How To Keep Up With Digital Marketing Trends

Whether you are starting a new business or a freelance career, or you are a business veteran, understanding how marketing works is crucial for success. To win in this modern age, you need to adapt to your customers’ behaviour. To do so, you’ll need to figure out how to keep up with digital marketing trends.

Without marketing, there is no brand awareness, no sales, and no engaged customers. Meaning – there is no business. With a rising technology, digital marketing trends and marketing knowledge grows alongside. Allowing companies to learn more about it and include it in their yearly plan.

What are marketing trends and why should you care about them? 

To make a good marketing strategy, your overall game plan, you’ll need to be up to date! Every year we need to keep up with current trends in order to understand what works the best for our audience. For example, in 2020, the main trends, among many others were revolving around interactive content, personalization, content marketing and video content. It was recognized that internet users crave for new experiences when they go online. For many, that means greater interactivity and more appealing visual content. 

Digital marketing trends will allow you to keep up with your customers and understand their interests. You’ll know how to approach them, communicate with them and keep up with their habits. You’ll be able to listen and adapt to their behavioural changes. So, instead of wasting your money on every marketing move that crosses your mind, this you’ll know right away where and when to invest!

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How to approach digital marketing trends?

You need to understand your target audience. Why? Because your audience is your compass.

Internet users are adapting to the rapid change of technology and social media platforms. At one moment, they were searching for hair tutorials on YouTube, and now they are dotting on TikTok videos. As you can see, the audience is constantly changing their habits, and if you want to succeed, you’ll need to know how to keep up with them. That is where digital marketing trends kick in! But how to actually keep up with these trends and at the same time follow our audience? 

Keep an eye on keywords

The first step is to know your target audience. Ask questions like: what platforms does your audience visit or what does interest them. Google Trends and Twitter hashtags will come in handy for this one.

• Google Trends is a tool that allows you to see what people are searching on Google and YouTube. For example, if you are just starting your business blog, this tool will help you narrow down your target audience. By entering a keyword related to your business, you’ll be able to see patterns connected to where and when it’s been most searched. You can choose a region, a state, or even worldwide! Not to mention, you can choose a category related to that keyword, as well as a type of search you are interested in. You can compare up to five keywords, and set alerts for any updates! This way you can catch on new trends early, and it can even help you discover trends before they actually spike in popularity.
  
• Twitter hashtags can be used in a similar way as Google Trends, except, it only applies to this platform. TwitterDeck is the easiest way to stay on top of Twitter trends. This tool allows you to use many columns, in different ways. Whether for notifications, scheduled tweets, messages, or even for following popular hashtags. Just type in a hashtag you want to follow and filter it by language, location, authors and even the number of engagements. This will show you all the tweets matching your filters in a chosen period of time. Allowing you to understand and see what is trending on Twitter under keywords you’ve entered. 

Stay informed

Digital marketing trends are changing rapidly. In order to understand how to make an outstanding marketing plan, you’ll need to follow industry news.

• Google Alerts will help you keep up with all topics you are interested in! Choose the keywords you want to track and adjust the alerts. It provides you with information and content from the field you are interested in, and it all leads to your email inbox! It gives you many options that help you narrow down your interests. You can choose how often and how many results you want to receive, as well as the language and region you want to include. The best thing is – you can pick the form that suits you the best! Video, blog or even discussion – just check it in a Sources field. For example, by setting “marketing” as your keyword, “The United States” as your region, “blog” and “video” as sources, you get a daily dose of American news on this topic!  

• Subscription – Reading blogs will not only help you keep up with marketing trends, but also provide you with many useful tips and tricks. Subscribe to ones related to your industry. It will help you keep up with all the news and research, which can later serve as a direction when creating a marketing strategy. And remember, with these magazines you can never go wrong with Forbes, Target Marketing and Social Media Examiner. Don’t shy away from the newsletter either! They are a great way to stay on top of the latest industry trends, without going through lots of content!

Boost your inspiration

Keeping up with digital marketing trends is not only about keywords and industry news. It’s about creativity, innovation and bringing something new and fresh to your audience. Since that is the thing that makes your business stand out from the competition!

• Social Media might be the best source of creativity! You can first hand check what your competition does and get inspired. Also, since we are all used to social media platforms, you can easily see what your target group likes, and adapt your marketing to them. Besides using your social media for additional spark, you can use it for learning and networking as well. Join groups on LinkedIn and Facebook that are related to your industry. They are a great source for online events, conferences, and exchange of the latest industry learnings.
  
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• Ask your team – If you have a team, include them! But if you don’t have a team, ask your friends for help. Innovation is a crucial part of keeping up with these ever-changing trends. To stay on the top of your game, create a space for idea exchange. Share recent articles on industry findings, interesting trends and inspirational discoveries. Schedule a monthly brainstorming session, as these can benefit your marketing strategy and innovation process. Also, try talking to people who could be your potential target audience, but have different interests than you. They’ll be more likely to have great ideas that have not crossed your mind yet!

Bonus tip

Innovating and keeping up with digital marketing trends is great for the business. But not at the cost of your customers’ satisfaction! Even if surveys may seem like an old-fashioned way to gather data, encouraging your customers to give feedback can be very useful. Ask your audience about their preferences, what they like the most about your brand and other core questions that come to mind. However, be careful not to overwhelm them with long boring questionnaires. A great way to do a questionnaire could be to do a poll, ‘ask a question’ or ‘suggest a topic’ on social media platforms. You’ll get to engage your customers, as they’re more likely to answer these, rather than long questionnaires.

The more diverse the pool of participants you have, the more accurate your customer profile will be. Aim for both current and past customers, site visitors, in-process prospects, and leads. Honest customer feedback can reveal a lot about your business and branding. This way you’ll gain pain points that current trends don’t address! Since the core of your business is your audience, take some time and think about  Who Are You Targeting? And afterwards, learn to Create a Customer Profile!