of all Digital Transformation services under one roof.