Looking back in 2018, you will notice how the digital landscape has evolved yet again, with new technologies and trends dominating the online world. Businesses and marketers must keep up with the changing times or risk shrinking to irrelevance. This means they should constantly update their digital marketing strategy to maintain its effectivity.
What better time is there to start planning your digital marketing strategy than in the first quarter of the year? You should include your business goals in your new year’s resolutions, especially the marketing department where the impact of digital changes can be felt the most. It is time to think about your plans for this year if you want to remain competitive in your specific niche.
Of course, there are aspects in your strategy that will remain the same, like the importance of organic search and content marketing. But there are also changes that emerged from the past year that you can no longer ignore in 2019.
You may take a look at the infographic below by Serpwatch
Keyword Rankings
Search engines, especially Google, are responsible for the bulk of total organic traffic. Although paid advertising is getting more and more popular with many companies and businesses enlisting to bid for ad placements using targeted keywords, organic search still remains unbeaten when it comes to traffic.
Most people, 80% of them actually, prefer organic listings and ignore paid search. In B2B, 57% of marketers point to keyword rankings as instrumental in generating leads, more than any other marketing initiative. Leads accumulated from search engines have higher conversion rate compared to outbound leads.
Local SEO
It is great to rank in the universal results pages, but do you know that bagging the top spot in local search can also bring significant results?
It is actually found that 72% of consumers who were doing a local search of shops nearby ended up visiting a store within five miles. They mostly do it real-time too, usually within the day.
Of those searches, 28% result in a purchase. The importance of local SEO cannot be neglected.
Businesses with physical stores and offices can benefit a lot from optimizing their websites for local search, as this strategy can grow the customer base and result in a stronger business and consumer relationship.
Mobile Optimization
Technology has made it possible for anyone today to communicate, shop, and surf for information anytime and anywhere. The rise of mobile search is an important development in the digital world. In 2018, a study found that 52.2% of all online traffic was actually generated via mobile phones, higher than the data from 2017.
This 2019, you can expect a continuous upward growth from mobile search and marketing. It is one trend that marketers should focus on. Optimizing their websites for mobile search can work wonders for organic traffic.
Internet users do not have the patience to wait for a website that takes forever to load on mobile phones, or worse, if its design is simply incompatible with their devices. This can affect SEO rankings, with Google apparently favoring mobile-friendly websites.
Social Media Presence
Being on social media is a trend that will stay for many years to come, with businesses increasingly realizing the benefits of being on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, among many others.
Customer engagement is quite high on sites like Facebook and Instagram. Both platforms also have billions of users that can supply a considerable number of potential customers to businesses doing their social strategy right.
For one, 60% of users admitted to discovering products on Instagram while 75% of them take action, like visiting a website or clicking the link to the online shop after seeing a brand’s post on their feed.
LinkedIn remained a dominant force in B2B marketing, with 80% of B2B leads coming from this network, compared to Twitter’s 13% and Facebook’s 7%.
Video Marketing
Brands have long been using images in their digital content. However, in recent years, videos are taking a large bulk of the market. Almost 50% of users actually search for videos on products or services before they visit a store. Many consumers also believe that demo videos are quite helpful. Including a video in your content can actually increase purchases by 144%.
On social media, Facebook and YouTube particularly, 45% of people watch more than an hour of videos every week. This is a significant statistic, especially if you look at how consumers react to the videos they watch, with 64% of them saying that watching a marketing video has influenced their purchase decision.
The future looks good for video marketing as well. It is said that videos are expected to represent 82% of all internet traffic in 2021. If you want to be one step ahead of your competitors, incorporating videos in your blog and social media posts is the way to go.
Paid Advertising
Paying for ad placements in search engines may not be as big as SEO when it comes to traffic and reach, but it does bring in results.
Just look at how pay-per-click strategy performs — 64.6% of people click on Google ads when they intend to buy an item online. In mobile paid ads, 2/3 of consumers said they could recall a specific brand after seeing its advertisement on mobile in the last week.
However, paid advertising should be practiced with caution. You should weigh the pros and cons of including it in your current strategy, seeing that 70% of people actually dislike mobile ads and 81% of consumers left a website because of a pop-up ad.
Marketing Automation
Using automation tools to run an email marketing campaign or lead generation campaign is becoming more and more common nowadays. In fact, spending on marketing automation tools is projected to reach $25.1 billion annually by 2023.
It is also found that 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation tools for more than three years. Companies that manage their lead generation through automation see a 10% bump in revenue within 6-9 months.
Bottom Line
These stats and trends can give you the push you need to make any necessary adjustments in your online marketing strategy. You do not have to do a complete overhaul, as some old processes will certainly remain.
Try to focus on the ones that can help you reach your goals, be they attracting new leads, strengthening customer base, improving sales, or driving traffic to your website.
Just remember that when you plan 2019 marketing campaigns, it is always important to give your customers a good experience through personalization and quicker and more efficient response rate.
