As a business owner, you should familiarize yourself with the latest digital marketing trends to gain the upper hand on your competitors. Tactics that once yielded sales or conversions may now prove ineffective. So, consider the following digital marketing trends to help your business succeed.

digital marketing

According to a study conducted by Infusionsoft, social media is the most popular digital marketing channel for businesses selling to consumers, with nearly half of all business owners using the platform to attract leads and generate sales. Infusionsoft researchers say Facebook is the leading social media channel with 75.1 percent usage, followed by Instagram with 37.6 percent usage, Twitter with 35.1 percent, LinkedIn with 22.8 percent and YouTube with 21.4 percent.

Facebook Ads Are Now A Necessity

To reach a large audience on Facebook, most businesses have invested in learning how to use the network’s paid advertising service, Facebook Ads. Relying strictly on organic methods of social media marketing isn’t going to work to generate targeted traffic. Facebook’s organic, non-paid reach for commercial content has declined over the past few years. This means businesses owners must use Facebook Ads to reach their target audience and build their campaigns in a smart and cost-effective manner. Advertising budgets can quickly be drained with poor results without proper demographic research and experience advertising on the Facebook platform.

Video Promotion To Expand Your Audience

Video marketing is a powerful digital marketing strategy that’s expected to gain momentum this year. With increasing internet speeds video can be viewed and downloaded much faster than it could in the past changing expectations of web users. Unfortunately, though, research cited by AllBusiness show that only one-quarter of small business owners’ use it. Businesses that fall under this category should hire a professional, invest the time and resources into creating high-quality video. Publishing relevant videos on YouTube, social media and your website, you’ll connect with prospects on a deeper level and add a personal touch to your marketing campaign.

CRM For Greater Efficiency

Don’t underestimate the importance of automation tools in your business’s digital marketing efforts. Most professional marketers say lack of time is the biggest challenge facing their digital marketing strategy. Logging in and publishing every social media post by hand, for instance, is a monotonous and time-consuming process that can be avoided with the right tools. Social media management and customer relationship management (CRM) software are just a few tools that can help your business automate many of its marketing tasks.

Mobile Marketing Success

If you want to succeed with a digital marketing and search engine optimization strategy, a business must embrace the mobile revolution. According to comScore, 95 percent of Americans own a cellphone and 77 percent own a smartphone. Furthermore, there are now more mobile internet users than desktop users. Whether you’re promoting your business on Facebook, AdWords or elsewhere, you should focus on attracting mobile users. Certain web searches cater to mobile devices more than others. Optimizing your site pages for both desktop and mobile are critical to success. Local businesses like restaurants, gas stations and walk-in stores have a much higher reward with mobile marketing. Plan your mobile strategy around the search behavior of your target market and avoid following the heard or jumping on a marketing trend because larger companies are utilizing it. Be your own advocate and test your personalized marketing strategy before making large financial investments in a campaign.mobile seo

Does Email Still Generate Revenue?

Contrary to what some business owners believe, email is still a relevant and effective digital marketing channel. According to ConstantContact every $1 a business spends on email marketing generates roughly $38 in return. It costs very little to acquire prospects’ email addresses. And once you’ve obtained their email addresses, you can send them endless promotional messages. But being a producer of email SPAM will hurt the reputation of a business more than help it. Earn consumer trust by only sending emails with valuable content and respect their privacy and time by making the email content informative and helpful.

Embracing digital marketing trends described above is a great start for an online marketing campaign, however, it’s important to monitor and adjust your marketing efforts accordingly. Each business has a unique audience with very specific buying habits so doing research on demographics is important. If a strategy or channel isn’t working, switch to new platform and change your approach.