Digital Marketing trends in the last five years have brought more changes to social media and other online channels than ever before. With the popularization of Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and vine brands, influencers are able to build audiences and communicate in months rather than years.
With all the new online channels and tools popping up on the digital marketing landscape we wanted to write a quick list of top Digital Marketing trends that will help you grow your business and be successful in both your projects and online businesses.
Digital Marketing Trends #1 – More Video
Video is quickly proving to be the most popular form of content out there. Hubspot quotes a study that found some incredible statistics about video content. Did you know that one third of all online activity is spent on watching video?
Or that including a video in a landing page can increase conversion rates by 80%? That’s incredible.
Aside from video being so potent, it’s also getting easier and easier to create videos. There are numerous tools and apps that help make video creation super easy.
(Check out FxGuru for adding Hollywood style effects to your video, or Vine for making short videos on the go)
Also social media helps you share videos very easily. Facebook videos are very popular and it’s easy to boost them or advertise them on the platform. Also, Youtube is still huge, and of course Vine is growing in popularity.
Snapchat videos are very popular and a lot of popular brands use them very successfully.
Digital Marketing Trends #2 – Facebook advertising
According to the social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk, Facebook advertising is one of the most powerful and effective ways to advertise your business. And it’s true. You can literally target anybody on the planet for your ad.
You can target the employees of a certain company, everyone that likes a certain cause or follow a certain page, and using the Facebook Pixel you can target all the people that have visited your website.
Facebook Ads are cheaper than Google, traditional print ads, TV and Radio, and even web banners and popups. Also, with more than 1.2 billion users Facebook is by far the biggest network that you can tap into.
If you are new to Facebook Advertising I would recommend this incredibly thorough tutorial by Neil Patel.
Digital Marketing Trend 3 – Instagram Influencers
If you were blown away by Facebook, wait until you hear about Instagram influencers. Instagram is an incredibly visual platform, perfect for images and videos, and perfect for people to tell their stories and market their brand or business.
The two main assets on Instagram are the number of followers and the engagement of the audience. When a person has a significant number of engaged followers they become an influencer, or someone that is likely to influence his audiences’ buying decisions.
Influencer marketing is probably the second most effective marketing tool after Facebook Ads, in some cases it can work even better.
Here are the steps to go about getting an infuencer to market your product:
- Look up a hashtag that’s related to your industry (#Nike, #shoes, #SocialMedia, #Business)
- Direct message 500-1000 people that have a substantial following and good engagement
- Offer each influencer some value (free product, free service, help with something they need)
- Follow through with your promise and have the influencer promote your product
Normally finding the right influencers could take a few hours per day for a few weeks. Luckily, there are numerous tools, essentially databases of influencers, that help you find who you are looking for.
Here is the most comprehensive list of influencer tools that I have found.
Digital Marketing Trend 4 – Native Storytelling
If content is king, execution is queen. This trend of digital marketing involves creating a new verb – storytelling. More and more people, brands, and businesses are sharing their stories in 2017.
They share their process, how they met certain goals, their why, or how they started their company. It’s a super powerful approach because it humanizes their experience and helps us all to relate to what they are going through.
Here is a comprehensive list of storytelling tools you can use.
Digital Marketing Trend 5 – Social Media Automation
The last but not least trend is the most time saving of all the trends we have covered so far. When you are doing everything right, creating video content, telling your story, partnering up with Influencers and advertising on Facebook, you will naturally see a lot more engagement from your social media followers.
The challenge is to find time and the dedicated staff to handle all the engagement, as well as publish all of your content on the various social media channels. There are numerous tools out there that help businesses automate their social media.
One of the most powerful tool is called eClincher, and it has everything you need in one platform.
What are we automating you ask? Here is a list of things that eClincher helps simplify for you:
- Publishing – Automatically publish all of your content on all the channels at once, schedule posts to repeat or recycle every hour, day, week or month.
- Engagement – reply to every DM, tweet, share, like, and comment in one place using a unified social inbox. Content Curation – find the most relevant content and post it on your blog
- Automate Blog Post Publishing – automatically post every single blog post to your social media channels
- Analytics – download white label analytics reports of every social media channel you manage Manage Social Media Team – assign tasks and brand channels to your team to handle for you.
READ ALSO: Digital Marketing Skills: What Does Future of Marketing Jobs Look Like?
These are the top 5 digital marketing trends of 2017. If you think we have missed anything or want to add anything to the list, please leave a comment below. If you implement these you will always win, guaranteed. Cheers!
Ben Kazinik (@eclincherrocks) is an inbound marketer for eClincher, the world’s most powerful social media management platform. He enjoys hiking, cooking, soccer, and visiting his family around the world. Email me at – ben@eclincher.com
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