What’s Next in Digital Marketing?

On Oct 4, 2021, a 6-hour global outage of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp impacted users, businesses, and huge brands resulting in a loss of advertising time and promotional revenue. Facebook risked a $79 million loss in ad revenue — an amount that grew with every minute the platforms remained down for global users. What’s worse? This amount will never be recovered. That’s how much brands and businesses depend on social media for their brand marketing and product / service promotions. 

But this outage caused global users to instantly switch to other digital marketing avenues like Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, YouTube even. Twitter appeared to embrace its moment in the spotlight. The company’s main account tweeted “hello literally everyone,” garnering 3.3 million ‘likes’ in four hours! Users began using this outage to create relatable and shareable meme content just like Twitter did. (Still keeping the marketing game strong!)

Now forget the MNCs and think about start-ups, growing businesses, and mid-level companies. What if they only stuck to social media for their marketing and branding activities? This is exactly why exploring other digital marketing avenues and tools is highly important. So, a global outage like this wouldn’t affect your promotion so much. You’d still engage with your clients / customers / followers / potential customers. Here are some digital marketing trends you could follow to thrive in situations like these. 

The Latest Online Search Trends and Predictions

People often surf the internet first before a social media platform to look for service providers that match their needs. Then why not start there? Be available exactly where they look for you; have a website! Search engines like Google have certain tools that can boost your web traffic.

Image source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/macbook-air-on-grey-wooden-table-67112/ 

1. Aim for Position Zero and not always First! 

Generally, readers ask Google a question in the search bar and hit ‘search’ to find the answers that are most relevant to them on the first search result page. Sometimes, Google suggests answers in a paragraph that’s at the top of the result page right below the search bar. These boxes are called Position Zero in the search engine results with images and information displayed in an easy to distinguish box. They get the answer they were looking for and don’t click on the article. This is called a No-Click Search. Google and other search engines provide these to help people find answers quickly and keep people on their website (and off of yours).

For business owners wanting to attract website visitors, it can be frustrating to see lower traffic because Google is handing your potential customer the answer at Position Zero. But these snippets aren’t all bad. When Google uses your website to give answers, it shows your content is valuable. The trick is to ensure you add info for searchers to these snippets to draw readers in and entice them to click on your website for more information and answers. 

No-click searches may benefit the reader and the search engine, but you can also leverage this. Being the subject of a no-click search means you’re halfway there — readers are hooked on to what you have to say. Your next step is to attract them to your website for what more you have to offer. 

Things you can do: 

• Update Page Titles 
• Make ‘How to’ lists bigger yet accurate so that the info is cut off. 
• Give only teaser info and not the entire solution. 
• Use schema to enhance your content 
• Provide details about your website’s trustworthiness and authority, like ratings and reviews

2. Let Locals ‘Google Your Business’

For businesses operating on a local level, like a veterinary clinic or a plumbing company, listing the brand on Google My Business provides valuable information establishing the brand’s geographical location. Having a geographically defined service area with Google My Business listings helps brands to show up in ‘Near Me’ searches. It also provides additional info to customers about your business within Google Search Results. At one glance, your potential customers can view your open hours, get directions to your address, and see star ratings and reviews left by other users. To ensure correct information is displayed, you must verify your Google business listings and keep the information updated. (Updating status to ‘open’ cause Google defaulted all brands to be ‘temporarily closed’ during COVID-19) 

The benefits of verifying your business are: 

• Manage your business information in Search, Maps, and other Google properties.
• Be considered more trustworthy and reputable than unverified competitors. 
• Prevent fraud in the event that someone else tries to act as the owner and claims your listing as theirs.

3. Searches need to hear and see you! 

Voice-activated digital assistants are here to stay and continue to be huge sellers! To be honest, we talk to Alexa, Siri, or Cortana more than some speak to their family members. This growing popularity of digital assistants for Voice Search, both at home and on the smartphone, has led to significant shifts in using keywords during searches. Think about it. You are looking for a 3D cake shop near you. You will type a different sentence on the search bar on Google and phrase it differently while asking Alexa / Siri to find the answer. ‘3D cake shop Malad’ on Google becomes ‘where’s the closest 3D cake shop’ on Alexa / Siri. When writing content, choose your keywords based on the questions people may ask Alexa or Siri. This increases your visibility. Moreover, this digital marketing trend shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon! 

The same goes with Visual Search too. Instead of typing a description for images, users can now upload an image to get information about it and relevant links. If you’re uploading a flower photo, Google returns species info, a landmark image will return historic data, a product pic will return similar projects with links where to buy them. Google Lens, Pinterest Lens, and other related search tools turn a user’s camera into a search bar. 

How can your business leverage visual search? 

• Add high-quality images tagged with descriptive keywords
• Introduce an image search into your online inventory
• If your target market uses Pinterest, consider advertising on this platform
• Have an image sitemap to increase the likelihood of your images being discovered by search engines
• Use descriptive filenames for images before uploading them to your website
• Add alternative text to all images aka “Alt tags”

4. Make it Convenient for Searchers 

Mobile-first website design: 

With the decline of desktop usage and the prevalence of smartphones for the majority of our internet browsing, more websites are created with a mobile-first design approach. Why choose a mobile-first web design?

• Faster page loading – improving both visitor experience and search engine ranking results.
• Less expensive than building an app and a website.
• Integrated mobile features like voice detection and camera use into your website. 
• Easy website navigation thus has a higher chance to increase conversions.

Gamification: 

Let’s think of gamification in the pre-digital age, like McDonald’s Monopoly game – buy certain products, collect game pieces, and win prizes. Simple and VERY effective. Now, as a large number of smartphone users use their phones to play mobile games, it’s easy to see how gaming can be a draw for e-commerce, too. 

Benefits of Gamification Include:

• Increased user engagement
• Users become more interested in your products or services
• Provides clear calls to action on how to convert
• Can be used for educational and training purposes
• A great way to bring users back to a website

AR and VR: 

With access to VR and AR technology and constant updates, brands are offering tours of facilities, taking users through creating products, and creating interactive 3D models. This gives users a thorough understanding to examine products. As AR/VR technology becomes more accessible, even smaller businesses can get in on the action. AR is already being used by major companies like IKEA. Using their app and AR, customers can see what a piece of furniture would look like in their space before purchasing. One of our clients Nerolac also has an app called Colour My Space, where potential customers can view colour schemes for their walls by using pictures of their own homes. How cool is that! 

Benefits:

• It offers a more immersive shopping experience
• Helps the customer make buying decisions.
• Offers a more personalized experience.
• Increases brand awareness and user engagement.

Video marketing: 

Video became one of the top forms of content in 2019, and that trend shows no sign of stopping. Think about the benefits of video marketing: Customers respond well to videos, engagement increases, and videos are cost-effective and easy to put together. Best of all, it offers one of the highest conversion rates of any form of digital marketing. But, like every other digital marketing trend, even continuing trends get updated. Video is no different. 

• Live streams, such as Facebook Live, Instagram Live, YouTube Live, keep people watching three times longer than standard video. It triggers “FOMO” and hooks viewers in so they are the first to get some big news. 
• Personalized video advertising is being integrated into emails to create more personalized messages, share information quickly, and prevent your message from being lost in a wall of text. Emails with videos have a click-through rate that’s 8x higher than traditional emails! 
• Product videos make customers feel more confident in what they’re buying, and they can offer a better sense of scale and specifications that text and pictures just can’t.

Content Marketing: 

Some of the most effective forms of content marketing to help you meet these goals include: 

• Blog posts to share company news and information related to your industry.
• FAQs
• Email newsletters to continue engagement and keep customers informed on a regular basis
• Case studies to provide proof of your success.

Website/page Speed: 

Who waits for a page to buffer and load when one is eager to find what they are looking for? Slow loading pages are a put-off to potential leads. There are ways you can fix your website’s loading speed and make it faster: 

• Reduce all images size to 100kb on your website 
• Reduce the number of internal redirects, specifically redirect chains that go through several redirects before landing on the correct URL and internal links to redirects

Digital marketing is constantly changing. We think the above tactics and ideas are going to be huge game-changers for the foreseeable future of digital/online marketing. Need help implementing these digital marketing trends and tools into your strategy? Our marketing experts can help you! Get in touch by writing to support@spacebar.in or scheduling a consultation.