Because it’s hard to predict the future – if not positively impossible – digital marketing is a particularly challenging occupation. As if that didn’t make it hard enough, there are constantly changing algorithms and small tweaks and touches marketers must stay on top of if they want to keep posting great figures.
It’s a dynamic arena saturated with minor disruptive tech that occasionally becomes major. All of that said, there are still discernible movements based on adoption or other valid metrics – such as ROI – that point to broad trends. Ironically, your best opinion might be sitting quietly at a keyboard near you. IT support not only experiences some of the most voluminous exposure to online life through a myriad of clients and their issues, they’re also integral to the whole show.
IT support is still often seen as only the tech arm of digital life, but a company like Mustard IT enables digital marketing from the hardware up. They also have a snapshot of online life few other fraternities can match. Whatever digital marketing trends emerge, IT support is building their platform and keeping the wheels turning.
Here are five current online marketing trends that are certain to become baseline components of digital marketing soon. Some are new, and some are now beginning to peak, having been around in limited form for some time.
SERP Position Zero
SERP Position Zero – also known as a featured snippet – is not the same as search advertising, the paid-for top entries on a user’s search. SERP PZ is a featured piece of text that Google and Bing algorithms serve up as the most intuitive answer to a user query, positioned at the top of the page. It’s considered prime real estate, as many users will look at that and nothing else, and it contains a link to the page source too.
Imagine a user searching “How to kick like Bruce Lee?” The algorithms today are clever enough to know that the person isn’t searching for memorabilia of Bruce Lee nor even his movie clips, although some might appear on the first SERP. The SERP PZ is likely to be instruction or classes offered; the algorithms employ their intuitive understanding to return a highly relevant result above all others. Google’s last Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) update had a major impact on SEO.
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The deep learning algorithm makes Google searches smarter and grapples with the nuances of human language. Particularly complicated searches that demand context to answer correctly have driven Google to release BERT upon the masses.
No one can buy featured snippets. SERP PZ must be earned, which makes it a holy grail for marketers online. It can be difficult to distinguish between SERP PZ and the top ads, but it’s still the most sought-after spot on the page. Today’s search engines are smart enough to (mostly) guess at intent. Merely returning results based on words or structure isn’t good enough anymore.
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The pole position of featured snippets is a competitive space, however – one can tumble from there if a search engine decides that something else would constitute a more authoritative and relevant return for users. Companies hoping to continually occupy such lofty heights will need exquisite SEO, regular content updates and an exhaustive keyword list.
Shoppable Posts
If the question is ‘How many people are on social media?’ then a cheeky (but accurate) answer would be, ‘Who isn’t?’
Social media – no matter that its darker sides are starting to show – remains ubiquitous. Shoppable posts were more inevitable than being an unanticipated arrival. Instagram has evolved, for example, from a playground of envy to one of available merchandise. A billion people use Instagram every month, and a substantial to huge percentage – depending on which stats you read – will use it to find interesting products and buy there. The statistics on Pinterest are no different.
Facebook’s business pages might have seemed corny when they were first launched, as that platform was intended for social gathering up until then. Not so today, where users will often look down upon companies without a strong social media presence, Facebook included. Social media allows marketers to quickly reach consumers – a shortened sales funnel is a dynamite leg up – and consumers, in turn, have begun to expect to be able to source things that they see and like where they feel most in control and at home – social media.
Video Content
Video content has been touted as essential for modern sites for a few years now, and its nature – and importance – have continued to grow. Consumers have taken to video content, and that makes it a great digital marketing tool. Videographers have never had it so good, as the greater business community now considers it imperative to have video content on their site, although news sites and household brands still feel that compulsion keener than most.
Live video – counter-intuitively, as ‘polished’ and professional videos set the bar in years past – particularly gleans a good response from users. Live videos on Instagram and Facebook Live are watched an average of three times longer than a prerecorded message. Not only that, but their popularity almost quadrupled in 2019. Very importantly for marketers, they also induce a far greater level of interaction with posts – almost six times higher – than recorded videos elicit.
Marketers say, ‘content is king,’ but it’s more than just a glib phrase. Content truly is king. In fact, content is set to become a dividing line between the top sites and everyone else. Good, sometimes valuable – but at least engaging and worthwhile – content is the coalface of online sales. Not only is worthy content detected by search engines whether it’s video or text, content is someone’s online voice. It either carries authority or charm, or it’s feeble and negligible.
The days of people reading just any old thing or watching video mindlessly are gone. The bar has been raised ever higher, and users now expect at least some ‘wow’ factor for their time. In the remote reaches of the web, when you’re not available but people are visiting your site, content is the only presentation you have. If it’s lousy, people move on. Content needs to be entertaining or at the very least engaging, and memorable. Good content generates hits and that fills the sales funnel, hence the advent of ‘content marketing.’
One last and prominent aspect of content has gleaned its own moniker, and that is ‘interactive content.’ Encapsulating the notion of live video mentioned above, interactive content is now a prime focus of digital marketers. Interactive content is typically visual and highly engaging, and consumers are seeking it out when browsing. Interactive content has novelty appeal, it engages people with far greater ease, and keeps them engaged far longer than traditional presentations. The pinnacle value of interactive content, however, is that it’s easy to share. It generates the web equivalent of word of mouth, and that is priceless to marketers.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
When VR was being touted a few years back as a looming ‘big thing’ for online marketing, the most common question was, “How?”
First, consumers have taken to Augmented and Virtual Reality as entertainment and practical tools in other spheres. The technology has grown in sophistication and uptake, although AR is emerging as the most applicable tech between the two in retail applications. Second, commercial entities are finding ways to successfully introduce it into their customers’ shopping experience.
Furniture giant Ikea, for example, has developed an app that will allow a user to perfectly visualize how a piece of furniture would fit into their available space. Before buying, consumers can get a literal glimpse of how suitable any furniture piece might be for their homes by using Ikea Place. And Ikea is not alone by any means. Many corporates are doing it, and the floodgates are now open.
Finally, a good use for all that data collected: personalization
The last emerging trend going forward in digital marketing is the culmination of a decade of confusion. Terms like ‘data lakes’ and ‘data mining’ have been bandied about for years, but in a nutshell – for most companies – data was too copious to adequately sort and arrive at a point of value from it all. Everyone collected data like crazy, and only very few knew how to sort it and apply it as a tool for business growth.
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Enter the era of personalization. Spurred by the fact that users nowadays glibly overlook generic advertising online, good old personal mails are finally finding their place in the modern era. Generic ads that lack immediate appeal or any real connection to a consumer are almost immediately dismissed. Companies that try to personalize their offering are far, far higher to induce a positive response for it.
‘You have to be list building’ marketers were saying this in 2010. Well, this is why. Nothing quite lends itself to personalizing like an email. Lists, too, need to be divided into prequalified recipients to heighten a favorable response. The concept of carefully sorted mailing lists, with courteously personalized mail content, is enjoying a golden moment right now. Generic mails blasted out to a mass of people not only have a low strike rate, they can even offend and inhibit later business dealings. Personalized mail, however, lands far better, and induces a far higher uptake.