Top 5 emerging digital trends

To gain sufficient results from your digital marketing output there are a number of tactics which shouldn’t be seen as a ‘nice to have’ but instead a necessity.

1. Understand new online ads

Modern paid search is facing multiple challenges. Google has removed some handy key word tools, PPC has got costly and competitive and more than 50 per cent of searches are now happening on mobiles where there are fewer ad opportunities  Don’t fight it, just learn to be selective and concentrate on getting the RIGHT MESSAGE to the RIGHT MARKET using the RIGHT MEDIA.

For example, display adverts are cost effective and have good conversion rates. Identity PPC marketing is also a good option targeting certain audiences on social media platforms.

2. Get eyes on your content

With 4,800 blogs posted every minute, it’s getting harder to stand out. Drafting quality content which will get people clicking on it, liking it and sharing it is timing consuming and relies on a number of strategic elements.

Firstly you need to think about who your audience is and what will grab their attention, what websites are they likely to look at and what do they find engaging?  Secondly do some competitor research and take the time to understand others that operate in your field. The actual idea process is one of the most complex and is the difference between success and failure. If your idea is based on your research and ticks the new, useful and feasible box it’s likely to be a good one.

Getting content seen is now extremely difficult and to seriously get it amplified you need to put as much into promoting your content as you did producing it. In addition to manually posting it to your social media profiles and pitching it to other media sources, power your story by attributing budget to online advertising via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google.

3. Measure, measure, measure

For many businesses there is still a missing link between marketing spend and bottom-line performance. The answer is to understand the true value of measurement.

Your digital campaigns are unlikely to turn in to direct sales every time but it will give you a wealth of intelligent information if you set your objectives first. What is going to be commercially beneficial to you? Brand awareness, downloads, sign ups, enquiries, conversions?

4. Have a crisis plan in place

Social media platforms are continuing to cause a major headache for businesses.

If something has been picked up by the public and it is likely to affect share price, lose customers or lead to a costly court battle then you need to take action.

You should already have a social media crisis plan in place and even tested it via role play so you have confidence in your team. Quite often it’s an operational fail which has led to the crisis which means you need to understand the problem and get the CEO or business owner to do the apologising. If they are media savvy then a professional video can work best, it puts a human face behind a company which people can associate with. Always stay ahead of the story by updating people and turning off any pro-active marketing until it has calmed down.

5. Keep moving

Big players like Google and Apple have been predicting what we want to see and making everything they touch intelligent.

This is evident in Google’s search platform, when typing something it automatically brings up what it thinks you need, often even offering bold words for things it thinks you may deem important too.

Google Now, the service that helps Android users by making recommendations based on their data, can pull information from Gmail like flight information, restaurant reservations, package tracking and movies. Apple on the other hand has branched out to work with partners so mobile devices can learn your habits and activate certain apps at certain times.

Expect more emphasis on the strengths of intelligence in the next 12 months. Global companies are investing heavily on working with engineers and mathematicians to produce new algorithms which will provide computer generated results to feed in to your everyday tools.