***This article about digital marketing trends in 2022 was written before the current Coronavirus Crisis***
2022 has been quite a satisfactory year so far for digital marketing. Trends have grown into practices, and theories have materialized into strategies. For many experts who forecasted how the new year will fare, the first two months have already proved substantial based on their findings. With these cutting-edge techniques and new strategies to achieve results, digital marketing has created exciting new opportunities for online brands to effectively achieve their business goals. Here are some digital marketing trends to follow in 2020.
Powerful Digital Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore
In this article, we will explore four key digital marketing trends that have made a huge impact on the online landscape, deciding how content is built, channeled across, and served onto the audiences’ table.
1) Select Emerging Topics
Making your content unique and informative is the fastest way to get recognition and earn your badge as an influencer in your subject niche.
Many webmasters and digital marketers concentrate too much on content curation which sidelines the positioning and trending element of the topic itself. Targeting growing trends, the latest social media buzz, and other emerging topics from the news feed can win you significant leverage for your blog.
Utilize Google Trends
The best way to achieve exposure is by locking the attention of your readers from trending keywords. Google Trends is an amazing tool to identify hot keywords and their search potential. It is full of helpful features that allow you to pick out statistically valuable keywords and compare them with each other.
With the related queries section, you can search the other trending keywords that have a healthy search volume against your primary keyword. This complements your main keyword and drives additional traffic to it. These keywords have explosive properties, which means they will eventually blow big on Google and work wonders for your content.
Organizing Your Narrative
And now that you have the keywords to win Google’s attention, it’s time you build a narrative for your topic. The smartest way to go about that is to format your content as a guide.
Since these topics are still new and have not made an impressionable footprint yet, you can organize them into a guide format for readers to benefit from. If you are fast enough, your topic might instantly be recognized as THE GUIDE on a particular topic.
2) Make Your Content Epic!
Content is the sole medium for ranking on Google now, which makes adding content more competitive than ever. With the ever-growing production of content, making your material stand out becomes quite challenging.
According to a report from Orbit Media, 47% of bloggers acknowledge that getting traffic and attracting visitors is their biggest challenge in content marketing. Content that is noticed, landed on, interacted with, and pursued is every search engine optimizer’s dream. The key to it is making it epic!
Now, this seems pretty vague, right? How does one make their content epic? Well, it works by overwhelming the reader with a massive, in-depth, and impressive amalgamation of information, statistical data, and engaging elements.
Leveraging Your Content Design
Your content design is a key determinant and establishes a central position in the engagement cycle. Publishers that learn to leverage content design have reportedly made fortunes from their online presence.
Your design must focus on the agenda of the content which includes graphics, textual information, white spacing, calls to action (CTAs), and navigation elements. All these elements must work together and flow harmoniously.
Quality Over Quantity
You must also remember that quality triumphs over quantity, so make sure not to publish any half-cooked or cut-cornered copy that disorients the visitor. This is key for making sure your content is epic.
Now quality content is easier said than done… It takes a lot of time, effort, and layers of editing and proofreading from the content creator. If you put your blood, sweat, and tears into your content, you very well may be able to reach the standard of epic set by Google.
3) Use Email Marketing For Promotion
Email marketing is one of the most effective branding and lead generation tactics known to the internet. Sadly, webmasters often its importance in their digital marketing strategies and seldom utilize its power to their advantage.
According to Statista, global email users in 2019 amounted to 3.9 billion and are forecasted to reach 4.3 billion by 2023, which is nearly half of the world’s population! It is a fast, efficient, and sustainable method of building exposure, increasing your brand position, and supplementing traffic to your website.
Many marketers often face the dilemma of using these practices and still failing to get results. Usually, that’s because not everyone knows the right way to do it.
Structure Your Content Effectively
First off, you need to consider the structure of your content. If you are using emails as a content distribution channel, inviting your visitors to sign up from your pages should be the first priority. Here, you have to be very careful about the conversion orientation of your content. Make sure that it’s optimized according to your goals. Getting clicks is one thing, but leading them toward a conversion should always be your end game.
Put Together A Newsletter Template
Now let’s move to your newsletter template. Brian Deen, one of the world’s leading digital marketing influencers and one who Entrepreneur.com refers to as “SEO Genius”, explains how he learned to modify an old email template to make it more defined and digestible for his subscribers.
By removing unnecessary clutter, and using clear and concise wording, the click-through rate immediately went up. He implemented a new structure that featured a ‘Subject’ (blog topic), followed by the ‘Hook’ which summarized the agenda into a sentence, and then the preview which includes statistics and other key information to stand by the claim. He ended the template with a link and a CTA that further enticed the visitor to click the link.
Hone In On Your Target Audience
Lastly, you must always create the content of the email template based on your regional and demographical preferences in order to make it exclusive to your target audience. Every region has different dynamics.
For example, Missouri SEO will depend on keywords searched most by their respective audiences, just as audiences in Toronto or St. Louis, Missouri will depend on theirs. You must always factor in cultural lingo and factor out phrases that may be considered disrespectful or irrelevant. This helps you personalize the campaigns according to the desired expectations of the recipient which directly impacts the open rate and conversion rate of the email.
4) Become A Source Of Credibility
Citing information from credible sources is a great way to support your topic agenda and increase relevancy with Google. Now imagine if YOU were that source of information that was being widely shared and discussed on other platforms. You would win tons of valuable backlinks that bring link juice to your website.
The idea of becoming “the source” is to position yourself as the best supplier of information related to a certain topic. This is achieved by creating research-backed content about some new and interesting data.
Design A Topic From Scratch
The first step in creating a post like this is designing a topic from scratch. This is because once you take the post live, Google will naturally give it the first-mover advantage. Many successful bloggers often design their topics around this principle to appeal to Google’s search algorithm.
By creating something about an innovative, trending, or objectively new topic, you put yourself on a powerful pedestal that invites researchers, content creators, and webmasters to cite you as a source of their information. This information gets infinitely circulated generating traffic and building brand integrity for your website. However, for the audience to take your post seriously, you must ensure all the content you have curated is 100% authentic.
Posting weak, flawed, or misleading information can have severe consequences for your digital footprint, especially if it falls under the health or finance categories. In recent updates, Google has taken several steps to ensure the validity of information and introduced advanced algorithms to tackle false and fraudulent information on leading online sources.
Therefore, when you are aiming for “The Source” post, always take the pain of thorough research and proofreading to ensure what you have found is genuine and does not misrepresent anything in any way.
Create An Infographic
To top it off, you can visualize your findings by creating an attractive infographic that mixes textual information with graphical elements to make your point clear, digestible, and memorable. According to a study conducted by Thermopylae, the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text, therefore infographics are a great way to present stats and other important information.
After that, you can always promote your content via press releases to help make it visible to influencers, journalists, and other online authorities.
