Digital Marketing Trends to Grow Your Business

Your business has to look to meet the needs of a mobile and social media addicted customer. Following these digital marketing trends will reveal why.

I think the businesses that will be the most successful post-COVID-19 are those that adapt their strategies to align with these online trends.

Adopting new online marketing techniques will also be paramount. It will give you a competitive edge and ensure a good ROI. To help point you in the right direction, I have identified trends likely to affect digital marketing ROI.

Email Marketing

Contrary to speculations, email is not dead. Despite external market conditions, as noted in this article, it has remained quite reliable.

Email marketing allows your business to nurture prospects through a lengthy decision-making process without the same budgetary commitment as other channels, like paid social.

Where to direct your email marketing investments? The same article mentioned above says that according to Smart Insights, 45% of email marketers report that engagement is their #1 obstacle to successful email marketing campaigns. 65% of respondents think personalisation is the best way to improve email marketing effectiveness.

How can you leverage email marketing solutions already in your tech stack or available from vendors to generate emails that include personalised content and offers based on behavioural data you have about a person? Email marketing automation will expand and intensify. Personalising email marketing campaigns based on your email list is fine, but it can be highly labour-intensive, prohibitively for smaller businesses, and well-suited for large enterprises.

You can trigger personalised email campaigns based on user behaviour by linking your web analytics to email marketing platforms.

Email marketing automation software, such as ActiveCampaign or HubSpot, can integrate with your website and trigger email campaigns based on specific website activity.

Traditionally, lead nurturing is limited to the email marketing world, but that is changing and changing fast.

Its low cost and targeted reach make it the perfect base to build other online marketing initiatives.

Email is the most measurable marketing channel. It has a proven and reliable high ROI. Combined with other online marketing channels, it becomes even more powerful and effective.

Email marketing is a great way to drive traffic to specific product pages for online retailers. Another good thing about email marketing is reaching out to all customers during business or non-business hours.

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Online Marketing Analytics

The first step to improving any metric is to measure it. If your business has an online presence (not just a website), enhance integration with online marketing analytic tools like Google Analytics.

It will empower your business to extract detailed data. Your analytic report will highlight new opportunities to optimise your marketing campaigns, show results, and show market share.

Your analytics will help you answer many questions that can move your business forward. For instance, according to this article, if over 75% of your traffic comes from smartphones and mobile devices, or your analytics show a consistent rise in mobile traffic to your website, a mobile-first design may be suitable for your business’s website. Through their mobile-first indexing, Google now encourages website owners to take a mobile-first approach to develop their websites.

Understanding your analytics can help you leverage and increase your search engine results since it will enable you to see and track what’s working and what’s not so you can make tweaks and adjustments.

New predictive analytics, powered by AI, can help you ensure that your digital marketing plan and campaigns are efficient, whether you’re advertising on Messenger, Playables, Carousels, or Stories, e.g. Instagram Stories Facebook Stories, etc.

Your business can trigger personalised email campaigns based on user behaviour by linking web analytics to email marketing platforms.

It requires an investment in email marketing software and web analytics that integrate directly with your customer relationship management (CRM) solution.

Therefore, your business must prepare to explore new opportunities.

Blending Email Marketing with Social Networking

Social networking is now the number one activity on the Web. It plays an integral role in the vast majority of customer buying decisions.

There are 1.3 billion active users on Facebook Messenger each month and between people and businesses via this messaging app.

As we enter a new decade and Martech continues to change rapidly, here are the digital marketing trends we're looking forward to seeing in 2022. Click To Tweet

The same article mentioned above notes that as a business owner, you don’t have time to email every new subscriber, chase down every abandoned cart and block out time for social media posts about sales and promotions on social media and through email.

But when you blend email marketing with social media marketing as a digital marketing technique, it becomes more efficient. It can extend reach, enhance engagement, grow customer opt-in lists and build customers’ trust and loyalty to your brand.

Mobile Marketing

According to this article, with the decline of desktop usage and the prevalence of smartphones for most internet browsing, we create more websites with a mobile-first design.

When designing your website, ensure you deliver the best experience to mobile users while including features designed to improve desktop and mobile use.

Why choose a mobile-first web design? You can integrate mobile features like voice detection and camera use into your website with a mobile-first design. It will also help mobile users to navigate your website with greater ease and increase conversions.

The article cited above notes that as 80% of smartphone users use their phones to play mobile games, it’s easy to see how gaming can be a draw in e-commerce.

The existence of different telecom operators has opened up various avenues for mobile marketing.

Mobile marketing reaches your targeted audiences and drives the urgency of your message in real-time while extending marketing reach—building customer retention and loyalty and building a robust, interested and opted-in customer base.

Mobile’s low execution cost means maximised campaign effectiveness.

This means that many people will interact with your digital channels on their mobile devices, so ensure that you optimise your digital channels to provide the best mobile experience possible to lead to conversion.

Messaging Platforms

We will see increasing use in platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp by brands as digital marketing tools for their online marketing campaign. Customers want real-time replies to their questions and queries. This demand for instant responses has put a lot of pressure on small and medium businesses/brands to use messaging platforms as customer service and support tools to meet the needs of their customers and ensure business growth.

We will see how wise brands use these platforms as the year progresses. Read this article on how to use these platforms for marketing.

Micro-Influencers

Increasingly, brands are ignoring the Kylie Jenners and Kardashians of the world. Instead, they’re seeking “micro-influencers,” i.e. individuals on various social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Snapchat and TikTok who have relatively small, specific, but highly engaged followers. Using these micro-influencers offers one of the highest conversion rates of any marketing, even traditional marketing.

What resulted from that ‘social media influencer’ you hired to mention your brand on their social media presence? Were you impressed or disappointed? Read this article for tips on avoiding scams by so-called social media influencers.

Brand Fatigue

There is an increase in advertising by brands who want to engage with their target audience on social. With this continued reliance on advertising to reach their audience, the average Internet user also increases brand fatigue.

This deluge of adverts frustrates many followers. These frustrated followers now experience what we call brand fatigue. So your brand needs to find creative means to avoid brand fatigue.

These are exciting times for marketers. Advertise, but you need to make sure your adverts don’t suck, or your fans will tune out.

Live Streaming

Does the thought of live streaming scare you? There is a growing emphasis for brands to shift from using blog posts to using live streaming to engage with their existing and potential customers.

Nowadays, customers want to see and experience your brand via their different devices in real-time. Is your brand prepared to deliver?

Transparency on Social

There’s been a growing demand for transparency on social media for some time now. Consumers want to engage further with genuine brands about their activities on social.

Trust between brands and their consumers has been declining for some time now. Brands that are genuine on social will earn the trust of their target audience.

According to Smart Insights, 45% of email marketers report that engagement is their #1 obstacle to successful Email marketing campaigns. Click To Tweet

Re-establishing consumer trust through greater transparency on social is vital to the survival of your brand.

Voice and Visual Search to Influence SEO

Voice-activated digital assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and others rely on voice search. Voice search will continue to influence search engine optimisation. These assistants are at the centre of the broader shift to semantic search.

Brands need to keep this in mind and focus on tweaking their search engine optimization (SEO) campaign to cater to consumers using voice search. The article mentioned above says they design these voice assistants to interpret and respond to searches spoken in natural language. This focus on interpreting the search intent is an evolution of the search engine experience to accommodate the growing popularity of voice assistants and voice search.

If you have been relying on ancient myths about SEO, now is the time to stop. Read this article on myths about SEO that you should stop believing.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in Marketing Applications

There is increasing use of AI and ML in marketing applications, content marketing and SEO. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning will influence the following areas.

Email Marketing: With the use of AI and ML, marketers will be capable of deciding on the email subject headlines, message copy, and Calls To Action (CTA) to send to the proper persons at the right time.

Website Personalisation: Brands will use AI and ML to study visitors’ activities on their website to offer visitors relevant content at every step of the customer journey.

Social Media Tools: We will also see higher adoption of AI and ML in social media tools to enable a brand to find influencers, trending topics, and hashtags on social media.

Images And Video

It is possible to submit images for search or take photos and search for context. So by using pictures and video, brands can build and engage their target audience in exciting ways.

According to this article, having an image and video sitemap will increase the likelihood of your images and videos being discovered by search engines. To benefit from this, you need to use descriptive filenames for your photos and videos before uploading them to your website or other platforms.

Integrated, Online Marketing

As we enter a new decade and Martech continues to change rapidly, here are the digital marketing trends we’re looking forward to seeing in 2022.

Your business now has the opportunity and the ability to create integrated online marketing programs quickly.

Joining email, voice and visual search, social, mobile and other online marketing channels – and most importantly, measure and optimise those programs with built-in metrics.

Email marketing is the anchor for online marketing. And significant opportunities exist for your business to take advantage of synergies between online marketing channels.

According to Smart Insights, we now talk about ‘lifecycle email marketing’ and sales cadences within B2B nurturing. This highlights the trend of increased integration between channels. Email marketing for prospects and customers is now treated as a better-integrated channel with web, social, display ads, and personal ads.

Mobile marketing reaches your targeted audiences and drives the urgency of your message in real-time while extending marketing reach. Click To Tweet

Regarding search, going into 2022, the end goal is shifting to more SEO visibility in “Position zero.” Position zero refers to no-click searches, also known as Google’s “Featured snippet”, and 2022 SEO marketing trends prioritise it. Featured snippets are mostly for long-tail keyword phrases like questions, sometimes read aloud with Google Assistant voice searches.

Featured snippets are becoming more common on mobile. And according to this article, mobile and desktop featured snippets have grown 11% and 9.5% over the past two years, respectively. The article also notes that 62% of mobile users never click on search results, and having a featured snippet reduces CTR by 5.3%

You need to understand that Google is doing all it can to keep search traffic and consumers on its entities, i.e. Google Search, Google My Business and YouTube. So it would help if you considered this when planning your marketing strategy.

Another interesting thing to note is that according to this article, a survey conducted by Social Publi, 93% of marketers already use influencer marketing. That’s mainly because influencer marketing can often bring in a higher ROI than search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising with Google Ads.

User experience is not just a buzzword. It’s now becoming a central ranking factor for search algorithms. According to a May 2020 Google Webmaster Central Blog post, Google Search now factors so-called “UX signals” into its rankings.

Conclusion

These are some significant trends to watch. There are lots more, but we cannot cover all the patterns now for the sake of time. So which of these digital marketing trends are you interested in?

Mauco Enterprises is ready to assist you with your digital marketing efforts. We have made it our goal to help genuine businesses grow online. Contact us now if you need help developing an effective online marketing strategy.

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