Digital marketing hit the world of business with the introduction of the internet and certain features of the world wide web.

Social media has been the latest innovation in digital marketing and has a strong part to play in many business marketing strategies.

Trends have changed dramatically over 20 years, and as a business owner, it’s important to know and understand them so you can utilize them to benefit your company. But what are the trends in digital marketing?

Social Media

Let’s start off with one of the biggest innovations marketing has seen in the last 20 years. Social media has brought a new level of marketing to the forefront allowing companies to pinpoint their target market without wasting valuable resources. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and now TikTok have brought a platform that enables certain people to rise to the top of an online popularity scale, making them influencers.

An influencer is someone with 100,000 followers or more on any of these social media applications. Most of them will talk about their own likes and dislikes, making their following personal to the likes of that person. This means if an influencer is heavily into bicycles and they often discuss the latest bikes, places to ride, and developments in the industry, their following will also be into that. Let’s take a bicycle company that wants to advertise their new product to an avid cycling community. They could take advantage of this influencer and pay them to advertise their product.

There are many different versions of influencer that depend on the number of followers. For example, a micro/nano influencer would have 10000 followers, and a mega influencer would have upwards of 1 million. The price of advertising depends on the number of followers they have.

The huge benefit of this form of digital marketing is the trust people have in those they follow. Being able to interact with them on social media means they see them more like someone they trust like a friend. Whereas a television advert is made by an agency with one obvious goal in mind: sell.

Content Creation

The number of online businesses popping up now is enormous. As technology expands and develops, so does the need for companies, we never would have thought of before. Many business owners have the skill to create and run a company, but not many have the ability to write the required content for their website, social media, and sometimes even chain emails.

This is where hiring content writers come into play. A content writer will be given a brief, a rough overview of what is needed, and a timeline. From there, they will go away and write all the content needed for their project. This saves businesses huge amounts of time, especially if they aren’t naturally gifted with words. It’s a relatively inexpensive way of creating high-quality content for all your company needs.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is a process that involves growing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website by increasing the visibility of a webpage on a search engine results page. There are many different SEO techniques to ensure this happens. The main ones are keyword placement and backlinking.

The more popular your website is, the higher it will be ranked on Google. We can use an analogy to explain how this works. If you attend a new school and want to know who the most popular person is, you’ll ask around for some advice. If one person gets votes from a large number of other pupils, then you’ll assume they are the most popular. This is the same when it comes to websites. If a large number of websites have links to a webpage in particular, then Google will assume that it’s popular and move it up the list in search results. This is known as backlinking.

Keywords are words or phrases searched by consumers on a daily basis when searching for certain products. Let’s take the bicycle example again. Let’s say the owner of the bike shop has done their research and discovered that when people are searching for a new bike they often type into Google; new bike, affordable bikes for sale, and fastest road bikes. They know they are going to have to include those keywords and phrases on their website so Google can match them to the searches made by consumers.

These are the latest in digital marketing trends, and if you own a business that’s trying to find better ways to advertise and market themselves, then these are some of the best ways. The good thing about content writers is they will often input keywords and phrases into their text (for a fee), meaning you don’t need to do any leg work at all. Social media is a must with running a business now, as is optimizing your website. Don’t get left behind in the modern age.