What are the hottest social media and digital marketing trends RIGHT NOW? I’ll be sharing the 4 MAJOR social media and digital marketing trends you should absolutely be paying attention to this year to stay alive and thrive in the ever-changing wild wild west that is the Internet.
I mean, knew the hot trends I wanted to share with you guys from my own experience in the industry over the last 10 years, and especially the changes I’ve seen happening recently, but some of the stats I found blew my mind.
Like seriously… So, grab a notebook and get ready to take some notes! Alright, major marketing trend number one, video is taking over. So, I don’t need to tell you how awesome video is. Here you are on YouTube watching my video! But guys I’m not just talking about YouTube… Between Netflix, and Snapchat, and Instagram Stories, and Facebook Live, it is no secret that video has become a staple in our everyday lives.
In fact, a whopping 75 MILLION consumers in the US alone watch video content on a daily basis… And it’s predicted that 82% of ALL internet traffic will come through video by 2021. Guys, that is huge! So if you’re not taking advantage of video in your marketing, you absolutely need to be… and this includes LIVE video too.
So by 2021, it’s expected that 13% of all internet traffic will come from from LIVE video. Kinda cool right? I mean it’s no secret that people love real, relatable and relevant content, which you’ll see in just a second, is a huge underlying factor in the trends that I’m sharing with you today.
But I’m actually curious to know – what video content do you create or consume most regularly outside of YouTube? Comment below and let me know your favs. And now, there’s something really, really important I want to talk about when it comes to video… and that’s something called the “attention span myth” – or the belief that people’s attention spans have gotten shorter, and therefore longer video content no longer works.
Well, I’m here to say that is absolutely not true. Think about it: when’s the last time you binged watched something on Netflix for hours? Well, hate to say it guys but science says it was probably sometime in the last 24 hours.
Netflix has reported that its nearly 118 million subscribers watch 140 million hours of content on average per day. That’s 71 minutes per user per day! So have people’s attention spans really gotten shorter?! NO! Not at all.
But what has changed is the increase in easy and available options to choose from, with the simultaneous decrease in people’s intolerance of crappy content. The truth is, your video can be as long as you want it to be, as long as you’re adding educational or entertainment value, it’s high quality, easy and available! This is what I call “The Netflix Effect” – there are literally millions of incredibly high-quality video options available in just one click.
So if someone isn’t loving what you’re putting out there, they’re going to move on… So guys I hate to say it, but you can’t blame the algorithm or people’s “shorter attention spans” for your lame content.
As marketers today, we are not only in the ATTENTION business, but were in the RETENTION business… so how ya gonna get people to stick around? Create engaging high quality content. Now, before I move on, there’s something else that’s really important to know about video length.
If the purpose of your video is not education or entertainment, but rather ENGAGEMENT. Shorter videos do in fact outperform longer videos. And testing has shown that videos around two minutes in length generate the highest levels of engagement.
And it makes perfect sense right, when you’re asking for something from your viewer – i.e. engagement – get to the point or they gone. So, major marketing trend number two, hyper-relevant behaviour-based content is a must Guys this hurts to say, especially as an email marketer, but gone are the days of relying SOLELY on “batch-and-blast” email sends.
Or in other words, sending the exact SAME email message to every single one of your subscribers at the same time, regardless of where they are in their consumer journey with you. The future of effective email marketing will be sending behaviour-based emails in REAL TIME to your subscribers.
In fact 78% of consumers say that personally-relevant content is a determining factor in their purchasing decision and a lack of relevance in marketing messaging leads to a massive 83% decrease in engagement.
So it makes sense that a recent study showed that releveant e-mails triggered based on behavior are 3x more effective than “one size fits all” email blasts. So for example, sending an email to a potential buyer immediately after they left a shopping cart but didn’t buy… or sending viewers of a particular video a different email message than those who never watched it at all.
Yes, while it does mean creating MORE marketing assets, thanks to AI, it’s incredibly easy to monitor, track and create these relevant digital experiences and action-based communications using a robust CRM platform.
And there are many of them out there. So in my next video, I’m going to talk more about how AI is actually influencing your marketing messaging, and what you, as a copywriter, need to do to stay relevant and effective.
Now don’t worry, in my opinion, machine-learning will never be able to completely match real, relevant and relatable copy written by a HUMAN… but it can help you streamline the process and give you invaluable data to fuel your creative genius.
Alright, major marketing trend number three, omni-channel marketing is expected Look, while it’s still highly possible to run effective marketing campaigns through a single marketing channel, say Facebook Ads, or emails, or Social Media… What’s changing is the need to have all these channels COMMUNICATE with one another behind the scenes to create hyper-relevant communication that’s tailored to your audience’s actions.
So, for example, if one of your followers clicks a post on your Instagram and goes and watches a webinar that you hosted… You wouldn’t want to send them an email later that day asking them to sign up for that very same webinar that they just watched.
You’d very likely be hurting your chances of turning that subscriber into a long term customer, because they no longer feel they’re in a 1-to-1 relationship with you. It becomes apparent they are simply “being marketed to”.
This is becoming increasingly important as more and more people are engaging with brands ACROSS multiple devices which makes omni-channel and omni-device tracking a must. In fact, 98% of people switch between devices in the same day.
I know I do. And unfortunately, while your customer really doesn’t care about the integration that happens behind the scenes, they absolutely EXPECT it. 87% of consumers believe that brands should be putting more effort into omni-channel initiatives.
So, I encourage you to use email, use social media, use chat bots, and SMS, and desktop notifications, and paid ads and retargeting – or better yet, all of the above – but – heads up – it’s no longer enough to create a strategy for each one of these channels in isolation, you need to take a more holistic approach and ensure that these channels are connected and speaking to one another so that you can provide the hyper-relevant behaviour based content that I just spoke about.
And that is the key difference between multi-channel and omni-channel marketing. Omni-channel marketing helps create stronger brand loyalty and drastically improves your customer lifetime value. In fact, companies that utilize optimized omnichannel strategies report a 91% increase in retention rate over those companies that do not.
Guys that is huge. Ok and finally… marketing trend number four, voice search is on the rise The future of search is VOICE. According to Google, right now 20% of all searches are voice queries through digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa… and next year, they expect that number to skyrocket over 50%.
I mean it makes sense as mobile usage has been on the rise for years and 71 percent of all mobile users between the ages of 18 and 29 use voice assistants regularly on their smartphone. So I’m curious to know, how often do you do voice search or use digital assistants? Do you have one in your home or just rely on your Siri or your smartphone? Comment below and let me know.
Because I know for me, Voice Search is becoming second nature anytime I’m looking for a quick answer to something… and this is kind of crazy but digital assistants are going beyond simple search AI and are actually evolving to understand user intent and behaviors.
So it actually grows smarter, and smarter with every single interaction… crazy right? “Hey Siri, where is the highest rated Vietnamese restaurants near me?” Interactions like this happen so regularly that you might not even consider it a traditional “Google Search”.
And guess what, neither do many marketers….. yet… and this creates a huge opportunity for you, if you know how to capitalize on it. Because the way that people traditionally conduct a Google Search is very different than the way they might conduct a voice search.
So for example, when you are searching for a brunch spot on Google, you might type in something like “Best Brunch in Los Angeles.” But when you change that to a voice search your behavior completely changes to ask a question, like “Hey Siri – What restaurant in Los Angeles has the best brunch?” or “What restaurants near me are open for brunch right now?” You get the idea.
So knowing how to formulate your content and copy to appeal to Voice Search is a key factor in taking advantage of this trend and in my next video, I’ll talk about some key content and copywriting tips for doing just that.
Those are the 4 MAJOR MARKETING TRENDS that are taking over the Internet right now.
