If you’re ready to level up your online marketing efforts, it may be time to take advantage of the top five future digital marketing trends.
Moving into a new area of digital currencies, Web3, and meta verses, the future of digital marketing trends are similarly advancing its tools, platforms, and best practices to better meet the needs of forward thinking businesses and consumers.
Instead of learning from the ground up, we’ve summarised what we believe to be the top five upcoming digital marketing trends that will shape the future. By deep diving into industry trends, how-to guides, and where to get started, the Edge Marketing team of digital marketers regularly reviews best practices in the online marketing landscape to help our community get a leg up.
Read on to learn more about the current changes in digital marketing and how and where you can start learning more about each to get ahead of the game.
The Top Five Future Digital Marketing Trends
If you’re looking for an edge to beat out competitors in a busy online landscape, staying on top of best SEO practices, changing algorithms, and a killer digital marketing strategy that will best connect with and convert your target audience is the way to go.
Instead of taking a trial-and-error approach with each new trend, we’ve summarised the top five key trends that are becoming increasingly popular in the online marketing world that could offer huge competitive advantages. (And are expected to only increase in popularity and impact on your overall marketing strategy in the months and years to come!)
- Long Form Content Marketing
Shifting from one side of the spectrum to the other, long form content is making a triumphant return after a couple of years of bite-sized ads. From content marketing articles to video content, more users are flocking to authentic, detailed content that gives them more in-depth insight into their topic or area of interest.
From a major increase in the word count of the most well ranked content marketing articles to longer BTS video reels, brands interested in establishing a more authentic connection with their audience should consider diving more deeply into their work–instead of spreading more topics across shorter, sharper reels.
- Chatbots and Conversational AI
Want your users to have a good experience online? Move away from marketing automation and consider adopting real-time chatbots and conversational artificial intelligence.
More online users now expect real-time conversations from live support teams or, at the very least, sophisticated enough AI to anticipate the solutions to their problems. To offer your users a better experience and create a frictionless sales and support funnel, consider adopting artificial intelligence technologies that can speak with your customers when you and your people are offline.
- Search Engine Optimisation
An oldie but a goodie–search engine optimisation efforts aren’t going anywhere.
On the contrary, a well designed and executed SEO campaign can see significant ROIs for businesses no matter their internal capacity, budget, or team size. With the opportunity to analyse your efforts with real-time data, current marketing analytics platforms can help you better define your messaging and see a continual increase in ROI using search engines over time.
If you haven’t yet considered actioning SEO or SEM efforts for your brand, now is the time.
- Web3, Cryptocurrencies, Meta verse, and NFTs
Does this trend sound a little too high tech for you? Not to worry–with the rising popularity of meta verses and cryptocurrencies, there are more user-friendly guides, documents, and explainer videos that can give you the basic need-to-know information than ever online.
While this may not be the right fit for every target market, the truth is that a number of online audiences are transitioning toward these digital solutions and appreciate their favourite brands trialling new technologies online. Because some platforms are still emerging and could require significant internal resources for your brand to get up-and-running online, we recommend identifying 1-2 of these future tech shifts to trial that would help you best find and connect with one of your top target markets.
- Omnichannel User Experiences
Step away from the one-size-fits-all marketing efforts and start considering how deep your digital marketing campaigns can go.
Confused? Omnichannel marketing means taking advantage of multiple platforms with consistent messaging and collateral to connect with your audience right where they are. Instead of asking your consumers to change their behaviour to see your marketing message, multiple digital channels find out where the consumers are and go to them.
Where the omnichannel customer experience comes into play is considering how seamless the consumer’s experience is in each of these channels. A long-since important factor for website and product design, designing for the user’s experience with your brand at every touch point is becoming increasingly more important.
From social media platforms to pop-up store design, surrounding your community with on-brand experiences can create better engagement and customer loyalty. (Read: using multiple digital marketing channels to turn prospective customers into buyers and existing customers into brand evangelists. How’s that for a ROI?)
Learning How to Plan for the Future of Digital Marketing
Intrigued? We thought so. Much like most leading marketing agencies, we’re always excited by the prospect of new platforms, tools, and solutions that will help us better understand our audience and connect with them in more authentic and innovative ways. Fully believing that some target markets who have been traditionally underserved will be better served by these emerging trends, we’re looking forward to identifying which will best connect with our customers and crafting up new marketing ideas.
If you’re also interested in learning more about the above trends and want to see if they’re the right fit for your audience and business, we recommend approaching each as a new subject matter and comparing it against your marketing goals, budget, and resources before fully diving in.
- Consider which emerging trend you want to trial first.
Like most marketing efforts, we always recommend a ‘Lean Methodology’ approach. In short, this means making one small change and testing its efficacy before moving on to the next. Why bother? By actioning one new change at a time, you can better measure its effectiveness. Too many changed variables can lead to no one effort being measured accurately for great results. Dial back on using multiple publishing platforms all at once and trial new tools one step at a time.
- Review your consumer market.
More on this below, but we always recommend double checking that the emerging trend will be a good fit for your audience. While you personally may be intrigued by a new technology or platform, advertising dollars will be wasted if your end consumer doesn’t hang out there. Better safe than sorry–so review all of the information you have about your consumer’s online behaviour before hitting ‘Go!’
- Understand the framework, tools, and strategies before spending money.
One of the easiest ways to waste marketing money? Throwing financial resources at a new technology or platform without fully understanding how to use it.
From voice search to augmented reality and virtual reality, there will be some future trends in digital marketing that can only be best understood and guided by industry experts who can guide you through best practices. Furthermore, some marketing efforts will always see the best ROI only after a live campaign has been running for some time and you’ve collected enough data to refine and define your work. That said–we cannot stress enough that you should always look into the basic ‘how to’s’ of a new digital tool before spending money on it.
Besides the Edge Marketing blog, a couple of industry leaders who offer great educational and informative content that can help guide your marketing work include HubSpot, Google Analytics and Google Search Console, Moz, SEMRush, and Ahrefs. You can thank us later once you’ve had a chance to review some of the emerging trend 101s.
Keep Your Target Audiences Top of Mind
We think this is likely expected among our community but thought it important to point out nonetheless–just because a digital marketing trend is emerging, doesn’t mean the content form will be the best fit for your audience.
How so? Think of your target market and customer personas. With both B2B and B2C organisations often serving a breadth of different demographics, you can probably quite easily identify where one of the above digital marketing trends won’t be the best fit for your customer. Much the same as existing marketing efforts that show great ROI for your efforts, new initiatives should be considered in their content, messaging, and platform delivery for effectiveness in making an impact on your people.
Confused? Don’t be. At its simplest, this means:
- Consider the target markets you serve and review your consumer personas.
- Review the emerging digital marketing trends above.
- Where possible, consider if any of the above new forms of marketing or content will easily and effectively connect with your audience. If you’re marketing to the aged care community and older adults living in retirement villages, chances are ramping up your efforts in the meta verse may not connect.
- Not sure where to start? Review recent user generated content to see what new trends your audiences are interested in. Not only can reviewing conversational marketing broaden your understanding and language used when connecting with customers, it can help many digital marketers narrow their list of which new technologies and trends to try out first.
See? Simple. Where digital marketing trends and emerging technologies are exciting is the opportunity for deepening customer relationships, offering a better online experience, and taking back some of our personal information and privacy online. That said, just because we find each of the emerging publishing platforms and technologies exciting doesn’t mean each will connect with and support better customer interactions.
To make sure you’re making the most out of your marketing and advertising spend, we recommend identifying 1-2 of the new emerging trends and learning more about it to see if your target market is making (or expected to make) the same shift. Seems like it will resonate? Test the waters with 1-2 controlled campaigns and track your response. Like any new marketing effort, wherever you can test, track, and measure your efforts will lead to a more refined and defined campaign with a better ROI in the future.
Stay on Top of Your Digital Marketers Education and Emerging Trends
Edge Marketing takes pride in being one of Australia’s leading digital marketing agencies that delivers excellent marketing strategies and search engine optimisation for our clients on the Gold Coast and country-wide.
Committed to educating our community about best practices, emerging trends, and how they can stay on top of their digital marketing efforts no matter their team or budget, we regularly publish materials examining new industry topics and how you can leverage them. From email marketing to data analytics and how to maximise your search engine results, we can keep you informed about all things digital marketing.
If you’re interested in marketing automation, industry digital marketing opinions, and how to best leverage all your business data to nurture lasting customer relationships, follow along with the Edge Marketing blog. Well versed in the marketing sector, we can teach you more about new digital offerings or discuss outsourcing your digital marketing efforts if you’re ready to level up your results.
