5 Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Afford To Ignore

Is it wise to invest in digital marketing trends? For many small business owners, the answer is probably “no.” Investing in trends that fall flat or under-deliver can have very real consequences. However, when has a trend passed the test?

Digital Marketing Trends

With everything turning to digital, companies are jumping online to market their businesses. In order to survive the challenges of digital marketing, brands need to keep up with the latest innovations. Here are 5 trends that aren’t going anywhere:

1) Voice Search

Almost every question customers have can be answered through search engines. While people can get a wealth of information easily, they don’t always have the patience to read through several paragraphs to find the information they were looking for. Voice search provides relevant information through audio content. As artificial intelligence gets better, the number of errors made by voice search assistants like Alexa and Siri has decreased dramatically, making this form of marketing more reliable than ever. Many marketers are eyeing voice search as the next opportunity to add SEO value to your content.

2) Video Marketing

The effectiveness of video marketing should not come as much of a surprise since vision is your most dominant sense. You already know that pictures can massively boost engagement, so just imagine what videos can do for your business. Not sure where to start? Professional video production isn’t the easiest or cheapest task, but even amateur videos pay off big time. Posting a simple Facebook Live video at a special event, or explaining how to use your product or service is a great place to start.

3) Influencers

Influencer marketing focuses on key social media leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market. Rather than marketing directly to a large target audience, you instead pay influencers to get out the word for you. It’s essentially word of mouth, but the voice is that of a trusted public figure.

4) Messenger

When you think of social media you probably picture the major social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But that thinking misses a big part of social media, which is their messaging apps. Each month around 1.3 billion people use Facebook Messenger. Since it’s still a relatively new marketing channel, it’s a great way to get people’s attention and generate high-quality leads. Whether you opt for a Chatbot, sponsored message, or provide customer support via messenger, it’s a great way to create a one on one conversation with your target audience.

Pro Tip: Encourage customers to use messenger apps to submit negative feedback so that you can resolve conflicts behind the scenes.

5) Micro-Moments

The key to micro-moment marketing is to embrace the idea that you only have a few seconds to capture the attention of your target customer. In those seconds, your brand must convey a clear and attractive message that is relevant to the consumer. Otherwise, they’re on to the next search result, tweet or article, and you’ve lost their attention. Effective micro-moment marketing takes advantage of the “near me” searches, and the “How to…” moments. 

Stand Out In A Sea Of Options

Consumers are bombarded by content, ads, emails, texts, tweets, push notifications and a slew of other digital marketing tools. The industry has reached a point of content overload wherein people cannot consume any more content than they already are. This makes it more challenging than ever to make your brand stand out. It’s crucial to stay ahead of the latest trends, which is where an experienced digital marketing firm comes in. With little time to spend researching new marketing tools, it pays to invest in a team that specializes in exactly that.

Contact Us to learn more about creating an effective digital marketing strategy for your Houston business.