Marketing in today’s era is all about connecting audience to brand in the right place at right time. In the era of digitalization, a best strategy for a brand is to meet it customer online where their major audience spends its majority of time. Digital Platforms are getting attached with various marketing schemes in our day to day life. Hence it is necessary to understand the trends that one must follow to be a pro at digital marketing.
1) Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the best choice when one wishes to build his brand quickly online and bring awareness among its target audience. Influencer Marketing is an approach of marketing that focuses on influential people and hires them to market for the brand. This approach of marketing directly caters to a large group of consumers through influencers.
It is important for the brand to find the right influencer in order to use influencer marketing for improving online presence. These influencers connect brands with the group of their passionate followers to increase the reach of the brand content. The biggest advantage of influencer marketing is that the audience is already existing, all that a brand needs to do is to establish a win-win situation between the buyers and the brand such that they value what each of them offers
2) Paid form of Advertising
According to the current trends, businesses know that they need to have an active social media presence. So they have their profile on various platforms which they update on daily basis. Companies that wish to take their social media strategies at higher level pay for advertisements on these platforms. Facebook alone has more than 6 million advertisers on its platform, whereas in September 2007 Instagram hit 2 million monthly paid advertisers.
Paid advertising on social media helps you reach precise audience, and also makes it easy for you to maintain the budget. As a result of which, paid advertising is being preferred by various business as a part of their social media marketing strategy.
3) Live Videos
Live streaming videos came into the market in 2011 with an app called ‘YouNow’. Later on in 2014, ‘Snapchat’ was launched in the market. In due course in 2015, ‘Twitter’ took possession of the live streaming video application ‘Periscope’ which was unified with social media platforms in 2016. Facebook launched the live streaming functionality with the name of ‘Facebook Live’ in 2016. From 2017, live streaming is available on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Even today, Video content is said to the most popular content. According to a recent study, live video content is so popular that approximately 95% of the brand executives have said that it will be a crucial part of their 2018 marketing strategy. A Research study says that 80% audience prefer live video over blogs and 82% audience prefers live videos over social media posts.
4) Meaningful Content
Sharing fresh content on social media platforms is a crucial part of building online presence of the business. If business websites hope to retain visitors and gain repeated customers, they must maintain fresh content. The customers will know that you are an active business in the industry with the help of the fresh content on the website. Social media marketing and fresh content go hand in hand.
Fresh content holds the make the customers feel passionate about the brand. Moreover, fresh content also helps in improving SEO ranking of your website through Google Bots. Marketers love social media platforms and so to attract more people, the content needs to resonate well with the target market.
5) Voice Optimization
The market is hearing a lot about voice search in the last couple of years. Various brands have come up with their own search functionality. i.e. Amazon has Alexa, Microsoft has Cortana, Apple has Siri and Google has Voice Search. Optimizing a website with Voice Search will bring in quick effectiveness for the customers. If a website can provide quick answers to question of the customers, it will increase the traffic on your website. Quick solution to the customer queries will save their time and on the other hand a website will generate a loyal customer.
Along with adding fuel to website traffic, Voice search can also divert them to the physical location of your business. It also brings in authority to a business website if the name is mentioned as the source, and as a result it will boost the SEO ranking of your website.
6) Artificial Intelligence Bots / chatbots
Chatbots can be termed as software that can have a conversation with a human. Chatbots are in buzz during the current times. The major use of chatbot is to support a business and help it build relations with consumers. With the help of this, a business can provide service to its customer anytime as chatbots are active 24*7.
Chatbots always have an active presence and they can handle various customers at one single time. Moreover, it is a cost-effective measure. It provides 100% satisfaction to the customers and the chances of error decrease. Thus businesses will be able to manage well with chatbots being cost-effective and working for 24*7 with efficiency.
7) Responsive web design
Responsive web design is an approach to build web pages that detect the screen size of the device in which it is operated and changes the layout in accordance to the same. It is one of the major techniques used in order to retain viewers of mobile devices specifically.
A business will be able to generate major mobile traffic along with speedy web pages if it adopts the responsive web design. A major downfall an also be observed in the bounce rate of the website due to which one can witness a major boost in the ranking of the SEO. Increased SEO will lead to high conversion rates that make responsive design an added advantage for business
Conclusion:-
Being a digital marketer means completing assignments and meeting the deadlines. A great marketer is the one who is a trend setter and not a trend follower. A brand should always look for new ways like live videos paid advertisements, voice optimization, freshly brewed content etc. All of these are ways in which brand can revive and engage its audience in order to survive in the world of digital marketing.
Sweety sorathiya is part of Digital marketing team at GR Imagine working as a ProBlogger, Inbound marketing in GR Imagine. GR imagine serves in providing web design & development, graphic design and Digital marketing services in Ahmedabad . Follow Gr Imagine at LinkedIn