Eps 11: Digital Marketing Trends
— Future of Digital Marketing and Trends
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Ernest Price
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More businesses are entering the digital space and competing for customers in 2022, which is why one especially big digital marketing trend for 2022 is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.
All this means digital marketers in 2022 need to adapt their strategies to address this general trend. Take these marketing trends to heart, and take it into consideration as you plan your own digital marketing strategy for 2021. Now that you are familiar with the latest digital marketing trends that will benefit your company in 2022, it is time to implement them in order to achieve a wide range of influence and a higher degree of engagement. Let us figure out how digital marketing is going to look in 2021 by considering the changes that we saw in 2020, which shaped or affected the majority of trends.
Providing more authentic content, using chatbots and voice search, using social media marketing more heavily, and creating engaging UX are some key trends that you should know about in 2021, and leverage. Social media marketing is also experiencing an explosion of growth, with content marketing, SEO, specifically, and viral marketing being the key trends to become more prevalent in 2021. Influencer marketing is also picking up speed, as consumers are hungry for authentic content and product recommendations, making it a key trend that will become more prevalent in 2022. These trends are expected to impact marketing in 2021 and beyond, but this does not mean that you have to instantly abandon what you are doing and shift over to using different, more cutting-edge technologies in order to market your company effectively.
SEO has been, and will continue to be, an incredibly important component to your digital marketing strategy in 2021, but aspects like the experience on your pages and understanding your users intent are becoming critical for ranking better on Google in 2021.
As search algorithms continue to get smarter and more contextual, marketers must put less emphasis on SEO "hacks" and "tricks" and more focus on providing a great, meaningful experience for users. Currently, the Internet Marketer uses Search Engine Optimization to produce Web content that is highly responsive to the search engines, and also the terms and keywords web users are searching for. Other major aspects of Internet marketing include monitoring Web analytics, and creating Search Engine Optimization strategies for expanding a companys or brands reach.
From creating unique content as a marketing strategy to using social media platforms, Internet marketing professionals need to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and tactics being used on the Web. Making the Internet more accessible for all by speaking to them in their own languages, Digital Marketers around the world can increase the effectiveness of their organic results by including vernacular SEO as a part of their strategies.
Every part of digital marketing--social media newsfeeds, display ads, social ads, search engine optimization, even email--is becoming driven by algorithms. These moving parts, as well as so many others, are constantly changing, with new technologies, techniques, and nearly-endless Google and Facebook algorithm updates keeping many digital marketing teams . Truth is, on a high-level, trends across digital marketing tactics are similar every year: there is plenty of focus on search, social, and email marketing, and on emerging techniques for website design and content marketing in order to attract and convert our audiences.
It is difficult to separate out true trends that are going to transform the digital marketing landscape over a couple years, and long-term evolutions in existing marketing strategies. While many of the principles behind marketing stay consistent year after year, the tools businesses use to succeed at marketing are very different year after year. When you are reading about emerging trends in an article such as this, it is all too easy to assume that being a successful marketer can be simplified into following a checklist of best practices and making sure to utilize the latest techniques and technologies.
Marketing has moved beyond branding and advertising; marketers need to work with other departments to focus on creating a great customer experience and engaging them in long-term relationships. Strategic marketing transformation acknowledges this, and makes sure the brand, the reputation of the business, customer relationships, and customer experiences in general are considered throughout all company activities. Agility, adaptability, and continuous innovation are now the table stakes for marketing organizations of any size, across any industry.
There are a variety of drivers to improving the customer experience, like having a robust content marketing strategy that is integrated throughout your marketing funnel, and also advances in artificial intelligence and how this could simplify consumers lives. There is also pushback to increasing digitalization and automation in the interactions between brands and consumers, as well as the push for making marketing more human-like once more. This is an oversimplification, but everything that makes games engaging, engaging, and entertaining is now being used as a marketing strategy by businesses to boost customer loyalty, brand recognition, and sales.
In terms of trends for digital marketing, we can expect to see even more of the predictive analytics tools and applications, like enhanced lead scoring, customer segmentation, and personalization. Across the entire survey suite, marketers are the most comfortable using AI to target ads, customize content on the fly, optimize emails sent, and assess conversions. Analysts at Altimeter highlighted this trend in their report, The Power of Influence, in which they recommended brands invest 25% of digital marketing budgets on influencer marketing, a figure that they estimated will hit $10 billion by 2020, an increase of 5X.
Within media, I focus on changes in search and social media marketing, which are two channels of greatest importance for marketers -- though programmatic display ads use continues to grow among larger brands.