What is your marketing message?
Can you answer this question in one clear, concise sentence? In today’s digital world, individuals don’t have time to sift through a convoluted marketing message. You may only have an instant to grab someone’s attention and with a plethora of online marketing vehicles, deciding how and where you choose to market yourself is becoming more difficult.
Below are a few of the web marketing trends that will dominate, or continue to dominate, in 2014.
Content, Content, Content
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
Content marketing can be done through many different formats, such as news releases, white papers, videos, blogs, case studies, infographics, fact sheets, etc. Posting information through these different channels allows users to get to you easier through search engines. And with over 4 billion videos being watched online every day, there’s a good chance that someone might just stumble across your company’s video.
Design
Marketing is not just about what you say, it’s also about how you say it. Is your message short, sweet and impactful? Does it elicit emotion? A headline such as “Do you have Type 2 Diabetes?” will catch someone’s attention more easily than a long, vague headline.
Large images and artwork will continue to be a great tool to use in marketing. Images can establish a personal connection with the target audience. Simplicity in design can also make your message even more effective. People live fast-paced lives and getting your message in front of them in an easy-to-understand, non-confusing manner is more important than ever.
Social Media
As more and more social media websites explore paid advertisements, your ability to expand your reach, while better targeting your audience, will need to increase proportionately. For example, let’s say someone gets on Google and does a search for “Rheumatoid Arthritis Clinical Study.” After browsing the results for a few minutes and checking out a couple of sites, they get interrupted causing them to walk away from their computer for a few hours. When they come back, they log into their Facebook account and as they’re scrolling down the page, they see an ad for a rheumatoid arthritis clinical research study that you are sponsoring. They click the ad and it takes them to your study’s website. This is known as retargeting. It allows you to target people specifically by what they’re looking for on the web, thus creating a larger conversion rate. You’re also not paying for ad space that may only be seen by a small part of your target audience.
In summary, Gary Vaynerchuk, co-founder and CEO of VaynerMedia, a social media brand consulting agency, may have said it best when he stated, “Content is king, but marketing is queen and runs the household.”