Here’s what to look out for in 2016
Social networks
Social media is going from strength to strength, with almost every marketer believing that channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are raising exposure for their businesses. Small enterprises in particular benefit from social marketing as it has a wide reach and is relatively cheap. Most companies are increasingly focusing on social networks to raise brand awareness.
Facebook is the favourite social media site among marketers, with many agreeing that they’ve picked up more traffic through it. LinkedIn is also a popular choice of venue for adverts and for driving more revenue. Spending on social media adverts is also up and looks set to carry on rising.
SEO – the next level
The biggest trend in Search engine optimisation is making SEO agile to the ever-changing Google algorithms. Another is to make the content attractive enough to hold people on the page – marketers are no longer writing content for search engines, with vague, catch-all keywords, but for real people who are ready to buy.
A big indicator of this trend is the shift to long-tail keywords, which pinpoint exactly what people are after. Long-tail keywords bring in “pre-qualified” traffic and are becoming more important as part of an SEO campaign.
Big data:
Analytics remains central to digital marketing. The volume of data available to businesses keeps growing, and companies need to be able to read and interpret it if they are going to stay afloat.
More data also means more noise, so companies need to use analytics to keep their messages, and their feedback, meaningful. Much of the available market data goes unanalysed because it is unstructured and hard to interpret – filtering and structuring this information remains essential for digital marketers.
