Your consumers like to use a number of devices and platforms simultaneously, and the toughest job you, as a marketer, have is to not lose sight of your target audience and track them down regardless of where they are. But how does this variety in choice impact you and your customers? Let’s take a look at some trends which will have a considerable impact on your digital marketing campaigns.
The era of “everywhere” commerce
Any internet marketing agency worth its salt will help you target an audience which seems to be at different places, all at once. Take a look at this: as per a recent report, 232 million people are on the Internet, 177 million stay connected at home through Wi-Fi, 182 million use broadband to access the web at home, 256 million users are glued to their TV sets and almost 150 million people have smartphones – the last two statistics are from the US alone. Given today’s highly fragmented media consumption pattern, users prefer staying on multiple devices over common platforms to do more of what they love.
It means your digital marketing agency should keep you in the hunt and be prepared to change or modify existing strategies on short notice. You have to be “everywhere” when it comes to digital marketing. As a thorough marketer, you should be prepared with diverse content and transmit it across different platforms as per your budget. Remember that capturing and maintaining your users’ attention will become more challenging as media and device multitasking become the next stages in digital evolution. Your content needs to be creative, smart and more visual to engage the audience.
Has “Hummingbird” affected SEO?
Before hiring the services of a digital marketing company, make sure the people there are not only knowledgeable but also possess the requisite skill set to help you make the most of latest SEO trends, including the “Hummingbird” algorithm from Google. Rolled out a couple of months back, this new search update brings with it a lot of the old, existing components and marries them off with some new ones, which Google believes makes the search results more effective. Instead of looking for exact word matches in a page, the new engine now tries to take each word of the query and analyze it to better understand what the user might want to know.
The internet marketing company you employ needs to make provisions for promoting long tail keywords which consumers today are more likely to use. This is because when you speak out a search, you tend to use more number of words just like in a conversation, the only difference being here you are interacting with the search engine and not a person. Conversational search is slowly picking up pace with “Hummingbird” trying to sort information based on what a user might actually be interested in rather than just take two or three individual query terms and display results accordingly.
Content marketing still on top
Content is still king. It will continue to play an important role going into 2014. The “Hummingbird” algorithm hasn’t drastically impacted rankings – at least none that has come to the spotlight, yet. So, it can be safe to say that content which is unique, relevant, original and plagiarism-free will continue to rank high. One of the ways to improve your site’s rank is by Google Authorship. This stresses on the importance of the author’s quality of work: not just present but what he/she has created in the past as well as what other authoritative individuals have had to say about his/her work. Don’t forget to discuss Author tags with your digital marketing agency and benefit from better online visibility.
Author Bio: Henry Smith is an industry veteran who runs a successful internet marketing agency. He has been helping companies achieve better ROI through innovative online and offline marketing campaigns for almost two decades now.