People have adopted the internet and social media in their day-to-day lives. And entrepreneurs can leverage this to boost their businesses by marketing their goods and services online. Digital marketing involves promoting brands and businesses online to create awareness and connect with their target audience. The goal of digital marketing is to convert audiences into prospects and prospects into long-term customers.
The internet has now enabled businesses to reach their customers via email, text messages, multimedia messages, and web adverts. However, aside from reaching customers on different platforms, there are numerous digital marketing jobs for different categories of people, irrespective of their age and availability.
To enlighten you more on this topic, we have teamed up with experts from job aggregator Jooble to discuss the digital marketing trends in 2023. Let’s get started.
Top Digital Marketing Trends by today’s standard
The digital space is a broad field where businesses reach and attract their potential customers with the help of the internet. Hence, you should find a way of maximizing digital marketing to create brand awareness and promote your business.
This article is for you if you want to gain in-depth perspectives and stay updated with current digital marketing trends to help expand your business.
Below are the top digital marketing trends you can adopt:
1. Blogs
Blogs are revolutionary marketing tools. You can think of them as mini-magazines that give entrepreneurs and brand owners a dynamic vehicle they can use to promote their brands. Blogs help build brands and attract attention and are highly effective than the traditional means of advertisement.
The purpose of a blog is to provide meaningful content that answers questions about your business on your website. It also helps expand your brand’s visibility by giving Google and other search engine content to index and come up in search results.
2. Search Engine Optimization
Also known as SEO — it is one of the prominent digital marketing trends you should never omit in digital marketing. Search engine optimization makes your web page visible to search engines and ensures that it ranks high in searches.
The process requires specific tactics and consideration to develop content that will give you that online visibility. The content must be user-friendly with useful inbound links. Don’t forget that the outcome is to ensure your business comes up on search engines’ first page when someone searches for anything relating to your business. Hence, the need for you to create relevant content and research keywords that people frequently search for on the internet.
Also, note that your content will not always be at the top of the search engines’ first page because the algorithm keeps changing. This is another reason you need to create and post quality content regularly.
3. Content Marketing
Content marketing is another common digital marketing trend you can adopt. The main aim of doing this is to engage the target audience with relevant content to keep them glued to your page and convert them into customers eventually. Such content must be entertaining and captivating to the readers and be able to rank high in search engines.
Many companies have content writers who roll out different content daily to ensure that people interact with the brand and establish a relationship with them. However, content marketing is not limited to writing alone. It can be pictures or multimedia, social media posts, blog posts, or funny short videos since it adds communication value to your target audience.
Content marketing is highly efficient when you do it right. It helps build your brand and increase patronage as you educate and entertain your target audience. Consistency makes content marketing effective because other brands are putting out their content now and then, and you have to stay on top of your game to be noticed and relevant.
4. Social Media Marketing
The increasing use of social media has proven the effectiveness of this type of digital marketing. Like the other types of digital marketing, social media marketing creates brand awareness and generates traffic online for the promotion of a brand on one or all the social media platforms you register your company with. It can be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, or even Youtube.
These social media platforms are built in such a way that you can see how people are engaging with your business post, such as likes, shares, comments, views, etc. Apart from advertising and marketing your brand, you can also interact with real people and hear their opinions about your products and services.
Although social media marketing might seem simple, you must be strategic about it too. The number of content you post and when you should post them are all critical to the effectiveness of your marketing. You might even need a calendar to keep track of your activity and measure the results.
Twitter is a great free social media platform to boost your marketing campaigns. Create your brand’s Twitter profile and tweets about trending topics or hashtags to get more reach. You can check what is trending on Twitter in us.
Social media marketing is best suggested for brands who offer products and services that don’t require an immediate and impulsive purchase but rather target interacting with their audience and familiarizing them with the brand.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another type of digital marketing that is thriving in 2022. It is a mode of advertisement whereby you let a third party promote your product and get a commission in return. The third parties are affiliate marketers, and the commission you give them acts as an incentive so they can be motivated to promote your product more.
This is easy for the business owner because the affiliate marketer does the hard work for you. You just need to equip them with what your brand is about and leave the promotion to the affiliate marketer. In essence, affiliate marketing lets someone get paid every time the item they promote is purchased, and as a brand owner, you pay an affiliate marketer anytime they help you make sales.
6. Email Marketing
Email marketing is the act of sending promotional messages about your brand to various email addresses. In reality, every email you send to a potential or current customer could be regarded as email marketing. The goal of sending them the mail is for them to click on it to get detailed information about what you are promoting.
Email marketing has existed for some time and is still highly effective. It helps you stay in touch with your audience constantly, which builds relationships so that you will be the first they will think about whenever they need your services.
You need to be professional and creative to use this method of marketing. Execution is where the ingredient of success lies. Hence, you should take your time before sending out the emails. Some mails are left unopened, and yours can be added to that list if you fail to use a catchy subject and are not creative with the message you are trying to convey.
You can create a newsletter beyond sending sales messages and promotional links. This will easily tag your campaign as valuable. Your email must not be contentless to avoid a situation where your followers start to unsubscribe.
7. Online Courses
You can market your goods and services by giving instructional experiences using the digital network for interaction, learning, and dialogue. This method is efficient as it helps convince and tell potential customers of the knowledge you have in your chosen career.
However, it doesn’t require any face-to-face meetings with your customers. The most important thing is that the course should not be boring to your audience and must deliver a clear outcome.
8. Video Marketing
Video marketing is now widely used in place of the traditional way of advertising businesses and brands on television. Technology has made it easy to make videos and post them online to promote your business. Research has also shown that up to 90% of business owners confirmed that video increased the traffic they get on their website.
This method has proven effective because it creates an emotional connection with the target audience. You can create a different kind of content with a video; it might be a short video or a long one. It is worth noting that the video must be able to catch attention in split seconds. Therefore, you must be particular about the content in the video.
Video marketing is a type of digital marketing that doesn’t fail, but how successful it will become depends solely on your content. Set the goals you want to achieve with the video and work towards them right from when you are recording. Be conscious of the light and sound and ensure you clearly communicate your intentions to your audience.
Video marketing can be pre-recorded, and you can use it for your social media marketing.
9. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is another type of digital marketing you can adopt in 2022. It involves collaborating with celebrities, influencers, experts, and popular figures with a large audience and followers on social media to promote your products and services. You can even sign these influencers as your brand ambassadors.
Influencers will recommend your products to their followers, and the followers will trust their leadership and buy from you. However, it is not all that simple. You have to choose the right influencer that will be able to convert before collaborating with them. To do this, consider the type of people following them and the level of engagement.
Other types of digital marketing include display advertising, audio marketing, mobile marketing, pay-per-click marketing, marketing automation, etc.
Other Digital Marketing Trends In 2022
The internet has undoubtedly changed how we do business for the better, and companies are now investing in online marketing. With smartphones widely adopted across the globe, it is a smart move as an entrepreneur to start marketing your brand in the digital space.
Online marketing is where the people and the money are. It is the only way to build brand awareness, acquire and retain customers, increase profitability, and remain relevant in the business. This is why digital marketing is challenging and highly competitive.
To keep a steady flow of targeted traffic and turn audiences into long-term customers, below are the other digital marketing trends in 2022 you can explore.
10. Artificial Intelligence
Generally, the use of artificial intelligence in all sectors, including marketing, has been on the rise. AI has simplified a lot of tasks on the internet. It helps monitor site traffic and boost search engine optimization, making digital marketing easy.
The advanced function of artificial intelligence makes it possible for it to predict what customers want according to their purchase history and search history on the internet. It collects customers’ data and quickly analyzes it to predict their next move, then it suggests an item or offers in line with the data it has collected and even sends personalized advertisements.
All of these would result in high conversion rates once these customers are targeted with the product and services they need without the need for sending any unnecessary ads.
11. Personalized Message
One of the digital marketing trends in 2022 is the use of personalized messages. The information on the internet outnumbers the ones we need. However, a personalized message offers an easy route in such a way that it addresses the need of your target audience.
There are different types of customers, and you appear more professional and unique when you tailor your advertisement to their preferences. For example, you can segment your email marketing based on the different types of customers on your list, and there are lots of marketing tools you can use to that effect.
You also need to consider the difference in location and culture of your customer and tailor the message to them. This will aid the enticement of your customers, make them get stuck to your content, and increase their loyalty.
12. Tell Real Stories
Telling a real story is one of the digital marketing trends in 2022 because it’s one of the ways to put your brand in the minds of consumers. The effect that storytelling has on consumers cannot be underestimated. Nowadays, consumers are even more interested in how your products or services have solved a particular problem. They don’t just want to know how they are better than your competition.
They want to hear you tell them what will make them conclude in their mind that they need to try out your product. The result of this might not be an impulse buy, but it will register your products in their mind such that they turn to you the moment they are in need.
13. Create Simple Content
Creating simple content also works like personalizing messages due to the bulky information available on the internet. Creating straightforward content for your brand in a digital marketing world flooded with complex content will make you stand out.
This method is a digital marketing trend that any well-meaning brands that wish to announce their presence in 2022 should adopt. Good content doesn’t need to be complicated or clumsy. Instead, it is characterized by the clarity that will get a good reach and attract more engagement in the end.
Since online customers already have a lot of content available on the internet, one with precise details will stand out and be noticed first.
14. Do Short Videos
People love to consume video content, and how social media platforms incorporate videos points to the fact that brands should focus their attention on video marketing. The way people learn a new dance, hop on a new challenge, and even participate in polls and surveys on Tiktok indicates the power that short videos can wield and their influence on people. Tiktok, in particular, has promoted many songs, showing how fast people engage with short videos. That is why entrepreneurs should seize this opportunity and use short videos to promote their brands and advertise their products and services.
At this stage, video marketing will keep growing. Entrepreneurs and business owners should explore it to market their services.
15. Create Podcasts
Podcasts are episodic series created by businesses and brands to engage their existing followers and gain more audiences. Companies can promote their podcasts on social media, and you can also leverage this digital marketing tool to generate traffic.
To launch a successful podcast, you should address your audience’s problems and tell them how your brand will eliminate their worries. Try as much as possible to provide valuable information, and include a compelling call to action to entice them to listen more.
16. Conversational Marketing and Quality Interaction
Another digital marketing trend in 2022 that entrepreneurs and business owners should pay attention to is conversational marketing and quality interaction. Communication is not just made between brands and customers today; it has existed for a long. The growth of social media and wide usage of digital marketing means even larger-scale interactions between brands and consumers.
Customers now give importance to how direct and fast they get replies and interaction with the brand. And this goes a long way to determine their trust level in that brand. Hence, the need for entrepreneurs to prioritize quality interaction between brands and customers. You can actualize this by introducing chatbots to make conversation faster without glitches. This would also help improve customer experience and provide productive and positive interactions.
Conclusion
One of the best ways to win more customers is to venture into digital marketing because that is where you will find money and people. However, knowing the ins and outs of how digital marketing works requires a great deal of dedication. The task is more than just gathering information.
Also, it is worth noting that every business is unique and requires unique solutions for growth. You must identify the most suitable marketing method for your business to stay ahead of the competition.