If you want to thrive as a business, you need to have a good online presence. More than 60% of the world’s population uses the Internet. That’s a lot of potential customers you could be missing out on if you don’t implement digital marketing strategies.
However, as technologies used to promote brands continue to advance and consumer behaviors change, the digital marketing strategies that worked before may no longer work in the future.
To ensure your digital marketing efforts aren’t in vain, you need to keep up with this ever-changing landscape.
From the rise of video marketing to voice search, here are six digital marketing trends you should know to ensure your efforts continue to yield excellent results.
6 Must-Know Digital Marketing Trends for Today's Businesses
Consider these digital marketing trends when running your digital marketing campaigns and you should be good to go:
1. Increased Focus on Social Media Marketing
With its over 5 billion users, social media remains one of the most effective digital marketing channels. Social channels such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and others now come with a wide array of features that allow businesses to reach potential customers in different ways.
An increased focus on social media marketing is, therefore, expected. Here are the specific features of social media that will continue to convince marketers to zero in on their social media marketing efforts:
Direct engagement with customers
Social media continues to be an excellent platform for engaging directly with customers. Businesses can respond to customer queries and address concerns in real time. This boosts customer satisfaction, which also enhances brand loyalty.
Viral content
Social media stands out for its ability to make social content viral. Everything from your infographics to text-based captions can reach audiences beyond your immediate social network.
Don’t expect your content to go viral as soon as you post it on your social platform, though. To increase your chances for viral content, do your research on what types of posts your audience likes. Also, take the time to get more Instagram followers or add more Facebook friends. The more people you reach with a single post, the more potential shares you get.
Targeted ads
With social media’s excellent targeting features, marketing efforts can be more efficient and effective. B2B SaaS marketing agency can help B2B and consumer brands not only reach the right people with their social media ads but also reach them at the right time.
Influencers
Influencers continue to hold sway over their followers, which makes them a powerful tool for brands looking to reach a wider audience. With influencer partnerships, businesses can enhance their brand credibility and drive engagement, and, ultimately, generate sales.
Analytics
Social media channels come with powerful analytics tools that enable brands to evaluate their marketing campaigns and gain a deeper understanding of their audience. As a result, they can refine their marketing strategies so that they yield optimal results. With the rise of Web3 marketing agency, brands are also exploring new decentralized platforms that allow for direct, transparent engagement with audiences.
2. Continued Rise of Video Marketing
Over 90% of businesses already use video as a marketing tool, and there are many reasons why this trend will continue. The number of digital video viewers worldwide is 3.3 billion. That number is expected to rise, with consumers in 2024 increasingly expecting brands to come up with video content, according to a Hubspot study.
But it’s not just these rising consumer expectations for this type of content that guarantee the continued rise of video marketing.
It’s also the inherent benefits of video that brands can continue to enjoy. Here are some of them:
Higher engagement
Videos, by their very nature, engage. Interactive content like videos sees 52.6% higher engagement than static content.
Improved recall
Video has been found to boost retention by a whopping 83%. That means when brands use video to disseminate their brand messages, these messages will likely be remembered. This boosts the likelihood of conversions.
Build trust
Video content like behind-the-scenes and live Q&A sessions humanizes brands, building trust and credibility.
SEO benefits
Brands can enhance their visibility online with video since this type of content–if with video titles, tags, and descriptions optimized for SEO–typically ranks high in search engine results. Videos on websites can also increase dwell time, which indicate user engagement and content relevance that can also impact rankings.
3. Emphasis on Personalization
Consumers–81%—prefer brands that offer a personalized experience–and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. If any, the trend is for consumers to demand even more personalized experiences. In fact, 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to experience this level of personalization.
That’s why marketers will continue to emphasize personalization in their digital marketing campaigns.
Personalization as one of the most important digital marketing trends will continue to take different forms:
Tailored informative content topics: Brands will continue to produce informative marketing emails, blog posts, and social media content on topics that resonate with their target audience. Hence a robust content strategy to create diverse and engaging content can be helpful.
Product recommendations: Brands will continue to use purchase data to customize their product recommendations on their ads and promotional emails. These customized product recommendations can also appear on websites. You can generate domain names that are personalized and use them to complement your customized recommendations. For example, shoesforyou.com can showcase the shoes you’re recommending to a website visitor who loves shoes.
Personalized rewards and discounts: Brand rewards and discounts will be tailored according to a customer’s known interests and preferences. For instance, a sneakerhead won’t be offered a 20% discount on a leather bag but on a pair of sneakers.
As users continue to seek relevant experiences, companies will continue to implement personalized marketing and make them feel valued.
4. Growth of Voice Search
This is one of the most important digital marketing trends you need to know. Studies predict, after all, that more consumers will be reliant on voice assistants like Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana for their needs. A forecast by eMarketer said a whopping 162.7 million Americans will use voice assistants by 2027, way more than the 149.1 million in 2024.
That means more digital marketers will optimize their sites for voice search, and so should you.
How can you do this? Follow these tips:
Research keywords for voice search. Target long-tail keywords (“ways to edit an Excel doc”) and question keywords (“how to edit an Excel doc”) with your content. The ultimate goal is to get voice assistants to serve it when a relevant question is asked by the user. You can use tools such as Semrush to look for accurate search keywords for voice to use.
Use conversational language: Ensure your content has a conversational tone. Don’t use overly formal language. Also, avoid jargon and technical words.
Don’t forget local SEO: Optimize your site content for local SEO. That entails using local keywords in your relevant content and optimizing your Google My Business profile, among others.
How is local SEO relevant to voice search? Well, think about it. When someone uses voice search, they’re probably using their phone and are on the go, looking for something nearby.
5. Use of generative AI
Voice assistants aren’t the only artificial intelligence devices revolutionizing the digital marketing landscape. Generative AI such as Writer and ChatGPT are also transforming the way digital marketers work—and are expected to continue to do so.
As generative AI technologies become smarter, digital marketers will continue to use them to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of their campaigns. These tools will continue to help in:
Content creation: Generative AI will continue to fast-track the content creation process for digital marketers. Whether it’s a blog article, a marketing email, a social media post, or even just images, generative AI will continue to help digital marketers save time, which they can allocate instead to other important aspects of their campaigns.
Personalization: Generative AI won’t just continue to help digital marketers create quality content in record time. It will aid them in personalizing this content, too, as it become more trained in analyzing customer data.
Overall, businesses need to fully embrace generative AI and recognize that, alongside human creativity, it can help them drive optimal marketing results.
6. Importance of SEO (traditional)
We mentioned how local SEO will continue to become a critical component of digital marketing because of the growth of voice search.
But that’s not the only type of SEO you should look out for as a digital marketer years from now. The more general SEO (or traditional SEO, if you will), will remain one of the most important digital marketing trends businesses should know about. Almost half of all Internet users employ a search engine like Google or Bing on a single day. As these technologies become more dependable and learn to house even larger amounts of data years from now, that number will likely increase.
That means businesses that want to stay competitive will have to up their SEO game. Here are some tips to follow for continued SEO success:
Keyword research and content optimization: You should leverage tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush to determine what terms users employ when making relevant search queries. Then optimize your content for the relevant keywords.
Guest post: Write guest posts for authoritative sites and incorporate your backlinks.
Create good site content: Search engines like Google value the user experience, and that’s not likely to change in the near future. As such, creating high-quality site content is likely to continue to increase your chances of ranking in search engine results pages.
By prioritizing the best SEO practices, businesses can enhance visibility, drive website traffic, and ultimately boost conversions even years from now.
Conclusion
To remain competitive as a business, you need to have an understanding of emerging digital marketing trends that can shape your promotional efforts.
You learned six of these from this article. These are:
- increased focus on social media marketing
- the continued rise of video marketing
- emphasis on personalization
- growth of voice search
- use of generative AI
- importance of SEO
By fully embracing these digital marketing trends, you can streamline and refine your marketing campaigns to generate optimal results.
