Marketing has always been a constantly evolving machine, but in today’s world, it’s like being on steroids or something. With new tech coming out every week, it’s relatively easy to become distracted or feel overwhelmed by the constant change. Nevertheless, you should keep an eye out for the latest trends, examine what strategies and practices still work and eliminate the rest.
What Still Works
Marketing strategiescome and go, being heavily influenced by the environment they exist in. Some, however, can change with the times, while others can’t. Content marketing is an example of a strategy that’s not only keeping its head above water but thriving in its new environment. Granted, it didn’t stay the same over the years, but it did something better; it evolved alongside the many technological advancements of today – becoming even more relevant, in the process.With social platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, it becomes ever more apparent that video will be the dominant force in content marketing. In fact,
trends show that video will represent over 80% of all consumer internet traffic, by 2021. That’s roughly 17,000 hours of video content every second, or about 5 million years’ worth of video crisscrossing the network every month.It shouldn’t come as a surprise since people generally prefer to interact visually than through written means. Our brains process images faster than words, which can explain why video content is
12x likelier to be shared , and why written material that’s backed up by pictures and video gets
94% more views than those without. Other types of visual content, besides video and images, are infographics, GIFs, or even emojis, and all provoke an instant emotional response from viewers.
What Remains Relevant and Supports Your Overall Strategy?
Even though
social media has been around for a while now, it is still as strong as ever. Promoting your content on its many platforms should be a given by this point. Nevertheless, content generators have always looked at social media as a sort of intermediary that swung users toward their content hubs. That way of thinking is now obsolete, as social platforms have matured into actual destinations and not distribution channels.Email marketing is yet another tried and true strategy that withstood the test of time. Not only that, but it saw a resurgence alongside content generation. Reaching people in their inbox was shown to yield a
4,300% ROI , and it did that because it still works.Related:
Using Google Analytics to Track Your Content Performance What’s Emerging and Evolving?
Like how TV gave way to the PC as the primary source of media consumption, so does the desktop now give way to mobile technologies to do the same.
Statistics show that mobile users spend twice as much time browsing the internet on their phones or tablets than they do on their computers. Likewise, mobile app usage is up 6% year-on-year, especially concerning e-commerce, entertainment, and finance. It gives businesses, big and small, an excellent tool for moving forward.Personalization, optimization, and automation are on the horizon. Over
72% of marketers are now using all sorts of marketing automation platforms (MAP) to personalize their email communications. The same thing can be said, but to a lesser degree (57%), about those personalizing customer experiences on their websites. And 55% of those who aren’t yet employing any of these techniques are planning to do so this year. As one would expect, this trend is only set to increase as time goes on, and you should be on alert for what will emerge from these fields in the future.
Conclusion
Marketing is, by its very nature, a constantly evolving organism. One can’t hope to impress and attract attention by doing the same thing over and over again. It can become tiring to adapt like this continually, but it is, nevertheless, necessary. But by evaluating the emerging trends and combining them with
well-established strategies, you can always keep yourself ahead of the pack.
