The Brave New Digital World

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Digital trends for the Marketing & Communications community

The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and it is scarily unforgiving. What is crucial for digital marketing one month, maybe useless the next.



We are on a mission to help you keep an eye on the digital marketing horizon. Here is a list of some promising digital marketing trends that look set to continue into 2021 and beyond.

Voice Search

A growing area your marketing department should focus on is voice search. Due to the advancement of voice assistants such as Siri and Google Assistant, more people than ever before are simply asking these assistants for answers. 


Voice search is far from in its infancy, in 2019 Adobe discovered that 48% of consumers use voice for general web searches. If you’re not already optimising your site for voice search, you should start today. 


Optimising for voice search is tricky, but it isn’t impossible. You should start by answering questions that people are asking and doing so in a succinct manner. In addition to this, you should also get a Google my Business profile, which answers direct questions about your business.

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A group of people are sitting at a table having a meeting.

Image Search

Google image ranking is important, but often an overlooked method to drive traffic towards your website. Image search may also be set to gain even more importance in the future. Google Lens allows users to ‘search what they see’ and Amazon allows for photo search on their mobile app. 



SEO tactics for image search have remained static for sometime. You should always ensure that your images have alt text, a descriptive filename, and a product schema markup. 

New SEO Trends

Search engine optimisation (SEO), is not a new concept and it's certainly here to stay. The goal with SEO is to have your business’ website sit as high as possible on Google rankings. A high-ranking website on Google is guaranteed to bring consistent, organic traffic. 



SEO, however, isn’t a static skill nor can you set and forget. Google updates its algorithms regularly, so whether you're new to SEO or well on your way, it’s important that your team is always aware of these changes and continue to invest time into updating and evolving your strategy.

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A group of people are sitting around a table with papers on it

User Experience

In the early days of SEO marketing, keywords and search terms were kings. This allowed marketers to pack their websites with keywords in order to rank highly on Google. In recent years, Google has moved away from this approach and is now looking to answer searchers' questions, rewarding websites that provide a great user experience (UX) through their ability to engage and retain a visitor's attention through relevant and helpful content on their website.


Thus introducing the partnership between SEO and UX to rank highly. SEO still addresses your search engine requirements whilst UX targets visitors to your website. UX and SEO are the perfect pair as they share a common goal, user experience. 



It's important that your SEO strategy is one that aligns with a great UX. To get the best out of this powerful duo, you need to consider how user-friendly your site is, does it adapt well to mobile platforms, can you keep visitors engaged for an extended period of time through simple navigation and helpful content?

New Social Media Trends

In addition to SEO trends, social media only gets bigger when it comes to digital marketing. Smart leaders know that it’s vital to understand how social media is changing if their business is going to continue to attract new customers and engage their existing audiences.

Live video

Instagram and Facebook live videos have ballooned in popularity since the events of 2020. Brands were forced to interact with their customers in new ways and live social media video certainly helped with this. 


There is no doubt this trend is here to stay throughout 2021 - so make sure your business is using live video in your social media strategy. 

Inclusivity

Businesses and brands are under more pressure than ever to modernise their philosophies. Business investment in social causes and community not only helps raise awareness of important issues but also shows your audience that your business cares about what is most important to them.


A recent study by Accenture found that 29% of people would switch to a brand that openly valued inclusivity and diversity. However, don’t use this purely as a marketing ploy, ensure your business adopts these values in an authentic and transparent way.

Stories

Instagram has over 500 million users, with a third of those users interacting with stories on a daily basis. If this wasn’t impressive enough, stories also have a very high clickthrough rate, with estimates placing this 5.6% higher than Instagram videos. 


As a result, it’s imperative that you jump onto the stories bandwagon as soon as possible to stay ahead in the social media game.

 

You might not be a digital and social specialist, but you don’t have to let anyone else know this. Keep an eye on the new digital marketing trends, these are the things you need to be looking for if you want your business to continue carving out its place in this brave new digital world. 

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