Digital Marketing trends to watch in 2018
Social Media
We always recommend using social media accounts to our clients, in terms of SEO, social media is a godsend! It enables you to advertise your business, update your users, link back to your website, encourage users to interact with you and also acts as a platform for people to leave feedback and reviews.
So, whilst we’ll continue to encourage you to use social media, here’s one particular social media feature to look out for: video. Did you know that videos on social media generate 1,200% more shares than text and images combined? With that staggering statistic, it may also be worth bearing in mind that viewers retain 95% of a message when they see a video, compared with only 10% retention rates when it's displayed as text. Now if these figures don’t make you seriously contemplate adding video content to part of your social media strategy for next year, I don’t know what will!
SEO: Mobile first
With 61% of the UK now using mobile search over desktop search, we need to be mobile ready. Whether it's using social media, online shopping or even online banking, people have no worries in trusting their mobile. So, what does this mean?
With mobile taking over the world, Google is starting to roll out its Mobile-First Index, this’ll rank mobile responsive websites higher than those which aren’t for the same keywords. (Read our recent article on Google Mobile First).
Now, the operative word here is ‘responsive’, luckily for you, if Studio44 has designed your site, it’s guaranteed to be perfectly mobile responsive … we’re ahead of the times here! Alas, if your site isn’t mobile responsive, you need to get this one to the top of your list!
Google Algorithm update … another one
‘Rank Brain’ – the latest Goggle algorithm update. This algorithm essentially learns from your search experience to increase relevancy, this will hope to provide users with the most relevant content for their search terms.
Visual content is still on the rise
When we talk about ‘content’ it's imperative for us to remember content isn’t just text, there are many different types of content, and also many different ways of distributing it. A survey completed in both 2016 and 2017, said that for the following year, the highest planned channel of distribution was YouTube, thus suggesting that video content is still on the rise! This by no means we can disregard other forms, but it’s definitely one for the 2018 to do list!
PPC: Mobile first (again)
A short but sweet point; casting our eyes back to earlier in the article and considering Mobile First, when it comes to PPC, all campaigns need to effectively target mobile users for the best results and a really good ROI.
Cost of Google Ads
In 2017, we did see that the cost of Google AdWords rose, however, whilst it continues to rise, there comes a positive. Google has said that whilst prices rise, they will provide more tools in 2018 to help me, as a Digital Marketer, to target even more refined keywords and improved conversion tracking – this is great for our clients!
These are just a few key trends that we think could positively impact us and our clients, if you have any queries on what 2018 holds in terms of digital marketing, feel free to contact us or check out our Facebook page for regular article updates & Studio44 happenings.
