With everyone’s way of life beginning to revolve around the internet, the realm of digital marketing has increasingly become prevalent in today’s age. Readers learn quickly, adapting with the times and adopting practices that tune out the noise to move on straight to what matters to them. Gone is the era of clickbait headlines—today’s media consumers know a superfluous piece of content from miles away and have since learned to avoid these at a glance.
To remain relevant in 2020 and the years to come, digital marketing agencies need to be adept in seeing emerging trends and figure out a way to ride those waves to their client’s benefit. If experience teaches us anything, it’s that customer engagement and loyalty cannot be manufactured; it needs careful cultivation of content that addresses your customers’ needs and concerns in whichever form they prefer.
Here are our top four emerging trends in digital marketing and how businesses and brands can take advantage of them to cut through the noise.
1. Micro-Influencers
As many a failed marketing campaigns will tell you, relying on influencer marketing is rarely the best way to spend your limited marketing funds. However, this doesn’t mean that influencers, as a whole, are ineffective mediums of promoting your brand.
The trick is to stay away from traditional celebrities who may have achieved household-name status, but are irrelevant or disconnected to the product or service you are selling. With traditional media’s hold on popular culture quickly eroding, it makes sense to shift to personalities who have smaller but highly-engaged followers.
Today, Youtubers, bloggers, gamers, and other famous, but niche, personalities often have more clout with their followers than traditional celebrities. It is because they can seem more empathetic and authentic to their audience—which consumers gobble up and pore into because of the heavy relevance and relatability to their own lives!
2. Podcasts
Podcasts have existed for a long time, but the recent push to long-form content and on-demand streaming services has made them invaluable digital marketing tools. Podcasts are relatively inexpensive to produce, can be consumed on-demand—thanks to platforms like Spotify and Apple Music—and are a great way to establish authority on a specific topic or industry.
Podcasts are excellent for:
- Personal brands who want to build their authority in their specific industries,
- Companies looking to educate customers while also entertaining them, and
- Small businesses that want to align with specific audience interests and ideals.
3. Responsive Web Design
With mobile searches surpassing desktop in 2020, it’s easy to see why responsive web design is here to stay. Nowadays, mobile responsiveness can make or break a customer’s experience, becoming the defining factor between a negative or positive impression.
The ubiquity of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, notwithstanding, this change’s primary impetus is Google’s push for mobile-responsive design, which started in 2015. At its core, the goal is simple: to enhance the user experience based on the device that they are using.
4. Voice Search
With the successful integration of virtual assistants, such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, in our workplaces, transportation, and even at home, it’s almost impossible to imagine a world without voice search ports.
According to a survey released by Adobe in 2019, 48% of consumers use voice assistants for general web searches. The message is clear: website owners and digital marketers alike will have to find ways to optimize for voice searching.
In copywriting, this means writing in a tone that more closely resembles how people talk to target keywords that have a high chance of appearing in voice searches.
The Bottom Line
Nowhere is the quote, “The only constant thing in life is change,” more relevant than in the world of digital marketing. Evolving user habits and decisions made by large players in the industry all make the job of a digital marketer exciting and challenging. This means that a digital marketer needs to evolve along with the market or risk the prospect of losing relevance!
Are you looking for more information about digital marketing trends and the latest news in the marketing industry? At Marketing Content, we provide cutting edge insights and information that can be used by small business owners and marketing consulting firms alike. Connect with us and keep yourself up to date with the latest digital marketing trends!