Digital Marketing Trends That Have Emerged Over 2015

Anoop Gupta

Whilst 2015 is far from over, the last nine months have seen a number of digital marketing trends emerge and others from years past prevail. With the end of the year only a few months away, we felt that now was the best time to take a look at some of these trends, as it’s the last chance for many businesses to begin implementing them before it’s too late. You can also rest assured that you’ll be on top of the latest trends and ready to go once 2016 commences.

• Content Marketing
  As time passes, we are seeing content creation becoming more and more important for digital marketing. The quantity over quality approach has become a thing of the past; instead of churning out 10 blogs in a week, we’re seeing creators publish a single blog that provides useful and in-depth information about a topic. Gone are the days when anyone and everyone could be an ‘expert’; these days, searchers have become more adept at spotting someone who knows what they’re talking about.
  
• Conversion Optimisation
  Also known as conversation rate optimisation (or CRO), this is the process of maximising the number of website visitors who convert (or, in other words, make a purchase). This can be achieved via split testing, whereby two slightly different pages are shown to consecutive searchers in order to see where they click. This sort of practice helps marketers to determine which elements of the page or layout produce the highest number of conversions – this can differ between businesses.
  
• Marketing Automation
  The sheer number of digital channels and social networks has made it difficult for traditional marketers to keep up. This is where marketing automation has gained momentum – hubs now exist that allow you to assemble all of the data together that is to be used across the business and in real-time. You can plan your social posts months in advance and even let the hub post for you, allowing you to reach potential customers outside of general business hours (including evenings and weekends).
  
• Mobile & Responsiveness
  We cannot stress the importance of ensuring that your website is mobile friendly enough. Think about how you generally perform searches – if you’re anything like us, you’re more inclined to whip out your smartphone or tablet than jump onto a laptop. If your website doesn’t perform well on mobile devices, you can rest assured that people are going to look elsewhere. Now that Google have introduced penalties for website’s that aren’t mobile friendly, this is more important than ever.
  
• Social Marketing
  Whilst plenty of businesses have realised the benefits of social marketing, many of them don’t really know much about social conversion. The purpose of your social media campaign is to generate leads (in the way of a ‘like’, a purchase and so on), so you need to ensure that you promote your content in a way that is entertaining, that the content you post is relevant (or native) to each platform, and that you don’t only post links to your content. This will all help you to achieve better conversions.

Has your business so far failed to incorporate any of the above digital marketing trends? It’s important to remember that it’s never too late to get started – many of these trends are still emerging, which means that other businesses are still exploring and testing. Before you get left too far behind, it’s time to start thinking about how these trends can be adopted in your marketing strategy. After all, no one is going to purchase your product or service if they can’t find you.

(152)