Digital Marketing …. The buzz which never stands still. Digital Marketing is an agile field where trends move on and techniques which worked well last year won’t be working for the coming years ahead. Hope you all agree with my understanding. To ensure your brands stand ahead of the competition it’s very much important to move with the times. Today’s tech landscape needs a compact digital marketing strategy. Digital Marketing these days is the bread and butter of the CMO’s. The success of a business depends upon the precise strategy turning leads into sales, new customers, and growth. Thing of the past is traditional advertising and these days it’s more irritating than being effective.
Here is a roundup of some of the biggest digital marketing trends to watch in 2018 to enhance your digital marketing strategy.
Prioritize the needs of your customer
When you are building a brand online do not lose your sight of the customer you really want to target. An ongoing struggle goes on between brands fighting their way to the top of search engines for their promise of discovery and valuable traffic. Many potential online customers are cynical, weary and suspicious. Customers have their own concerns, priorities, needs and none of which are your brand. Start by addressing questions and concerns, and trust that they’ll come back to you when they’re ready to transact. Deliver that ray of sunshine in their hour of need.
Update and audit your SEO more frequently
Knowing your product or the services you offer is very simple yet will that be so easy to influence your audience? Is it true that you are certain your product is reaching your targeted audience? Search Engine Optimization is the most ideal approach to enable your brand to contact the general population you need. Google refreshes its algorithm in excess of 500 times each year and that is the reason specialists in this field prescribes refreshing your SEO once a quarter. Research for the keywords that can influence your business to pick up footing in the web search tool cycle to make your brand discoverable as could reasonably be expected.
Blogging: a lead generation tool
Discussing SEO: Posting noteworthy and productive content guides individuals to your site and social networking pages, while furthermore increasing your rankings in search engines. Honestly, marketers who blog are more inclined to experience the positive return on investment, and organizations that blog create a larger number of leads than the individuals who don’t.
Each post you make is one more recorded page on your website, making it more probable for the customers to find you while searching online. Advertisers who organize blogging are 13x more prone to enjoy positive ROI. It additionally demonstrates to search engines that your site is dynamic, which will help surface your content to the top of search engine results. Further, blogging gives your brand a voice, and the majority of the consumers say they will probably purchase from a brand that is real as opposed to non-exclusive.
High-quality webinars and live events should be hosted
Various digital marketing resources are available which can be used to engage with your audience including webinars, online promotions, podcasts and more live events. Using a third party to streamline the process of event promotion helps to make it a seamless experience. Getting some external help with the details you can focus on creating an experience your customers could remember even after it’s over.
Refining and expanding email distribution efforts
One of the best tools to be added to your toolkit to easily reach your audience without any extra cost is termed as Email marketing. Increasing use of the mobile devices has helped to increase the Email open rates on mobile devices. Population these days are the cell phone users and they prefer accessing emails on their phone rather than a desktop. Emails are the dynamic notifications which works better than other mobile forms of notifications as they do not cost the reader anything. It’s the best way to engage your audience across platforms and can help you to keep your brand on top of their mind.
Video Marketing
2018 will be a big year for video marketing as companies incorporate this kind of marketing into all aspects of the consumer experience.
Social media is vital
Social media is getting an important place in everyday life of individuals. It is becoming one of the biggest tools for marketing any brand. Find out which platforms are widely used by your audience and then target your posts to the best times and dates to share. Start engaging with your audience through conversations on social media.
Personalization
Personalization does not mean simply including the recipient’s name in an email. Start the process with collection of data. Getting personal will not be possible if you do not know anything related to your audience? Understanding customer habits, preferences and behavior gets easier after gathering data about that individual.
Data gathering will help you to understand customer behaviors, habits and preferences. This will also help you to understand what they want to see and what they’re looking for. Think about different attributes to collect data. This can be anything from spending habits to your customers interests and hobbies. No need to send your customers with a long questionnaire. Use a discrete way to get your customers interest and create a buyer persona to meet their needs.
Consistency over every platform
Your marketing content ought to be appropriate for both mobile and desktop devices. Regardless of whether your desktop version looks extraordinary make a point to see if it clearly interprets crosswise over different gadgets. Customers expect consistency over every platform they utilize and the better accessibility you provide your audience the more probable they are to buy. Authenticity is the most indispensable perspective in any of the procedures. It will enable you to interface with your group of onlookers in ways previously unknown and construct a brand that they’ll consistently want to engage with.
Give importance to user generated content
Years before when marketing strategies didn’t exist, word of mouth marketing was the most powerful tool driving business profitable results. It is still one of the most valuable and important marketing forms. Brands encourage customers to talk about their online experiences. Hashtags are coined as user generated content and audience are engaging with brand hashtags and by sharing videos and images based on their experiences.
Chatbots
Digital marketing this year will be all about speed and consumers these days expect real time communication 24 hours a day. Here comes the role of instant messaging. Facebook messengers are used by people and there are approximately 2 billion interactions with businesses per month on the platforms. It is rapidly becoming the most important forms of communication utilized by few brands to its full potential. AI powered live chat tools can receive immediate responses to basic repeatable questions.
Conclusion:
Digital marketing trends have come a long way in the past quarter century. Today the pace of changes has reached an accelerated speed. Marketers who incrementally update their digital marketing strategies to keep pace will outperform rivals. In fact, that may be the smartest digital marketing strategy of all. When we plan our marketing strategy and activities for the year, it is a good idea to look into trends not to miss out on any opportunity.
Do you have a clear, integrated strategy for digital marketing?
I’m Ajay C Thomas, Founder & CEO of Sweans Technologies Ltd, a global agency specializing in website design, branding, web application development, and eCommerce, serving clients around the world with proven success.