Business

What Digital Marketing Trends Are We Seeing in 2017 So Far

Forecasting is important when it comes to planning your digital marketing strategy for the coming year, but the proof in the pudding is of course in the eating. So, what digital marketing trends are we seeing in 2017 and how do they differ to what was predicted?

Credit: https://twitter.com/ipfconline1 for the infographic

Scary that we are over half way through the year already. And whilst some businesses are hitting their KPIs from implementing successful strategies, others are still working out what works with a trial and error approach.

Whether your 2017 strategy was based on the successes of last year’s stats, off the predicted trends for this year or a bit of both, here are 4 actual digital marketing trends that we are seeing so far this year:

SEO is more difficult

The SEO arena is forever changing and becoming more complex. Google’s sophisticated algorithms constantly evolve to improve the quality of the results and this year is certainly no different.

So far, SEO marketing has had a huge focus on mobile-friendly sites and sites with a solid PPC strategy. Looking more at the latter, covering your bases with organic rankings to earn visits and PPC ads to buy visits, is now considered an essential combination if you are to have a chance at ranking high on Google.

Social media marketing is compulsory

Social media has a ready-made audience at the fingertips of all businesses and provides a creative way to display and distribute your content.

In an era where diverse and dynamic content is king, social is the most powerful way to share this and have others share it too. Businesses are well-aware of this and more and more brands are investing time and money into social marketing campaigns that have the potential to go viral.

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn all have effective ad display networks and the stats from these are impressive.

Mobile marketing is a key focus

This was a strong prediction last year, for the year ahead and it has certainly fulfilled its expectation. With stats on mobile usage still soaring, it’s no wonder that there is a huge focus on this medium.

Recent stats suggest that mobile ads perform 5 times better than traditional web ads (based on most common mobile ads that are sold on a CPC, CPA and CPT basis).

PPC has changed

This year Google got rid of the real estate on the right on the search engine results page, which made the ads spots in the header and footer even more competitive.

PPC now adopts more of a machine learning approach to automate certain facets of a campaign. Machine learning has been part of AdWords since 2008but this year has seen a number of developments to areas such as exact match keyword variants, Ad Rank thresholds and Google Attribution.

Do you want to talk digital marketing with an expert? Whitefish Marketing in Folkestone, Kent is an established digital marketing agency with deep experience in all disciplines of online marketing. Call us on 01303 720 288.

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