Digital marketing practice and efforts help to increase the online visibility of your brand. It takes the best digital marketing efforts to increase brand awareness. Increasing brand awareness helps to increase chances of making sales.
Digital marketing efforts are constantly changing. Factors related to the needs and behaviors of web users affect the current digital marketing practice. To ensure that it is employing the best digital marketing practice, brands have to stay on top of the trends. Here are six digital marketing trends to follow this year.
Micro Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is not exactly a new form of marketing. Brands have been known to use influential individuals as promoters of their brands. These individuals are paid to draw the attention of potential buyer to the products and services of the brand. They need not have intimate knowledge about the products or services of the brand.
This year, influencer marketing will see to a change of shape. Instead of very popular figures that cannot answer questions about their products and services, brand will employ the influence of far less popular people who have intimate knowledge of their products and services. Certain brands will even use loyalty programs and convert their old customers to brand promoters.
User Generated Content
One of the reasons why micro influencers are taking center stage this year is because customers want someone they can relate with. They do not want some distant individual who has zero knowledge about the Password Protected Products & Pages Plugin telling them to install it. It is this same issue of trust and expertise that will cause the growth of user generated content this year.
More brands will be forced to employ user generated content. It is because more customers are going with the opinions of fellow individuals instead of brand messaging. This year, brands will encourage users or customers to share content about their product or service delivery. Brands will also promote the content generated by users to promote their products and services.
Image Search
Many individuals have been at that point where they want to get more information about an object in a picture. Before now, they would not have been able to do this. This year however, web users will be able to search for answers on the internet if they have pictures of the problem.
Brands will modify their website to.incorporate image search. Search engines have already optimized their algorithms for image search. Search engines are already featuring an image search where web users can either take a picture or upload a picture of what they are searching for. Brands will soon follow suit. It will not just be about ranking high for image search. Websites of brands will include a feature that will enable web user search for results using images.
Voice Search
Just like image search, voice search will also gain traction. Almost all mobile devices have a voice assistant feature. With that voice assistant, web users can search for solutions on the internet via voice notes. Unlike image search, search engines and brands do not need to make serious changes.
To.incorporate voice search, brands will employ the use of long-tailed keywords when developing content. This is because web users will be asking questions when using voice search. Instead of typing in “WooCommerce Product Availability Scheduler Plugin“, web users will ask “how to install the Woocommerce email order plugin on your website.
Social Media Stories
Like many other digital marketing strategies, social media marketing is not new. Social media marketing is currently used by many brands. One method is paid social media marketing. However, this year will see social media marketing take a twist.
Social media stories are becoming very popular by the day. Virtually all social media platforms offer a feature where users can share content that is visible for just 24hrs. This year, more brands will use social media stories to promote their products and services. Unlike regular social media posts, stories offer a medium of sharing content without clogging the social media page of the brand. Brands will research the most appropriate time for sharing social media posts.
Content Marketing
Quite unsurprisingly, content marketing is not going away anytime soon. The content of a website or social media post is the web user’s attention. Content marketing will still play a major role in digital marketing efforts. However, it will be modified to suit the trends.
This year, content will be more interactive. Brands will focus on getting comments from web users. Content will be more about enlightening and delighting web users than showing the expertise of the brand. Even B2B content will be simplified enough for the average person to understand. User generated content mentioned earlier is still content as well.
As stated earlier, it is factors related to the needs and demand of customers or web users that will shape digital marketing trends. This year, customers and web users want to be part of the process. Besides the trends mentioned above, do not be hesitant to use digital marketing efforts that put customers or web users at the forefront.
