Digital marketing refers to advertising using digital platforms such as search engines, social media, email, and mobile apps. Using these digital platforms, companies endorse goods, services, and brands. Consumers rely on digital means to research products, and many of them usually opt for online services like shopping, business-related services, or personal needs. Google marketing insights found that 48% of customers usually opt for a search engine to search their query. 26% search with mobile devices while 33% are the ones looking for brand websites.
While digital marketing nowadays is just not about onboarding a channel (website or a means to share content), advertising online is a much more complex process than thought. To achieve the full potential of digital marketing, marketers nowadays dig deep to find out what’s the level of competition and many more similar things to discover marketing strategies and that make an impact on the audience converting them into leads and further into customers. By implementing omnichannel marketing strategies, businesses can now get insights on the customer’s behaviour on their website, this includes clicks made, total time spent on a particular page, and more importantly, what’s the target audience they can target through current marketing techniques.
COVID-19 has made an impact on lots of businesses and forced the same to come to halt, but during these tough times, digital marketing has seen a rapid hike, probably due to the increase in user engagement. There is no stop to this growth, it’s too hard to separate digital marketing from the marketing of a brand these days. And so the need arises to switch from traditional marketing to digital marketing.
To understand why digital marketing is the future of marketing, we have to first understand what changes can be seen in digital marketing in the coming years. Let’s dive deep into it.
E-privacy will shake up the industry:
According to Arianne Donoghue (Digital marketing consultant), it’s too hard to see how it is going to change. The change will be slow and steady, and probably we can trace that if we compare the statistics of the last 5 years in the near future. There is a technique named browser fingerprinting, that usually focuses on extracting lots of elements of data from the user’s browser like fonts, font size, etc. also it takes into account what emoji’s the user uses. Furthermore, this data is used to analyse who you are. Interestingly this data can be tracked through the VPN you use.
All data is being tracked using the cookies, so what if cookies disappeared, how will digital marketers are will analyse user behaviour. But we are sure that Google and Facebook have alternatives for the same, and we might see some new features in the devices shortly.
A zero-click and visual change to the future of search:
According to Ben Wood (Strategy director), Google surely wants to provide the best results, but on the other hand, they too have the best possible experience on their platform. What we can expect is it’s going to get more difficult to get clicks and Google wants each quality content on their search results page, wherever possible. And so is the reason behind Google regularly updating its algorithm.
A zero-click search is a way that is being used by search engines that does not send the user to third-party websites from organic search results. Around 50 percent of search results nowadays end without a click on an organic search result. Apart from this visual search has been on the rise if we turn the pages of the recent past. It can be a crucial part of SEO now. This is just the scenario of today’s world, soon you will get to see a lot.
Development is just no longer building websites:
According to John Martin (Technical Director at The Drum), programming languages like python are one of the main things taking shape right now in the digital marketing community. If you look into the past it was all about PHP, as it was the only programming language with great features and more importantly was open-source, which means you don’t have to pay for the same to use it. Python on the other hand has emerged as a go-to tool as it is easy to use, easy to learn, and allowing SEO professionals to do whatever they want.
Python has grown as a must-have skill for developers and SEO professionals while the craze continues. Soon developers are the ones who would be ensuring that brands and businesses automate things that are now manually operated. This is what a trend is, right? With an increasing fan base for developing websites with a new programming language, digital marketing would always be upgrading its importance in business growth. From our point of view, rather than just developing a website, it’s more important nowadays to develop an SEO-friendly, user-engaging, and easily recognisable website. Also, the importance of optimisation increases.
UX becoming a ranking factor, but it wouldn’t mean you need a website:
No matter what but UX is one of the most important elements of digital marketing, and so does the demand for UX consultancy for each business/brand increases. User testing is practised to validate theories and mitigate risk before making any decision. It allows us to analyse, where things may have gone wrong so that we aren’t making any mistakes again. The need for the same arises because businesses have the objective they want to achieve, but they won’t consider it to analyse what effects it will have on the customers. There must be a balance between the stakeholders’ thinking and the users’ needs.
UX has emerged as a vital tool to determining if your marketing campaign is going in the right direction. Not necessarily developing UX, you want to have a new website, you can implement the changes on the same. Apart from this one has to understand that simple, yet the creative design is more effective than a fancier one. Every decision must be taken considering the question, does it add value, if not then it’s not worth pursuing it. And UX isn’t a different part of marketing, it’s one of the digital marketing techniques.
Search Intent:
It’s the statistical measure of what people want the most. For example, mobile searches for “should I” grew over 65% if we turn the pages of the last two years. So, businesses must understand their audience’s intent and the questions they’re asking will achieve better organic search rankings. The better you analyse your audience, the better content that your audience likes you would be able to develop, this further increases user engagement.
One trend in search intent is the way people search nowadays. Instead of typing in those long sentences, people prefer to use voice assistants like Siri. Search engines like Google have mentioned that they would be adapting to meet these needs, as current statistics show that there is no end to the growth of this trend. Digital marketers understand the importance of the same, and so we could find more content competing on comprehensive keywords that focus on informational, transactional, and local needs of people.
Other stats include brands seeing a hike of 80% in brand metrics when they use intent-based targeting. Also, there would be around a 677% increase in organic traffic when using the same. Understanding how to be useful to people in their needs is a way to get going in digital marketing. Human behaviour is ever-changing and there’s no constant as in the natural sciences, so the day till we find the way to learn this human behaviour, digital marketing will be the trial and error method while demand for the same will increase as we proceed in the future.
Conclusion:
Digital marketing is a way to advertise using digital media. Advertising online being a more complex process these days, the role of digital marketing to endorse your brand increases. The need for digital marketing during recent times has increased drastically while other businesses being unrooted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many professionals have predicted that we are on the verge of shifting from passive customers to active customers. As we proceed into the future, customer voices would be heard as customer behaviour is an important parameter to track your success of marketing strategy.
Rather than just having a website on the internet, doesn’t mean you are marketing, it’s just similar to a car without fuel. You need to pour the optimisation and SEO friendliness in the same to succeed. The changing human behaviour is restricting us from understanding what users think, as each of them won’t be thinking about the same all the time. So until we discover the maths behind this ever-changing human behaviour, digital marketing will grow as fast as a launching rocket. So what you are waiting for, make a digital strategy and transform your marketing.
Invest in digital marketing today and have patience as it is the only way to yield desired results.
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