Mobile, personal and interactive priorities continue to expand for marketers aiming to maximize engagement.
It's been said that ignoring digital marketing is like opening a business but not telling anyone. And not improving your online marketing is akin to taking two steps back for every one you go forward, given the pace and expansion of the industry, which is expected to see a compound annual growth rate of 9% until 2026.
To keep on the right digital marketing course, a company should keep a close eye on key trends, including collecting more precise personalized user data, creating mobile-first content, especially short video content, and incorporating interactive media into content strategy. That advice comes straight from a tech entrepreneur and CEO who’s “been in the digital marketing game since the AOL days — before even Google and certainly long before Snapchat and TikTok were ever a thing.
‘Say My Name’
Contrary to the movie Godfather, digital marketing should be both personal and business. Just because a company wants to cast a wide marketing net doesn’t mean it can’t be personal, i.e., strive for personal engagement in its digital marketing. As Amine Rahal writes at Entrepreneur magazine, “We naturally love to be addressed by name, as doing so is dignifying and a marker of respect.”
Designed to collect personal, actionable information about a consumer’s site visits, third-party cookies are on the way out, with Google announcing a 2024 phase-out on its Chrome browser. That puts the onus on brands to be more proactive in getting a lead's name and other identifying information when they sign up. In short, collecting personalized user data will increasingly be something companies will have to do on their own.
Attractive & Interactive Content
A picture is worth a thousand words, and stunning visual marketing content can be worth even more in this mobile world. The good news is that your company’s content is never farther away than a person’s hand, pocket or pocketbook, but on the flip side, there’s so much mobile device competition for attention spans that are getting increasingly shorter.
To keep up with the pace of business and stay top of mind with consumers, Rahal suggests ramping up visual content production with infographics, reels and informative videos. Citing TikTok nearly doubling its monthly users in 2022 to almost two billion, the digital marketing guru recommends creating short, vertical video content in the 30-second to 3-minute range. Content optimization goes especially for mobile devices, which account for 54% of web traffic and growing.
Finally, digital engagement is much more effective when marketing content is interactive. People will always want their voice to be heard and to be able to get more from both information and entertainment perspectives. Rahal recommends including polls, quizzes, rating sliders, and “Ask a Question” widgets in mobile marketing content. Forbes reported that voice assistant use (e.g., Siri and Alexa) was projected to increase more than 30 percent from 2018 to 2022, showing increasing promise for voice-enabled search marketing. Engagement is simply more effective when consumers are participating rather than being passive onlookers.
“In our fast-paced marketing world, brand creation and management are not merely presenting a pretty picture to your audience, it’s increasingly about putting the consumer in your company’s picture and story with personal and interactive engagement,” said Marcia Homer, infinitee’s Director of Brand Management. “The digital marketing river can seem dauntingly fast, wide and deep, but with a limitless possibilities mentality and decades of experience we’ll guide you around the obstacles to make all the right connections.”
