The world of online marketing is changing all the time, and it’s important for businesses to keep on top of the latest trends. Because things change so fast, no one wants to spend time and money focusing on marketing techniques that will quickly become obsolete.
So here are some of the most important areas to focus on right now that are going to be important for a long time to come.
Focus on Mobile
It is becoming increasingly clear for businesses these days that they need to take a mobile-first approach. More people are using their phones to access the internet than ever before, and in 2015, Google changed its algorithms to ensure mobile-friendly sites were given priority in mobile search.
This is a trend that is set to continue, and that means smart businesses are focusing on mobile.
What this means is firstly ensuring that your website is mobile friendly, which often means using responsive design so that it displays correctly on any size screen. It also means creating content that is accessible on mobile devices to ensure the experience is optimized for mobile visitors even before you consider desktop visitors.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are also becoming increasingly important. This makes your pages open much faster on mobile devices, therefore providing a better user experience.
You should also focus on mobile when it comes to marketing your business. This could mean using AdWords ads that incorporate a telephone number so prospects can contact you directly.
Essentially, do anything you can that benefits mobile users and makes life easier for them, and you can’t go too far wrong.
Keep Creating Content
Content has been the backbone of successful online marketing for years, and the good news is that this is not going to change anytime soon. Now is a great time to focus on content marketing and increase your budget.
Creating valuable content and publishing it regularly has so many benefits. You can improve your SEO by targeting your main keywords, show thought leadership, demonstrate your authority in your niche, and create content that you can share across your social networks to generate traffic and links.
These days, longer, higher-quality content is the focus rather than short, basic blogs. Add images, statistics, original research to make your content even better.
But also make sure you go beyond text. Videos are becoming more popular than ever, and especially live videos. Infographics are also popular, as are podcasts.
Content is more important than ever, so make sure you focus on creating and promoting it in your business.
Invest in Paid Social
Social media has become a huge focus for marketers. Businesses have realized that they need to increase their presence, become more visible to their target audience, share useful content, and get involved in the conversation if they want to generate more traffic that converts.
Again, social media is not going anywhere fast, so investing more in building your presence is very wise.
One area where you might want to pay particular attention is paid social. Advertising has become a fantastic way to reach out to more people on social media and increase your visibility. Facebook Advertising, for example, provides an affordable way to reach out to your ideal customers because of the excellent targeting options available. This can be done even more effectively when automating social promotions through the use of tools like MeetEdgar or HootSuite.
Paid social is likely to become increasingly important over the coming years, so it’s well worth exploring.
Keep On Building Links
Link building has been at the heart of SEO since the beginning. And while many aspects of SEO have changed over the years, link building is still fundamental to a successful SEO strategy, and it will continue to be so for years to come.
Whether you build your own links or you use dedicated SEO reseller services to assist you, this is one area where you want to keep on focusing. Build high-quality links continuously and ensure you start ranking for your most important keywords.
Use Structured Data
Finally, structured data is another area to pay particular attention to over the coming years. Google is increasingly providing rich snippets of information in its search results, you will only be able to take advantage of this if you use structured data markup.
Keep Up with the Online Marketing Trends
Don’t waste your time and money on digital marketing techniques that are not going to be around for much longer. Instead, make sure you focus on the strategies that will be important for a long time to come.
From content marketing to structured data, these strategies are not going anywhere soon, so make them the focus of your online marketing campaigns and enjoy better results.