Ten years ago, keyword density was the biggest Google ranking factor, so if you wanted to rank for a keyword like weight loss with a keto light, you’d insert it up to fifty times in your content. You can’t do this today.
Ten years ago, you could buy a large Facebook page for a few dollars and send a broadcast you’re sure everyone will get. Today, you’ll be lucky to get a 10% engagement from your own organic followers.
Future trends in marketing are not forecasts for ten years from now, the future of marketing is tomorrow and even today. One algorithm change from Google and the entire industry is restrategizing.
Here are five future trends you don’t want to miss out on and why you should be thinking about them:
1. Micro Influencers
The trend is quite clear on this one, they’re only going to get bigger.
Follower count used to be the biggest part of the hiring process for influencers, so take two fitness coaches, the guy with a million social media followers was always going to get the gig over the influencer with a hundred thousand followers.
The marketing results have been analyzed and that has started to change things. If the guy with a hundred thousand followers is a senior fitness coach, a company advertising geriatric products will take him over the general fitness coach with a million followers.
Another thing going for these micro influencers is that because they have a smaller following, they spend more time engaging with their followers and can build trust that will come in handy when recommending products to their followers.
If influencer marketing is something you do and you have to pay influencers for exposure, work with the micro influencers, it’s cheaper and they’ll deliver higher conversions anyway.
2. Content Marketing
While ad networks and their affiliates continue to grow in size, the gap for quality content marketing continues to widen and it’s easy to make an impact by just filling a part of it.
It’s simple, many people will rather throw money at advertising because of the immediate results they can get instead of playing the long game and investing in content that consistently markets your brand.
There are several content marketing trends you latch on to and using content clusters is one of them.
Content clusters help place you as an authority in an area in your industry. Let’s take link building, the right content marketing can get you seen as a specialist in that in marketing circles but you can’t do that with just one pillar link building case study post.
You can have that pillar post where you talk about the basics of link building and list the techniques available but the expertise tag only comes when you’ve published several posts across several sites on link building so Google begins to see all those footprints and your pillar article ranks higher.
That happens because you now have the expertise tag. Google tried to standardize this with their authorship program in the past before they shut it down but those author footprints still count for something today.
3. Consumer Personalization
User experience is a huge marketing metric these days and large agencies are hiring dedicated UX teams to handle this.
Consumer personalization is a huge part of the user experience and you can’t fix that without providing tailored experiences to each customer.
Collect information from your customers at different points of the buying process so they don’t get overwhelmed with a huge form on signing up but encourage them to get a profile on your site and you can always work your way up from there to other personal information.
Customer retention is always cheaper than customer acquisition so if you’re not making more money from your existing customers, the problem could simply be that you don’t know them enough.
Personalization should be done in every area of the business so if you’re optimizing email marketing techniques, something as simple as including the first name of the recipient in every email is a good start.
4. Privacy Protection
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rolled out in May 2018 and if you were subscribed to a few company email lists, you’ll know privacy policy updates were announced across the web.
Most sites today have the cookie box pop up to notify visitors that their data is being collected while they visit the site.
There are more regulations set to be implemented over the coming months and years and it’s easy to see why, governments are beginning to care more and more about the data of their citizens.
It’s time to make your customers know you’re protecting their information and how you’re doing that.
The first thing you should do is to get an SSL certificate installed on your site, it’s even a ranking factor these days. Then display all your security badges especially if you collect financial data.
Finally, update your contact information, privacy policy and terms of use pages in line with current data regulations, email these changes to your customers and inform them of other things you’re doing to protect their data.
5. Voice Search
Write for human beings and not for bots is a common saying in marketing circles these days. Voice search already makes up 20% of all Google searches on mobile.
As mobile search continues to widen the gap between it and desktop search, marketers that use natural language in their content will keep winning on the search results pages.
This makes sense because if you use everyday language in your content you’ll be including a lot of low-competition keywords in your content and that will get you ranking for those along with your target keyword.
Sales for voice assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home are steadily on the rise, this means more people will be asking questions with their voices in the future.
Take advantage of this trend, start writing in a conversational tone and try to put a friendly twist to everything you publish on the web, even technical content.
Make sure your site is mobile-friendly. A mobile-friendly site will be easy to navigate and this will help Google with selecting snippets of your content to use as responses to a voice search.
Local SEO has a huge voice search component so if you’re optimizing a local business, make sure you don’t forget the common keywords people will say, the phrase “near me” dominates a lot of these voice queries.
