Every trend comes and goes, but many of them happen to stick around. For the online marketing trends that stick around, it’s in a small business’ best interest to pay attention to those trends and apply them to improve their online results. Although there was a time when a pattern like live video marketing was trendy, now it’s a vital tool in a small business’ toolbox. Stay informed about the current trends that are happening in today’s industry and join us for our free webinar training to learn more about today’s marketing trends. In this article, we dive into 5 digital marketing trends that are taking place right now.
Mobile responsive website designs
Everyone has a smartphone these days, and if you don’t, then you’re living in the stone ages. Many of us who own smartphones do a lot of our shopping and web browsing on our devices, which is why Smart Insights says small companies should work on creating responsive website designs that look good on mobile.
Creating mobile responsive website designs for the dominant use of smartphones is now old news. We see future innovation in digital experience in the areas of speed and personalization and conversational user interfaces based on improved insight. I’ll illustrate this with a couple of examples.
Google has long proclaimed the importance of download speed and despite the widespread use of RWD, performance Google’s benchmarks shows that many businesses are falling short of the required speeds.
Using technologies like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) which we introduced in last years webinar on trends have seen many successful examples implemented this year.
The positive impact of implementing these technologies is shown by this case study showing how retailer George at ASDA boosted site speed and advanced customer engagement with PWAs and AMPs leading to 31% increase in mobile conversion since upgrading to PWA, a 1.71X faster site speed and a 32% improvement in click-through rate from organic mobile traffic for top 500 AMP queries plus a 15% increase in page views per visit. Asda has 65% of its visitors on smartphone.
An interesting example of the ongoing importance of creating interaction and personalization to improve your digital value proposition is Stitch Fix, a US fashion retailer that since its 2017 IPO has grown its active client accounts to 2.7 million, an increase of 614,000 and 30% year-over-year.
In its filing before going public, the company pointed to its team of over 75 data scientists, many of whom have Ph.D degrees. CEO Katrina Lake explains that improving experience is at the heart of her growth plans:
“The engines we’re focused on are improving and innovating on the client experience: how to be deeply personalized, how to use data science to get clients more of what they want. The second engine is new launches; we launched plus sizes, men’s and premium, and we’re excited to see those grow.”
The first step in this process happens as soon as the customer creates their Stitch Fix account. Customers who set up an account, either through their email or by connecting to Facebook, are led through an extensive questionnaire called the Style Quiz which is an example of a conversational UI.
Push notifications
Digital doughnut discusses a recent trend in 2019, which is push notifications. Companies are using push notification options to market to their audience in the hopes of getting more sales. If a customer abandons a cart or would like to stay up to date on a website, push notifications are an excellent way to reel them back in.
Push notifications are moving into the realm of web browser technology and are one of the most popular web development trends for 2019.
Companies use browser push notifications to reach their leads more effectively and communicate with their audience in a more powerful way.
Another major role such notifications play is retaining customers and improving conversion rates. Ecommerce companies for example, use browser push to retarget their shoppers who abandoned their shopping carts and entice them to complete their purchases.
Live video
Another way to engage with your audience is through live video, and Digital Marketing Institute argues that regularly communicating with your audience through live video is the way to go. Not only does it account for a large amount of consumer internet traffic, but it increases conversions. As a new online business, increasing conversions is imperative to make sales.
Video has been a driving force in digital marketing for a long time because of how engaging it is, and it’s estimated that video will account for 82% of consumer internet traffic by 2021.
But that doesn’t mean video marketing is static, and people are always finding novel ways to engage audiences with video. Two of the popular trends on the rise right now are branded and live video.
With branded content, businesses can take advantage of all the benefits video has to offer—it’s highly engaging, delivers tons of information in a short time, increases conversions, and it’s more appealing than basic text—while also building trust and fostering relationships with their audiences.
Live video is a little newer to the scene, but it’s quickly becoming an extremely popular form of content among consumers and is expected to account for 13% of video traffic by 2021. One of the reasons live video is so appealing is that it’s interactive, and the audience can actually be invited to participate by calling in, asking questions, and being part of the conversation, which is great for relationship building.
Jeff Bullas shares some thoughts on the future of live streaming video and how it can benefit your business:
Live streaming video is maybe the hottest trend in digital marketing right now.
One of the first social networks to offer this was Google+. Google Hangouts was a great part of the platform.
But Meerkat was maybe the first live streaming video app that captured our consciousness. Then it was Periscope and then Blab. Only one of those survives and that is because it has a rich uncle called “Twitter”.
But when Facebook “Live” was launched in 2015 to a limited audience of celebrities the game changed.
But why use live streaming?
Mark Zuckerberg has suggested that people watch live streams 300% longer and comment 10 times more than regular videos. In marketing terms, more engagement is gold.
Engaged base email marketing
Email marketing is yet another essential way to improve your audience reach and get them to visit your website. Thanks to behavioral based emails, small businesses can figure out better methods to target their audience. Let’s see what else Digital Doughnut has to say about email marketing:
As email marketing is getting smarter, marketers have started to care more about sending emails to subscribers who are active on their lists. For instance, if a contact highly engages with your emails, he should be regularly nurtured with content and updates about your company until he converts into a loyal customer. On the other hand, if a subscriber hasn’t opened an email for a certain period of time, he will be considered as a dormant contact and will no longer receive additional emails.
But to send the right email to the right segment, marketers need to identify all their leads behaviors. If the platforms they are using have limitations to classify their audience into different segments based on their behaviors, they can integrate their tools with other applications that allow them to do that. After all data is determined and different segments are created according to defined criteria, marketers will be able to target their leads more effectively with behavioral-based emails.
To reinforce a more personalized manifestation of sending engagement-based emails, an obvious direction is resurfacing again: plain text emails. This sends those engagement-based emails in a more individualized and hand-crafted way to the targeted user, which gives a more personalized aspect to the communicated piece. Moreover, because HTML style emails containing detailed graphics may increase the potential for spam, marketers are considering plain texts as alternative ways to minimize this problem. Besides, plain text emails address the need of the user and improve the engagement rate.
Marketing trends are always changing, and it's up to you to stay up with the trends. To stay current we recommend regularly monitoring the trends from competitive websites and doing your research on news sites. For more tips, we not only walk you through how to start a profitable online business during our free webinar training, but how to maintain a money-making company. Register for our next training today!
Sources: Digital Marketing Institute, Jeff Bullas, Smart Insights, Digital Doughnut
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