DIGITAL MARKETING

Future Trends in Digital Marketing

DIGITAL MARKETING, Future Trends, social media

Augmented reality

According to Deep Patel, augmented reality will become a bigtrend. Apple has released IPhone 8 and IPhone X, which allow the phones provide the users with extraordinary augmented reality experiences. Augmented reality will have a huge impact on social media platforms. Patel thinks that Snapchat and Instagram will soon do filters which allows users to take selfie for example with a celebrity through augmented reality.

Video Advertising

According to Digital Marketing Institute, video advertising is growing. 52% of marketing professionals think that video advertising has the best ROI. Also, the audience want to see more videos on marketing. Facebook has come up with the new format of video, 6-second ads and now YouTube has challenged them by asking the filmmakers to tell a story in 6 seconds. According to Karen Taylor video marketing will represent over 80% of all marketing in 2019.

Live Streaming

According to 60 Second Marketer, live streaming has increased. You can live stream for example in Periscope, Facebook or Instagram. Live content is really good for marketers because it is genuine. Marketers can for example show behind-the-scenes material on live videos.

Virtual Reality

“Virtual Reality has massively boomed and it won’t be long before it becomes a ubiquitous global presence in the same way that the smartphone has ”, according to IOT For All.

Here are some of the virtual reality trends:

Gaming

Gaming is the first thing that most of the people think when they hear virtual reality. Now HTC Vive and Oculus Rift have dominated the market but also Microsoft and Sony are now increased their popularity. Now it is quite expensive to buy all these equipment for playing but in the future the prices may fall, according to IOT For All.

Cinematic experience

There is a huge potential for filmmakers to take advantage of virtual reality and give the audience a ultimate cinema experience. The audience could be part of the cinema, according to IOT For All.

Mobile

According to Digital Marketing Institute, mobile marketing is increasing constantly. People will shift from desktop to mobile even more in the future. Payments on mobile device are increasing even more in the future. According to comScore, 69% of digital media time is spent on mobile. Now it is crucial to have a website to fits also to mobile device.

 

 

Brands That Are Using Pinterest

DIGITAL MARKETING, social media

I chose three companies for a closer look on Pinterest, one Irish and two Finnish. The companies are Balmuir, Gugguu and Bia Beauty. Balmuir is a company, which has home interior and fashion items. Gugguu designs and produces high quality kids fashion. Bia Beauty is a beauty brand, which produces natural skin care with TLC.

Balmuir

Balmuir has 729 followers and they follow 41 people. Balmuir has 31 boards. They have a nice profile picture, which shows the brand clearly.

They should improve the links on their products. Because now they don’t have links straight to the product which is in the picture.

I think Balmuir has the best Pinterest account out of these three. They have many different boards, good quality and beautiful pictures. Their account is very inspirational for accessories and decorations. They have good pictures in actual use on bloggers. It is a really nice idea that they have also done collages of the whole outfit on their Pinterest account.

Gugguu

Gugguu has 431 followers and they follow only 5 people. Gugguu has 12 boards. They should follow more people so they could also get even more followers. The profile picture could be the logo or brand name. The most of Gugguu’s boards are product pictures. If you click on the picture it takes you to the Gugguu’s website but not to the product.

Gugguu has a really coherent Pinterest account. Almost every board has similar pictures, white background and cute kids. They could have more lifestyle like boards like the “Let’s PARTY” board, which is below. It would be nice to see the clothes in actual use, not only on the modelling pictures. Their account is now quite commercial so they could change it to more life-stylish.

Bia Beauty

Bia Beauty has 151 followers and they follow 76 people. Bia beauty has 13 boards. They could change the profile picture to their logo or brand name as well.

They have nice boards but a few of them are quite empty with only a few pictures. I think they should put more pictures to them because on the home page it doesn’t look good when some of the boards are empty. Bia Beauty could have some tutorials on how to use their products and some pictures to show people who are using their products.

Some of the pictures are blurry and could be more aesthetically appealing. Below are some examples which are not good.

They have a few infographics but I think they should have even more of them.

Now all of these brands could post more Christmassy pictures on their accounts. Now they don’t have a lot of seasonal posts.

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

DIGITAL MARKETING, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

What is SEO?

“SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of getting traffic from the ‘free’, ‘organic’, ‘editorial’ or ‘natural’ search results on search engines”, according to Search Engine Land. According to MOZ, when you succeed in SEO, the website looks better and is also more user-friendly. The right SEO will give your website many visitors and in the other hand bad SEO can hide your website.

Näyttökuva 2017-11-01 kello 17.20.19

The biggest search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo drive the majority of web traffic. Social media can also drive traffic to your website. Search engines helps people find the things they want, according to MOZ.

 

On-page SEO

1. Keywords

According to MOZ, keywords are important when improving your SEO. As you can see in the picture below you should mention your keyword in the title, header, in the text at least two or three times and also the image should have the keyword. The URL and meta description tag should also have the keyword.

You shouldn’t stuff too many keywords into text, URLs or titles. This causes more harm than good when ranking your site.

2. URLs

According to MOZ, the URLs should be clean and short and not include numbers or special characters. When your URL is short it is also easier to copy and paste it to for example blogs or emails.

3. Duplicate content

If your site has duplicate content search engine will notice it. The search engines won’t show duplicate content, it will try to notice, which is the original, according to MOZ.

4. Mobile-friendly site

According to Backlinko, the website should fit well to mobile and tablet also.

5. Good site speed

According to Backlinko, the website should load fast, within 4 seconds and it is one of the Google’s ranking signal.

6. Tags

According to Backlinko, the right tags are important. You should use title tags (<h1> &<h2>) and also <alt> tags in images.

 

Off-Page SEO

According to Reliablesoft, if you succeed in off-page SEO techniques it can improve you websites position in search engine results page.

1. Link building

According to MOZ, building backlinks are the most important thing of off-page SEO. There are three main types of links, which are natural links, manually built links and self-created links. Natural links are made by other people, for example a fashion blogger do a link to your site. If the you ask your customers or influencers to share and link to your website, it is manually built links. Self-created links are for example inbound links in online directory, forum or press release.

2 Social Media

Social media is also part of SEO. You should link your website to your social media sites, for example Facebook and Instagram, according to Reliablesoft.

3. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a good way to get traffic to your website. For example reddit.com could promote your content, according to Reliablesoft.

Why Social Listening Is Vital For Brands?

DIGITAL MARKETING, Social Listening, social media

What is Social Listening?

According to Trackmaven social listening means, ”Social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand and industry online.” Social listening can be passive or active. In passive engagement the firm does not join to the conversation. In the active engagement firm join actively to customers conversation (Homburg et al. 2015). According to Social Media Examiner you should also search what it is said about your competitors online. If you succeed in social listening it helps you develop your firms marketing, products, human resources and customer support. It also helps firms to differentiate their brand, product or service. Many companies employ people to collect comments, tweets and responses in different social media platforms. After that they report the metrics, for example the number of retweets. (Schweidel & Moe, 2014)

 

 

Social Listening Statistics

A blog post at Upfront Analytics, which was published in July 2016, has listed some statistics about social listening. It was surprising that only 24% of brands said that they do social listening. 90% of people trust recommendations on social media and social media influences 93% of shoppers’ buying decisions. According to these statistics firms should pay more attention to social listening. The recommendations online about a product are also important for me, usually when I am buying something more expensive I always look first the recommendations online.

Why is Social Listening Important?

“Social networking channels contain vast amounts of consumer behavior information.” (Walters, 2013. p.13) Firms which understands their customers and are engaged with them is a huge advantage (Walters, 2013). When you succeed in social listening you can get for example new ideas, development proposals and enhance your brand. It also helps you to know what your competitors are doing and keep up with them, according to Upfront Analytics. According to Socialbakers social listening is a great way to benchmark your brand to competitors. You can benchmark your social media performance by measuring the volume of conversation about your brand and your competitors.

Social Listening Tools

According to Social Media Examiner there are many platforms and tools for social listening. They are for example Google Alerts, Quora, Social Mention and Google Trends.

Google Alerts is a tool where you cant track your brand’s mentions, trends and other topics in the Internet. Google Alert is free for everyone so even the smaller companies can use it.

Quora is also a tool where you can track what people are saying about your company. You will get email of the notifications. This is also free for everyone.

Social Mention is a tool, which searches from all the social platforms. You can also filter the results e.g. location or language.

Google Trends is a platform where you can search for example queries. It is also possible to compare trends.

 

 

Walters, S. 2013. Beyond Listening. Business Intelligence Journal. Vol. 18 (1), p.13-17.

Homburg, C., Ehm, L. and Artz, M. (2015) Measuring and Managing Consumer Sentiment in an Online Community Environment. Journal of Marketing Research. Vol. 52 (5), 629-641.

Schweidel, D. & Moe, W. (2014) Listening In on Social Media: A Joint Model of Sentiment and Sentiment and Venue Format Choice. Journal of Marketing Research, 51 (4), 387-402.

 

Social Media Usage by Millennials

DIGITAL MARKETING, MILLENNIALS

Who are Millennials?

There is some dispute about how to categorize millennials. According to Wikipedia millennials were born anytime from the late 1980’s to the early 2000’s. Millennials are also known as generation Y or Net Generation. Millennials have grown up around social media and electronics and they tend to be the most tolerant of difference because they are the most ethnically diverse generation, according to Techtarget. Millennials are a large group of people; millennials make up 25% of the whole world’s population, according to Michelle Krasniak.

Are Millennials addicted to social media?

According to New York Times Nielsen report finds “Generation X is more addicted to social media than Millennials.” The Nielsen survey was done in 2016 in the US. The report shows that adults 35-49 spend on average 6 hours 58 minutes a week on social media compared to that the younger group spends 6 hours 19 minutes. The most popular social media network is Facebook and after that comes Instagram. According to Huffington Post people under age 45 uses daily on average four different devices.

Millennials use many of the social networks to read news. Facebook is the most popular network to read news, 88% of Millennials get their news from Facebook. A large amount of people also gets their news from YouTube (83%), according to American Press Institute.

A research was done for 333 US high school and college students and eMarketer reports of the findings. Almost 78% of respondents use Snapchat on a daily basis. 76% uses Instagram on a daily basis and 66% uses Facebook on a daily basis. I think that if the research has been done to an older group the usage of Facebook would have been higher.

According to this picture Millennials are more addicted to social media than other age groups. 42% of Millennials haven’t gone 5 hours without social media.

Social media usage by Finnish Millennials

According to Statista, the most popular social media network in 2016 for Finns were Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Among the younger age group it also included Snapchat. According to Mikrobitti over 80% of Finns use YouTube, but only one tenth publish videos themselves. The second popular social media network is Facebook. In Finland the usage of Facebook falls among under 18-year-old people and increases among older people. There are now over 200 000 over 65-year-old people who has Facebook account and it will increase even more. The younger people are moving on to more private social medias such as Snapchat.

According to this picture Millennials use social media the most in Finland in 2016.

This picture shows that WhatsApp, YouTube and Facebook are the most popular social media services.