The future is ever-changing and unpredictable. No one can ever tell with absolute certainty what may change or happen in the future. Just as dynamic as the future in the field of digital marketing. New trends, new tools, and new strategies are innovated and discovered every year. We may not be able to guess what the future holds, but we can tell you what the future of marketing holds! Let’s take a look at the top digital marketing trends for this year. 

There’s never a boring day when you’re working in the field of marketing. Every day holds a different challenge that you accomplish with different tactics and strategies. These new and unexpected digital marketing trends can help you navigate your creative obstacles with more ease and efficiency.  

Digital Marketing Trends to Look Out For

As digital marketing continues to get more complicated with the innovations coming up every year, it is important to identify the latest digital marketing trends that will help you maximize revenue and boost your brand’s reach.

  • Vertical Video Marketing

The usage of mobile phones has increased by around 220% from 2015. This means that people are more likely to discover your brand on their phones. Keeping this in mind, it is important to pay attention to marketing through vertical videos. 

Vertical videos are videos shot and displayed in portrait mode. While you’re using your phone to scroll through social media, you hold your phone at a vertical angle. Most viewers are not likely to tilt their phones to watch a landscape video. For this reason, most marketers pay more attention to vertical videos. 

Why is it more suitable?

  • Mobile users interact naturally with them.
  • Vertical videos comparatively see a 90% higher completion rate. 
  • Statistics suggest that they also drive more engagement.
  • Vertical videos also witness more viewership.  

You can promote your brand through vertical videos effectively if your video takes up the entire screen and showcases organic, informal content. Your video must always focus on content and be within 15 seconds to obtain better results. Adding subtitles or text in your video is also recommended. 

  • Voice Search

Do you own an Amazon Alexa or use Siri on your iPhone to look for things on the internet? That’s a voice search.  Although voice recognition has been a thing for many years, it has started gaining popularity recently. Developments like people being able to type using the voice typing feature with about 5% of errors, and the software being able to clearly understand our speech make voice search an important area to focus your marketing skills on. 

Several people now use voice search to navigate maps, search the internet, and plan out their tasks with ease. Since voice search is convenient and rapidly becoming a part of people’s lifestyles, it has become one of the new trends in digital marketing. 

Google identified that 52% of these device owners are willing to listen to promotions and deals while another 42% of them inquire about nearing activities and events. 

This is a sign that marketers need to start optimizing their marketing strategies and the keywords used in their content to successfully use voice search to their advantage. 

  • Influencer Marketing

The popularity of Instagram and YouTube has led people to create content on these platforms and make themselves a brand. Over time these people have become opinion leaders or ‘influencers’ who seem to be trustworthy sources of information. 

Thus, every digital marketing agency and marketer began approaching these influencers for collaborations through which they promote their brand and products. 

The advantages:

  • Brand awareness as the influencer’s follower base will get to know your brand and products through collaboration. 
  • Reposting the influencer’s content or creating user-generated content through the influencer’s followers is a good way to improvise your content strategy. 
  • Since the followers trust the influencers, they feel positive about the brand they promote. Automatically, the influencers generate organic and quality leads through collaborations. 
  • Compared to other marketing strategies, collaborating with influencers is a cost-effective and inexpensive way to promote your brand or product. 

Suggestions for Collaboration:

  • Look for engagement rather than reach while collaborating with influencers.
  • Approach micro/nano influencers as they tend to have a higher engagement rate.
  • Look for video creators as videos perform better and engage more with the audience. 

  • GIFs

Looking for a way to make your marketing campaign appealing to the eye? GIFs are your solution! These animated videos are the perfect way to grab someone’s attention. If GIFs adding a lively look to your emails, blog posts, and landing pages is unconvincing, then maybe the fact that GIPHY has over 700M users will convince you! 

Benefits

  • GIFs are more interesting than static posts. 
  • Mobile-friendly.
  • Users love GIFs. 
  • They’re fun and attention-grabbing. 

Wondering how to use them? Here’s how!

  • Explain a process or give a tutorial. 
  • Promote your product appealingly. 
  • Add GIFs to your website to make it seem more appealing and easy to read. 

  • Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

One of the latest digital marketing trends is the use of artificial intelligence for product promotion. AI is one of the smartest technologies that is changing our lives through automated tasks and computed solutions. It may seem like the stuff that interests science nerds, but this technology has been playing a subtle part in our lives. 

When used in marketing, AI can efficiently minimize errors and quickly automate data, translating it into informative and useful insights. The usage of this technology leads to positive outcomes for businesses and has thus become one of the new trends in digital marketing. 

Using AI in Marketing: 

  • AI improves the marketers’ understanding of their customers and helps them enhance their experience. 
  • It aids them in creating a targeted marketing campaign by enabling them in creating an accurate customer analysis and planning their journey to maximize Returns on Investment. 
  • We spoke about how trending influencer marketing is at the moment. AI algorithms help marketers identify influencers and content creators that match their brand’s philosophy and identity. 
  • The algorithm also helps marketers understand the kind of content customers are currently interacting with and aids them in creating content strategies that will interest their Target Group. 

  • The Metaverse

As children, all of us had our own different worlds that we created while daydreaming and playing with our toys. Imagine that fictional world being a reality. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? 

The Metaverse is a virtual 3D network of social connections. And it’s not just one-time experiences like VR gaming. In fact, it refers to an augmented reality where people can work, play, and socialize virtually together. The metaverse is also rumored to become the next internet in the form of a single universal virtual reality. 

The Metaverse is one of the most recent digital marketing trends and many say it is worth buzzing about. It is becoming a new platform for digital marketing due to the virtual connections and events taking place in this fictional world. 

The creation of Metaverse will also lead to the discovery of new performance standards. Questions such as how long an object can be seen in the virtual world, how long the users interact with an ad there, and the space an object takes up in the peripheral vision of a user will be the important insights that will help marketers optimize their digital marketing strategies in Metaverse. 

  • NFTs

NFTs are non-fungible tokens. It means something that cannot be bartered for something with equal value, as there is no way of measuring its value and providing an equal. 

NFTs are the digital version of a non-fungible item. These include creative digital assets that exist on the internet. An NFT can be anything from a graphic design or meme to an audio or video file. 

The big question is, why is it one of the latest digital marketing trends? NFTs offer the customers a new digital experience and have even allowed brands to reinvent themselves while providing an improved customer experience. 

With the help of NFTs, marketers can cater to specific audiences and send selected messages to selected groups of people. In a way, NFTs can help the brand increase brand loyalty in their customers by allowing them to own branded, digital items. 

 

Keep Your Strategies Up To Date

The changing trends and innovations in this field are what set the foundation for the future of digital marketing. It is important to be aware of the most recent digital marketing trends to stay ahead of the competition. 

While some of the trends may be easy to apply, others are just something you need to keep an eye on. No matter what your strategy may be, it helps to remember that the best marketing strategy is to make use of emerging trends and plan campaigns keeping the future in mind. 

Now that you’ve read our blog, why don’t you go ahead and conquer the marketing trends for this year?  

Sources:

https://digitalagencynetwork.com/whats-in-metaverse-for-digital-marketing-and-brands/