The things we believed we knew about the digital landscape were actually the tip of the iceberg. Find out 5 digital marketing trends to be successful in the field this year.
The amount of money committed to digital marketing and communications has increased dramatically over the last two years, posing issues for senior-level marketers who have been unable to keep up with the changing times. The rate at which new digital advertising, social media marketing, and SEO tactics are evolving and changing is faster than it has ever been.
People who have worked in marketing and communications for at least twenty years should reassess their skills and knowledge. Don’t let tactics you learned a decade ago become a weakness as you struggle to be heard in a digital community with nearly four billion individuals.
MySpace and Friendster were only two of the social media sites that were “out” by 2010. Facebook and Twitter were growing in popularity, while YouTube was producing video game stars. Some people used Google AdWords, but the field of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising was still in its early stages. On social media, simply posting on a regular basis was thought to be helpful. What a difference a decade can make.
When 2020 took an unexpected turn, I felt it was an opportunity to learn about contemporary digital marketing trends by enrolling in a master’s programme at a business school.
Here are some things I’ve learnt about how digital marketing has changed in the 2020s.
1. Roles have shifted, putting increased pressure on marketing departments to share some of their work with public relations teams, and vice versa. When I worked in a corporate setting, there was a clear distinction between marketing, public relations, and design.
2. Digital marketing and design thinking have made it possible for organisations to more seriously conduct strategy discussions and build plans for releasing new goods. Having representatives from all departments in the same room should now be routine procedure. Bring different coloured post-its to keep track of all the fantastic ideas your diverse team will come up with.
3. It takes a village to get a product to market. Most marketing departments featured designers, copywriters, ad planners, and researchers when I joined. A digital marketing team requires long-form content writers as well as copywriters. A search engine marketing professional, web designers (who understand search engine optimization), analysts to pull data from social media and web platforms, researchers, public relations professionals to manage messaging and the brand, content schedulers, real-time social monitors who engage in real time, designers and producers who can edit video and audio are all required.
4. Make a plan and stick to it until you get a chance to evaluate how well it is working. Too often, I see digital marketers change their techniques and strategy when a client or management expresses worry or has a new concept. Digital marketing is a game of whack-a-mole without a plan and some statistics to analyse progress.
5. Growth is fantastic if it is long-term. There are certain new firms that take off quickly and make a lot of money in the first five years. This is especially true in marketing, where word-of-mouth spreads in seconds. However, if you do not have a long-term marketing strategy, you will struggle to stay in business. As quickly as you are growing, a slew of rival products are researching and plotting their counter-attack.
There is a lot to learn about digital marketing, but not a lot of time. It is an exciting moment in the field of marketing and communications, but continuing education is essential for success.
