Content is still king in 2024. If your brand wants to cut through the competition and succeed, no doubt, there is a need to go the extra mile and take your digital marketing a notch higher. To leverage the digital space, earn significantly, and scale your brand forward, you must grasp important marketing and SEO trends shaping the market.
In line with this, you will need to customize your marketing skills to meet market demands. You will also need to analyze and understand your audience for your content to achieve the desired level of efficiency. In the discussion that follows, we are going to focus on marketing and SEO trends you must closely keep an eye on to scale upwards.
Outline:
Best legal marketing and SEO trends to follow
#1 Create an amazing website
At this point, any brand that doesn’t have a website is doing a great injustice to its marketing strategies. Such a business might not be able to beat competitors or take advantage of the revolutionary digital space.
Today, a website is a basic necessity and allows companies to be seen, heard, and felt online. Here are several advantages of having a website:
Easy access to new customers
In the modern business environment, people first search for all kinds of products and services online. This is the easiest way to compare prices from different vendors, get products near you, and save money. A business that doesn’t have a website is therefore greatly disadvantaged in landing new clients.
Easier way to advertise
Unlike traditional media, advertising online is cost-effective and gives your brand a global reach. You can constantly run marketing campaigns on your website and keep your audience updated on various events within your space.
Two-way communication
A major advantage of running a website for your business is getting feedback from your customers. In a significant way, communication online can remain anonymous, allowing customers to communicate freely and express their feelings towards your business. This kind of openness can help greatly in improving products and services.
Inclusiveness
Close to 15% of the world’s population has some form of disability. Yet, only 3% of websites are configured in a way that allows such users to fully access them. You need to configure your site so that it is accessible to all users. To check whether or not your site is accessible, you can use this web accessibility checker.
Branding
It is easy to translate your online presence to emphasize and reiterate your brick and mortar look. Using your brand colors and themes on your website is a good way of cementing your online presence. This strategy can work very well when the same themes are accentuated in your brick and mortar outlets.
#2 Leverage social media marketing
Social media marketing is such a vital business driver that small, medium and large organizations are dedicating significant amounts of their budgets to it. Engaging social media audiences requires a key understanding of the various dynamics that come with it. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram need different approaches for brands to excel in such campaigns successfully.
Facebook and YouTube are the biggest platforms. Statistics indicate that up to 68% of adults in America use Facebook, while 73% use YouTube. Globally, Facebook users stood at 2.6 billion for the first quarter of 2020. This is an audience that a marketer looks at with a huge appetite.
Here are some essential approaches that you must be keen on to succeed in social media.
Clarify your campaign goals
From the onset, you need to know what you want to achieve by the end of your marketing campaign. Design a strategy that is segmented into small, achievable, measurable milestones.
Work with influencers
Working with influencers to push your brand forward is now a key strategy used by marketers for brand positioning, sales, and profitability. Find influencers that are suitable and relevant to work within your space to achieve the desired objective.
Target the right platform and the right audience
Running social media campaigns without a clear understanding of your audience will be a waste of your time and money. Be very clear on whom you target so that your campaign can eventually bear fruits. And although you may run your campaign across several social media platforms, remember that each of them requires a different approach.
#3 Pay per click (PPC) ads and retargeting
PPC is a relatively old, tried, and tested method of online marketing. It is still highly effective when done properly. PPC is a good way of achieving quick results, delivering fast brand recognition, as well as eliminating a lot of dependence on SEO content. Still, it can be a very challenging and costly investment if you don’t lay the right foundation.
Even in 2024, well-paced PPC ads can reach a wider audience within a short time. Marketers, nonetheless, must be in a position to identify the right kind of content suitable for PPC campaigns and, at the same time, harness the power of their landing pages. In other words, they must answer the question of what happens once their clients click on their PPC ads since this is where the ultimate power of PPC campaigns lies.
#4 Video content optimization
Video content has so far ruled the internet. There is a chunk of brands that have primarily dominated digital marketing through video content. In general, video content has come of age in 2024, and any brand that wants to push forward and scale above the competition with speed must take advantage of it.
Whereas several brands have managed to take advantage of video content, optimizing it for better results is a different affair altogether. How do you optimize video content?
Keep it short, precise and to the point
Like in all forms of digital content, you have a limited time to impress your audience and send the message. Right from the beginning, ensure that all audiovisual aspects of your content contribute to the overall message. Within the first ten seconds or so, your viewer will have decided whether to stick with you or quit watching altogether.
Timing is key
When do you post your videos? This is a key question that is central to the success of digital video campaigns. With the help of various tools online, you can analyze your audience using geographical positioning and demographics. This will help you to post your videos at specific times and run them for a period when such audiences are more active, resulting in more feedback and higher numbers.
#5 Website optimization for voice search
A couple of years ago, voice search came to turn around how people scoop for information online. Over time, it has gained popularity and is now one of the highly regarded technologies for modern marketing.
In 2024, optimizing your content for voice search is one of the key trends that organizations must invest heavily in. Unlike other search engine optimization methods, however, voice search demands a unique approach for it to be effective.
It is estimated that voice search will make 75% of the top-ranking search engine results pages. With about 40 percent of millennials using voice assistants, eCommerce sites are specifically becoming synonymous with voice-led traffic. And there is no better time to optimize for them. Retailers and all other site owners should and must make it a priority.
To make your voice search effective, put in place the following considerations:
Enrich your answers
To succeed in voice search, you must pay attention to aspects such as featured snippets and keyword placements. Such considerations will help content seekers to get more appropriate answers for their queries from your content. Therefore, your main role should be to ensure that your content is relevant and in line with what content seekers are looking for online.
Optimize for smart devices
To a large extent, voice search has gained popularity amidst an increase in mobile device usage worldwide. As you craft your content and optimize your voice search, ensure that it aligns with mobile devices. This should be among the initial considerations in creating your voice content.
#6 Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new norm
Are you taking advantage of AI to optimize your marketing and SEO strategies? AI is among emerging and developing technologies that will greatly influence our lives in the future. In digital marketing, it is already making a significant impact on automated campaigns. In your marketing campaigns for 2024, make use of AI in the following ways:
Data analysis
AI is playing a key role in identifying the target audience and driving relevant content where it is most needed. Smart collection and use of consumer information will considerably define the outcome of your marketing campaigns. Do some research and invest in AI tools that will help you to gather and utilize data effectively.
Chatbots
Chatbots are now very popular with website owners and help to solve several queries with little or no human assistance. This is an aspect of AI that marketers (especially those in the internet software industry) should take advantage of in 2024 to run their campaigns and move brands to the next level.
AI digital advertising
Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Instagram have all taken advantage of AI to carry out targeted advertising. This is reflected by their accurate collection of user information in aspects such as gender, age, as well as social, professional, economic, cultural, and political interests. Use AI to direct such data accordingly and achieve suitable goals for your marketing needs.
#7 Mobile user experience (UX) will determine your rankings
As you design and strategize your marketing campaign, keep the end-user in mind. Work towards giving them a great experience, whether you are carrying out a video campaign, PPC ads, or even social media marketing.
Since mobile devices have become the primary tools of accessing online data, you must ensure that you give your audience outstanding experiences. How do you do this?
Simplify navigation tools and make them intuitive
One of the setbacks that hamper the success of online marketing campaigns is complex navigation and signing processes that discourage users from going too far. Navigation tools should also be easily accessible and visible to make them more user-friendly.
Have a clear and easy search format for mobile devices
Tools such as the search bar should be clearly placed for mobile use. Importantly, the format of information that the user finally gets on their device should load quickly and be easy to read. This means that you must make good use of color and font.
Make images and videos more responsive
Quite often, images and videos pose the greatest challenge loading for mobile devices. In this respect, you need to optimize them. This also applies to graphs and any other infographic data. In some cases, you may compress such images and videos differently for them to work optimally on mobile devices.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is a process that is constantly evolving. What is working today will not necessarily be the same tomorrow. Digital marketers must, therefore, continuously sharpen their skills and ensure that they are using modern techniques to keep their brands competitive.
Search engine optimization must be approached as a process that requires measurable milestones at every level to gauge the outcome. Importantly, marketers must keep on evaluating the strategies that work and initiate campaigns periodically.
