Friday, April 4, 2014

Forbes’ Top Online Marketing Trends to Dominate 2014

            
           “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!





DeMers, J., & Conner, C. (2013, September 17). The Top 7 Online Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2014 - Forbes [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2013/09/17/the-top-7-online-marketing-trends-that-will-dominate-2014/

2 comments:

  1. That is so true that more social media websites have become available for business to market their products on. I think that it is a better option to market on social media sites because if you follow or like the company the updated information that the company shares will show up on their feed, which they will be able to see when they look at their feeds. It is much easier for a consumer to stay in the loop when the businesses use these for marketing. I know that I liked many pages on Facebook and when they post something and I see it on my news feed I actual look into the new product more often than if I heard about on TV or the radio.

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  2. Thanks for sharing this amazing and informative article ... enjoyed every bit of it .. :

    Apu

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