“The Internet has drastically
altered the way in which information is shared, and has had a profound impact
on marketing.” (DeMers & Conner, 2013). It seems that more companies have
found that they are getting more success with advertising and publishing their
own original content rather than just posting ads on external websites. Since
this is the case, here are some of top online marketing trends that Forbes
predicts to be the most dominant in 2014.
Content
Marketing Will Be Bigger Than Ever
Companies
are starting to build trust with their consumers, and are doing so in many new
ways. One way is by creating new and valuable content, such as by giving
insight on relevant industry information to their audience. According to the Content Marketing Institute, the
top B2B content marketing strategies are social media, articles on a business’s
website, eNewsletters, case studies, videos and articles on other websites.
Because of this trend, marketing to the masses through T.V. and the radio are
becoming far less effective. The new hot trend is to market engaging content to
a very specific audience.
Social
Media Marketing Will Require More Diversity
Not very long ago, companies were
very limited on the social media websites that they could market on, because there
were not many websites available. The big ones then were mainly Facebook,
Twitter and LinkedIn. Now there are many more options available, such as
Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest. These new options are giving companies a much
larger platform to advertise on, allowing them to reach many more people.
Ad
Retargeting Will Grow in Effectiveness
This one is
very interesting. I’m sure that I’m not the only one that has found ad
retargeting to be pretty helpful and also extremely frustrating at the same
time. Ad retargeting is basically when your browser stores the cookies of
websites that you visit, then the products and or services that you looked at
on these websites are shown to you later in the form of on-screen ads on other
websites. Since only around 2% of people buy the products or services on their
first view of them, ad retargeting helps to remind consumers about these
products and services at later times, and increases the chances of them
returning to the website and purchasing them. They have actually performed
psychological studies, with results showing that being exposing to brand names
and logos creates familiarity, which builds trust with consumers and makes them
more likely to make a purchase. So by frequently exposing consumers to these
products and services that they have viewed, it will build their trust with
that company and will make them much more likely to return and make a purchase.
I can personally say that because of ad retargeting, I actually have returned
to a website after a period of time and made a purchase from them because the
ad reminded me of the product I was previously interested in. I can also say that
some of the ads can become extremely annoying, because sometimes they show you
ads for products that you only viewed one time and maybe were not even
interested in. But because ad retargeting has given marketers an amazing amount
of success, the chances of it becoming more mainstream in 2014 are very high.
I only talked about 3 out of the 7 trends
on this article, so if you would like to read about the other 4, you can go to
this website and see them all!
