For years, marketers across the world have struggled to find a foolproof digital marketing strategy capable of ensuring success by increasing the number of visitors, conversion rates, company sales, and overall profitability.
However, due to the complexity of the market, such a strategy is not easy to achieve. Successful digital marketing is a recipe consisting of laborious research, backed by trial and error.
Nevertheless, there are numerous aspects that should be kept in mind to increase the likelihood of achieving marketing success. These aspects can be referred to as digital marketing trends.
In this article, we will cover the importance of keeping up with the latest digital marketing trends. The information outlined below is backed by a series of digital marketing statistics that will help put everything into better perspective
Why Yesterday’s Strategies Don’t Work Today
During the last couple of years, the digital marketing industry has evolved considerably, granted the increasing number of internet users throughout the world.
In the case of search engine optimization, for instance, Google has been actively updating its algorithms to ensure that only the most valuable web pages are displayed in its search results.
However, digital marketing trends aren’t solely defined by what search engines and social media networks choose to promote. Instead, today’s most popular marketing campaigns take user psychology into account.
As part of the trends that will be outlined later on, you will notice how user behavior plays an essential role in the success of marketing campaigns. The main takeaway that you should keep in mind is that digital marketing trends and strategies need to be skilfully adapted to suit the millions of potential customers that you can find in the digital ecosystem.
Any digital marketing campaign that fails to consider users is bound to fail.
Understanding the Latest Digital Marketing Trends
Search Engine Optimization
SEO has been around for a while, and it represents one of the most important digital marketing strategies. Its overall importance is easy to grasp, granted that Google is currently responsible for 94% of organic traffic.
However, simply ranking on a search engine isn’t enough. Your SEO strategy needs to be well-adapted to ensure that the website being promoted ranks on Google’s first page since 75% of users do not scroll past the first page of search results.
Paid vs Organic Traffic
These statistics might get you to consider paying Google to promote your pages. While this can bring an extra amount of traffic, the 2019 SEO trends show that paid search results aren’t actually worth the investment. In fact, 80% of users ignore paid search listings, thus relying on organic results only.
Average Content Length
Google rewards web pages that provide informative, top-quality content. Research shows that an average web page ranked on Google’s first search results page contains around 1,890 words. Content is exactly what you want to focus your SEO efforts on.
Local SEO
In case you’re a business that operates only within a specific region, local SEO efforts should be taken into consideration as well. It’s been shown that 72% of customers who googled a product/service locally ended up visiting a store within a five-mile radius.
Additionally, 33% of mobile searches are location-based queries. Because of this, any business must make sure that its details are displayed correctly on Google since many users rely on this data alone when making a purchase decision.
By keeping these SEO trends in mind, you should be able to make more inspired decisions on what your SEO focus should be. Remember, quality SEO is achieved through trial and error, by implementing the industry’s best practices, and by keeping up with the latest trends.
Google’s algorithms constantly update. Therefore, what worked five years ago might even get your website penalized today
Social Media Marketing
The popularity of social media skyrocketed, and the current user base across all social media platforms continues to grow. In terms of advertising effectiveness, you might want to keep the following stats in mind:
- 60% of users end up discovering new products when browsing Instagram
- 74% of surveyed users have stated that they prefer using Facebook for professional and business-related purposes
- 75% of Instagram users engage with posts and take actions such as visiting a company’s website after seeing a post they enjoy.
Now that we’ve briefly explained the importance of social media for your marketing campaign, it’s time to dwell into the importance and impact of the latest social media marketing trends.
Similarly to Google, in the case of Facebook, paid ads work, yet they aren’t as effective as most people think. The latest trends show that if you wish to get a customer interested, you need to offer valuable content, instead of creating a simple ad promoting your brand’s product.
For instance, statistics point out that blog posts longer than 1,500 words tend to receive roughly 22.6% more likes on Facebook. Blog posts exceeding 1,500 words that are shared on Twitter are bound to get around 68.1% more tweets.
As you can see, there’s a high demand for top-quality, in-depth content.
When it comes down to visuals, high-quality images that provide value account for 75-90% of advertising effectiveness on Facebook. In the case of Twitter, however, video tweets can get six times more retweets when compared to photo-based tweets.
Numerous advertisers also wonder about the best times to post on social media. For Facebook, posts have the most impact if they’re made during the weekdays, between 1 PM and 3 PM.
Instagram, on the other hand, is bound to offer more exposure if posts are made on weekdays, at either 5 PM or 2 AM.
Video MarkEting
Video marketing has been around for a while, yet 2019 trends point towards an increase in the effectiveness of video marketing campaigns. As such, research shows that product videos are bound to increase purchases by 144%.
The impact is also related to how fond we are of video in general. For instance, when it comes down to purchasing a product or service, around 50% of users tend to look for videos related to the product or service in question.
However, it isn’t just website-based demo and product videos that play an important role. The rise of social media has also increased the impact of social videos.
Considering that 45% of people watch at least an hour of Facebook and YouTube videos on a weekly basis, it’s no surprise that 64% of interviewed consumers admitted that watching a marketing video on Facebook has influenced one of their purchase decisions last month.
Engagement numbers are also on the rise. In the case of branded videos on YouTube, the user engagement percentage stands at 32%.
Recently, the advertising market has gone through a phase where users were less receptive to branded content in the form of images, articles, and videos. This was mostly due to the increasing number of low-quality ad campaigns that failed to provide actual value and only relied on call-to-action strategies.
Luckily, this trend seems to have subsided by now, granted that 43% of people actually want to watch more video content coming from marketers. However, this stat is only relevant for high-quality, value-providing video content.
Indeed, video marketing is more expensive when compared to other marketing campaigns, but for a good reason. So far, it is estimated that video is capable of driving a 157% increase in organic traffic coming from search engine results. Therefore, video marketing has a direct impact on the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
From here, things are only looking up. Overall online video consumption trends are on the rise, and recent research predicts that by 2021, video alone will represent approximately 82% of all internet traffic. That said, videos are certainly a gold mine.
Cold Email Marketing
The latest trends are also actively shaping cold email marketing. In this case, email users across the world have to constantly deal with low-quality marketing emails that fail to provide any value. This has led to a steadily declining open rate of marketing emails.
At the moment, however, the open rate seems to be rising compared to the situation in 2018 when it was situated at 18.16% across all industries. The bounce rate, on the other hand, is around 9.60%.
Therefore, to ensure that your high-quality marketing emails provide conversion, brand awareness, and increased profitability, it is essential to follow the latest trends and best practices in the industry. As such, this is the year of personalization and segmentation.
Analyses of customer behavior led to personalized emails with increased open rates. With this in mind, segmented email campaigns have a 14.37% higher open rate when compared to non-segmented emails.
Personalization also leads to a 100% higher response rate. In case you wish to triple the response rate, follow-up emails can be of great help.
While high-quality, personalized emails are effective, it seems that emails written at a third-grade reading level get a more optimal response rate. Therefore, make sure that your emails aren’t too complicated. Unless the reader has showcased increased interest in your business, keep emails short and simple.
Lastly, the email marketing industry has to note that there is an increase in mobile email usage. More than 80% of users open emails via their mobile devices, so a pro tip would be to ensure that all your emails are optimized for mobiles
Marketing Automation
Since there are tons of different marketing strategies, handling all of your campaigns might prove a bit difficult. This is where marketing automation comes in. It is estimated that by 2023, spending on marketing automation tools is bound to reach $25 billion on a yearly basis.
Automation tools can handle a variety of time-consuming aspects. These include customer behavior analysis, posting at set times, sending emails to the right users at the right time, launching your ad campaigns when there’s extra room on the market, and more.
Content Marketing
Overall content consumption across all markets is already at its highest value ever. Research suggests that those numbers are bound to grow even further.
Therefore, well-adjusted, targeted, and high-quality content marketing strategies are bound to play an important role in the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.
For instance, companies that keep a blog tend to receive 97% more links to their website, thus leading to an increase in traffic, but also more sustainable SEO.
Content marketing is also bound to increase leads. As such, B2C companies that have their own blogs can get four times as many leads if they post regularly when compared to businesses that seldom post.
However, simply posting a ton of articles on your blog won’t do the trick. The latest trends indicate that a successful content marketing campaign is only possible with a feasible content strategy.
This is the main reason why 42% of surveyed companies decided to hire a specialized content strategy executive. Yet, the return-on-investment is certainly palpable. Content marketing is bound to provide three times more leads when compared to traditional paid advertising.
In terms of tips to get your content marketing effectiveness up a notch, experts believe that content should actively seek to provide actual, relevant information, rather than simple product reviews and descriptions.
It should also be diversified and instead of being focused on the same, recycled topics because 47% of buyers view 3-5 pieces of written content prior to engaging with a sales representative
A Quick Wrap-Up
Based on everything that has been outlined so far, it is safe to say that the latest digital marketing trends are complex and ever-changing. Yet, no successful marketing campaign is ever easy.
With a solid understanding of the latest trends, alongside creativity and a budget, any company can achieve its short and long-term digital marketing goals.
For more statistics on the latest digital marketing trends, feel free to browse the linked infographic.
