7 Prediction on Future of Digital Marketing

There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future of digital marketing when things are transforming so quickly. However, digital marketing will continue its unpredictable evolution and marketers have to keep up with the pace to reach out to more customers in the future.  Let’s know some key facts and figures for marketers to become equipped for the future of depicting digital marketing predictions.

  1. Google’s AMP Initiative:

Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) has become a discoverer in the history of the digital marketing segment. It is a web component framework developed by Google to provide a user-first format for web content. With this initiative, Google aims at improving the loading time of website pages in mobiles and other devices. This website publishing technology will also enhance user-friendliness and would focus on the experience of users.

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The AMP program is helping marketers and SEO professionals in boosting SEO campaigns for their mobile sites. Moreover, the web developers are also giving more time in making websites mobile responsive for better user appearance. The AMP initiative has set a target to re-invent the SEO techniques and online marketing in the future.

  1. Mobile Marketing:

Most of the SEO professionals are strategizing their ways to promote brands through mobile. Starting from SEO marketing to PPC campaign services, marketers prefer mobile marketing because browsing remains an easy experience through mobile devices.

Digital Ads are optimized for the mobile medium. The Video Ads are also targeted for the right audience through their personal devices. Activities in mobile can actually give the publishers and the advertisers an understanding of what activities drive Ad performances and their value to the users.

  1. Voice Search:

The future of voice-driven search queries is quite promising. Voice commerce sales are expected to reach $40bn by 2022 in the USA.

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Voice is going to be a major player in the marketing sphere in the future. The digital assistants will integrate with various tools and will become a mandatory part of every marketing strategy. AIs like Alexa and Google Assistant have a ways to go yet.

People use digital assistance for better convenience and ease of use. For example, people can order from their nearest store by simply sitting at their homes. Rather than going somewhere, they will just say, “Hey Alexa, Order some Avocado and Pomegranate”. If an online store sells these fruits and integrates with voice, this can help drive traffic to their site and increase sales.

Thus, optimize your content for voice search. Indeed, it’s a new way to search as well as promote the brands at one go.

  1. Geo-targeted Ads will become more popular:

Geo-targeted Ads are increasing in popularity nowadays. According to Balihoo, Geo-targeted Ad revenue will represent 45% of all mobile Ad revenues by 2021. This is mainly because people want Ads customized to their locations.

The digital Ad is served based on the user’s location. The most successful geo-targeted ads’ messages are customized for the user at their location. Geo-targeted Ads use both search engine queries and exiting audience data provided by an Ad network to target the audience. The geo-targeted Ads might also be used to target people for different products based on the climate in their regions.

Geo-targeted Ads will help customers save on shipping. This will reduce the cart abandon rates due to the expensive shipping charges. Moreover, these Ads will also help in reducing the tax rate discounts.

  1. Interactive Content is Essential:

According to Criteo, users spend an average of 2.5 seconds reading any given piece of content on a desktop.

Content will become more vital. The usual format of written content like blog posts and guest posts will become less common. Most users like the colorful, dynamic, creative, and interactive content. Interactive content produces two times more conversions than regular content.

Content will get more intelligent as many natural language processing software helps people what content their target audience is viewing. This will also measure the parameters to improve conversion rates and search engine optimization.

The interactive content will effectively go forward to draw the attention of viewers more easily than static content. The content on landing pages, funnels, websites, ads, etc. will be colorful and will have images that are literally moving. The dynamic HTML will become the most common language for creating images and infographics in the near future.

Virtual Reality (VR) will also grow into a very common form of interactive content. For example, quizzes, knowledge tests, and interactive videos will have a great impact on virtual reality.

Content marketing will become content selling in the future. According to a report, 93% of the most successful B2B content marketers reported that their organization is extremely committed to content marketing. Many marketers are changing their approach to create their marketing collaterals. They have a strategic approach to content creation and align it with the customer journey. Thus, the content marketing approach will have a direct impact on sales.

  1. The Rise of Artificial Intelligence:

AI is no longer a buzzword for marketers nowadays. AI technologies will have a huge impact on digital marketing in the near future. According to Gartner, AI features will be in every new software product by 2020.

Know ‘How AI & Machine Learning influence the growth of Digital Marketing’. (Give a link to the previous blogpost)

  1. New Trends in Social Media:

Out of 3.7 billion Internet users globally, 2.7 billion users use social media. Combining big data into the whole matrix, social media will become even more robust, and even more attractive platforms in digital marketing. The integrated approach of social media marketing includes personalization, segmentation, and optimization that helps to bring more engagement.

The growing demand for mobile has quickly made the social networks more involved with the audience. Move over Facebook and Twitter, the other leading social channel will be Instagram. With the rise of Instagram shopping and artificial intelligence lenses, Instagram is splashing the digital marketing scenario. These upgrades on Instagram will provide a higher engagement rate between brands and consumers. The engagement rates on this platform are quite higher than other social networks.

Final Thoughts:

The increased popularity of technology in marketing automation will create a blend of marketing and sales. In the future, we can witness a closer collaboration between sales and marketing teams. As more companies have a significant ROI in digital marketing spend, the investment will increase steadily. The market will ultimately grow due to increased investment in digital advertising.

Here, you have it the 7 digital marketing trends that will dominate in the near future. Use these tips to future proof your company in the digital marketing landscape. What trends do you think will govern 2020? Let us know in the comment section.

8 Content Marketing Strategies to Improve Your Search Traffic

Have you ever wondered, what is the driving force behind the success of any website with good search traffic? It’s content marketing.

Content marketing can change the face of any website when done right. Social networks and SEO strategies completely rely on content marketing for ranking higher up on the search engines. The 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report found that 71% of the users claimed that they consumed blog content during their purchase process.

Here in this article, we are going to discuss eight best content marketing tips that will help you to boost your traffic. However, before that let’s have a brief idea about content marketing.

What is Content marketing?

You can find several fancy definitions for content marketing on the internet. To be precise, content marketing is the method of creating and publishing content in order to increase website traffic, create brand awareness, and distribute value through content to specific audiences. Content marketing is not just SEO but also helps in a lot of other aspects-

  • Attracting the customers
  • Generating leads or increase sales
  • Engaging the online community of users
  • Expanding the customer base

Take a moment and think what the internet would offer without content on the channels like websites, apps, email, or even social networks, etc. Content marketing is the medium of communication with a purpose. You can create, publish, and distribute content by defining your marketing objectives. There are numerous advantages of content marketing, SEO improvement is just one of them.

Let’s discuss some useful ways to improve your website traffic with content marking. 

What are the content strategies to follow for improving your search traffic?

The power of content marketing caters to bringing new customers, educating users, driving revenue, and building a powerful brand identity for any business. Organizations have been following content plans, but these effective content development strategies only help when combined with better marketing plans. Let’s have a look!

  1. Research and understand your audience:

Once you have a clear goal about what content to create or why you’re writing it, the next step is building out your content marketing strategy to understand who is going to read your content and whom you want to outreach.

You need to know your audience and the go-to resource for your topic. Analyze the following things while understanding your audience.

  • What resources already exist in the market?
  • What do they cover?
  • Can you create better content?
  1. Create and document content marketing plan:

After researching the market, you won’t just have to measure your content, but also uncover what your content needs to include to beat the competition. So, to implement a content marketing plan with a proper strategy, create a marketing plan. You can also tailor your content to suit your overall marketing strategy. Prepare a marketing guide about planning your digital marketing strategy. In short, document your content marketing strategy.

  1. Do proper keyword research and brainstorm content ideas:

The smartest content marketing tips doesn’t mean to simply publish and watch. You need to develop your content around keywords that your targeted audience is searching for.

Content marketing strategy helps you to reach people using your articles, blog posts, guides, e-books, guest posts, or other written content. The keywords used in the content will have a direct impact on the improvement of your search traffic.

Research and find relevant keywords and use them in the content. This will help to rank in the search engine result pages. The calculated approach of keywords will make a balance between SEO and content. Competitive keywords are also useful in a specific niche.

There are many tools to make keyword research more effective. Use Google’s Keyword Planner, a keyword analysis tool, to analyze the most popular keyword volume and competition. The Google keyword planner is a good place to start getting keyword ideas. Simply search a couple of keyword phrases into the planner and you’ll get the keyword ideas ready for you. To get some deeper keyword gems, search with your competitor’s keywords on your landing page and then start the search.

  1. Focus on high-quality links (Fix the broken links and disavow bad links from current content):

Link building is not submitting your site to directories or asking your webmasters to include a link to your site. Instead, marketers need to focus on building relationships and earning high-quality links through different methods.

  • Guest blogging on high-quality sites
  • Create amazing resources that attract social share and inbound links
  • Associate your content in a specific niche on popular sites (B2C)
  • Reach out to influential bloggers for better relationships
  1. Ensure social media as a vital component:

The usage of social media has been increasing at a rapid pace from the past decade. The social networks have seen remarkable growth worldwide. You need to make sure you have an active presence of popular social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. Try to get more followers on these platforms. Create encouraging posts for better engagement. Respond directly to your followers through comments or Direct Messaging. If someone follows your brand on social media, that doesn’t mean they visit your website. You need to post links to your social pages to drive traffic directly to your website.

  1. Optimize and update your current content:

Good quality and consistent content are not only good for your product and brand awareness but your SEO too! If you keep updating and optimizing your old content regularly, you would start seeing a substantial increase in organic traffic. Always try to publish relevant and consistent content to get good SEO.

Creating niche content can heavily target a particular subset of customers. You need to create extremely creative and detailed content to cover a broader niche. Identify specific niches in your industry and recognize the angles and prospects with your SEO optimized content.

  1. Produce video content:

Users want more videos from different brands. 87 % of marketers produce and publish an array of video content online. If done right, video content can increase your organic search traffic to a great level. There is also a scope to incorporate call-to-actions, as many consumers act on them after watching a video.

Your business should have a YouTube channel set up and you need to publish new videos regularly according to the customers’ needs.

Mostly the users prefer to watch a video about a product than reading about it. This is a top reason to implement videos in your content marketing strategies to increase website traffic. Try to add videos to your emails and social media pages as 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter. You can also embed the video links to your blogs. This helps in generating new leads and increase your website traffic.

  1. Do Email marketing:

With various content marketing strategies in the market, it can be tempting for brands to skip the traditional approaches. However, email marketing can play a crucial role in the advertising foundation and remain the most profitable marketing tactic as compared to any modern marketing channel.

There are different ways for brands to leverage their email subscribers to drive more website traffic. You can encourage your email subscribers to share your content with their family and friends. This would help you to generate leads from new website visitors and from your current subscribers, too.

Conclusion:

Content is all about value. If your marketing strategy is no longer valuable to your audience, you need to rethink what you’re offering. They won’t help you to nurture leads or build trust in your brand. Hence, follow an updated business strategy that improves especially in sales, cost savings, and customer retention. Follow the above-mentioned content marketing strategies to generate website traffic and engagement; success will be yours.

How AI & Machine Learning Influence the Growth of Digital Marketing

Today, the world is experiencing some path-breaking advancements in science and technology. Out of all recent developments, Artificial Intelligence has been one of the most trending topics, and it is undoubtedly a great feat. It is believed that AI itself would drive the next industrial revolution.

AI remains influential as it expands its tentacles in almost every sphere of our lives. Whether it is a smart device or a self-driving car, chatbots or voice recognition technology, AI is everywhere today.

When it comes to marketing, everything that AI does is to understand the customer needs better and offer a customized experience based on individual preferences. While science often describes AI as robots with human-like traits, AI keeps on revolutionizing all kinds of industries. It is still in its’ evolving phase, and yet we have achieved the milestones like Google’s AI-based RankBrain search algorithm, IBM’s Watson, and some unexplained phenomenon like Facebook’s AI bots creating their own language.

AI and Digital Marketing started progressing together very recently. Marketers found that AI and Machine Learning in digital marketing can improve customer experiences exponentially, and can save their time and money at the same time. Let us discuss in brief about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to comprehend the roots.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

In simple words, Artificial Intelligence is intelligence exhibited by machines. It empowers machines to think, respond, and perform tasks like humans. It enables the machines to learn from their experiences and improvise outputs for new kinds of inputs.  

We can say AI is a way of training computers so that they can do things that humans execute better in the present scenario. More like making the machines self-sufficient with the humans-like decision-making capabilities.

What is Machine Learning?

Machine Learning is the study of computer algorithms that enable machines to learn on their own and perform functions without explicit programming. It is an application and subset of AI that deals with training the systems to learn and perfecting their outputs autonomously based on previous experiences.

How AI can provide a competitive edge to your digital marketing efforts?

According to emarsys, AI can enrich a brand’s overall value by fulfilling customer expectations more seamlessly. Brands can strengthen their revenue streams by investing in the right kind of AI. The impact of AI has enhanced every factor in digital marketing. Let us have a look at some of them below-

  • Improve user experience
  • Helps in decision making
  • Easier search sessions
  • Data-based Sales forecast
  • Minimized human errors
  • Easier analysis of huge data
  • Analysis of customer persona
  • Calculated and predicted ROI

AI helps businesses to understand their audiences better. It can analyze a huge mass of data in no time and predict the buying behaviors to influence decisions of the target customers. Besides improved user experience, AI and ML can help businesses devise effective marketing strategies determined by data analysis of individual business cases. With these AI Algorithms, it is easier to increase productivity by automating repetitive tasks.

AI allows swifter decision-making and helps to create better-performing content on websites. With AI-led digital marketing strategies, one can reach out to the right audience with the right kind of value. Ultimately, driving the sales and revenue streams on a positive altitude. 

How AI and ML are transforming the face of Digital Marketing?

From Google’s RankBrain to personalized recommendations of Amazon, from Google’s voice search to Apple’s Siri assistant, AI is drastically influencing the face of the current digital landscape.

Due to the data complexity and growing size of businesses, AI maintains a positive ascends in digital marketing. Effective data analysis and the ability to adapt to the inputs, it is something that humans have been doing. However, today, the AI is replacing humans and new marketing trends are entering the sphere. AI-based digital marketing is the new cool and practical way to invest time and resources strategically.

Personalization: You can use AI technology to translate your customers’ needs, requirements, and preferences into personalized experiences. Putting the customers first can be a crucial element for success for any business. If the content marketing strategy and Artificial Intelligence work in sync, it would become so easy to conduct personalized campaigns based on data such as buying behavior, intent, and online searches.

Personalized product recommendations: Many online retail stores and brands use AI technology to track their customers’ preferences, habits, and buying behavior. This helps them to know about their customers’ interests and use the same while promoting the precise products that they actually might want to purchase. With AI-led personalized user experience, it is easier to engage customers in productive activities that increase sales.

For example, Amazon uses AI-powered recommendation engines to personalize product suggestions to its users. It helps the eCommerce giant to scale up sales and boost the overall revenue.

Chatbots: Chatbots can make your website stand apart from the rest. They can chat with your visitors 24×7 without failing. These AI-based virtual assistants can reply to queries, fetch data form CRM, suggest products, make payments, and update order status like humans. In fact, AI bots can respond to the data-driven queries more promptly than humans can.

Likewise, businesses can also enhance their overall process using AI-driven programs in different communication formats. You can add chatbots to your websites, emails, mobile apps, and even text messages. According to an econsultancy report, 57% of customers prefer to live chat to get their queries resolved. Think of the value they might bring by automating your live chat system.

Not just that, the chatbots can reach out to your customers and follow them up like humans. For example, Starbucks is using an AI-based digital marketing strategy to supplement its human employees. The Chabot assistant named Barista helps the customers to order their favorite coffee with minimal human interaction.

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Unlike human beings, the bots never lose patience or become tired of working long hours. Subsequently, devising a more enjoyable customer experience. Moreover, the bots can handle multiple customers simultaneously, which turns out to offer higher returns on the investments.

Google AdWords In-market Audiences:

Google In-market audiences use AI and Machine Learning to understand the purchase intent of its users. This process involves analyzing trillions of search activities across millions of websites. According to Google, you can add audience targeting to the Ad groups and reach out to the people based on their interests, habits, behaviors, and interactions with your business.

AI-driven SEO:

Have you ever thought about how some web pages rank better than the others do? This is due to Google’s machine learning algorithm RankBrain. It ranks the websites among millions of others on the internet. Its ranking factors use AI-driven SEO to find valuable and useful content based on a user’s search intent.

AI-driven content:

The machines can write the content effectively as the content creation with AI technology will be faster.  For example, there are AI tools that use machine learning to analyze social media insights and recommend actionable posts to make.

Some tools in the market use natural language creation to transforms all your data into readable narratives. You can use the same to customize real-time content updates or adopt flexible content publication.

Brands like Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Nestle, Caterpillar, etc. use similar AI tools to create great enterprise content. Such unique AI technologies drive real-time industry trends and offer on-demand content assistance.

Naturally, they are not as perfect as humans are so far, but you never know the stuff future might have in its trunk for you.

AI-driven email marketing:

With machine learning, marketers can automate send times and frequency of emails. The same can effectively maximize the engagement and conversions stats for your email campaigns.

With AI, you can gather all actionable insights from different user behaviors and predict the right kind of content to drive conversions. AI will suggest the best time of day and the frequency for engaging the individuals. Ultimately, sending emails more precisely and achieving scalable ROIs.

AI-driven website design and optimization:

As we know, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a powerful aspect of digital marketing. It also helps in driving revenue. AI-based tools can test a large number of page elements and page variations simultaneously far better than the traditional A/B testing tools. The machines will do all the diagnosis and present the final insights. AI provides a more accurate and data-driven optimization for CRO.

AI-driven voice search:

Due to the intense application of AI-powered virtual assistants, voice search is becoming the ultimate phenomenon. It is a convenient option for mobile users indeed. According to TheeDesign, out of the 3.5 billion searches performed on Google every day, almost one-third is voice searches.

The digital marketers need to understand the fact and maneuvering the voice searches along with text-based optimizations.

According to Google, around 70% of the queries that Google Assistant receives consists of natural, conversational language. You need to optimize for voice search queries for your website. It is different from typed keywords requires necessary optimizations to offer direct answers to questions asked by searchers. Create the pages and optimize them accordingly as the questions normally start with who, how, what, where, when, why, etc.

Artificial Intelligence

Image Recognition:

The image and video analysis tool of Amazon known as Amazon Rekognition allows users to identify objects, recognize, and analyze the image. You just provide an image or video to the Rekognition API, it will identify the objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as to detect any inappropriate content.

For example, financial institutions and Airports can leverage AI-enabled technology to simplify the payments and facilitate faster check-ins with a higher level of security. 

Conclusion:

AI, being an active technology on the rise, can create wonders in different fields. The speed with which AI is growing across industries would surely trigger a revolution. AI and ML can help in marketing by managing data and retrieving information cost-effectively. Marketers can also make data-driven decisions for better campaign results. Besides that, they can also leverage the predictive analysis to identify their potential customers easily and leverage the purchasing behaviors to acquire higher sales and customer satisfaction.