Online marketing is always changing and evolving. The basics of social media marketing and content marketing will remain largely the same, but new twists are always being considered and developed.
We’ll look at some of the most exciting new ways that are being explored, starting with one that is very familiar to the image obsessed readers of Bored Panda.
Pictures will be used even more to tell stories
Pinterest and Instagram have shown that using images to promote products works. It has been shown in studies that websites with great images in them get greater amount of attention 94% of the time.
Not only will this benefit your conversion and overall engagement, but pictures with proper ALT text can improve your SEO. Get your cameras ready, or head over to Flickr, because pictures are going to be more important than ever.
More promotion via videos
Vine gives you six seconds to advertise a product. This makes for advertising that is quick to produce, easy to share with your audience, and even easier for your audience to share with their friends. Vine is expected to continue to grow. Instagram, Flickr and Snapchat are all having their new video options used more and more often to meet the demand for online video.
YouTube, of course, is still the king of the video hill. People are watching an incredible amount of video on the world’s second largest search engine. Brands such as Old Spice, Red Bull and The Home Depot are using their YouTube business channels in whole new ways. They’re pushing the limits of what social media and online marketing can be.
The advent of crowd marketing
Crowd marketing is a new technique that focuses on using popularity as an aspect of marketing to online audiences. The company that is using it most successfully right now is called Viral Tactic.
How their crowd marketing strategy works is by linking up with a wide range of influential social media leaders to promote people’s social media channels and websites, while still using the successful tactics of old.
This shift toward not only promoting websites, but to promote the social media accounts which popularize them, leads to a style of word of mouth advertising that builds and builds – all thanks to the power of exponential social media reach.
Marketing via location and GPS
Google is making search increasingly local, those with smartphones think that this is great as it allows them to find businesses that are close to them as they surf the internet from a mobile platform.
Marketers will have a constantly increasing ability to reach people according to their GPS coordinates. Using a Google+ profile page, with the location of your business clearly marked, is almost an essential now! Do everything you can to help your local search become a driving factor in your online marketing efforts.
Social media will continue to grow in diversity, and importance
Social media once consistent of nothing but Facebook and MySpace. Now online users can use Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and a host of other specialized platforms. Social media is now part of our daily lives, and businesses should take note.
This point relates well to the crowd marketing discussed above, you’ll need a bigger reach as social media increases in size, and most business people simply can not keep up on their own. The days of giving the intern a camera and asking them to take photos of the office for the day are long over. Establish your business on the basics, build yourself quickly with some crowd marketing techniques, and branch out to new social media websites as they become relevant to your business.
Sharing becomes more important
Sharing is the new word of mouth, which has long been the most important form of marketing. The difference between now and years past is that companies can control, monitor and grow their word of mouth when they engage with their social media accounts. This again relates back to crowd marketing as you find influential people and get them to share your information with their audience.
With this in mind, you will always want to consider whether or not the content you are creating is worthy of not only sharing with your followers, but whether or not your followers will see it as worthy of sharing with their friends, families and co-workers.
These are just some of the online marketing trends which have emerged in 2014, and which will continue to grow throughout the rest of the year. Get to work on your strategy to see your business succeed!
Image credit to Horia Varlan.
