The Latest Trend of Digital Marketing for 2014 is Content, Social Media and Mobile

We all know how digital marketing has influenced the big or small organization when it comes to branding, sharing and sales of their product and services. Although it can’t replace traditional marketing but it still made majors impacts while making the decisions and budget when it comes to marketing and advertising.

Digital Marketing is the “New Black”!

With the beginning of the year 2014, many changes and influences it going to make. Therefore, the strategy also changes with the new trends and requirements. No doubt Content Marketing is still a vital part of this strategy but one need to also understand how to make this work or content appeared in front of everybody. So, when someone ask you what’s your digital marketing strategy for 2014, then you have to be very clear and crisp about the thoughts  and approaches!

According to an Infographic shared by Digital Marketing Trends and Predictions for 2014, Mobile Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation and Social Media would be as a maximum in everyone’s list of strategies to mainly focus on.

Content is Still a Ruler

With the latest updates in Google, Content has become an important factor as Google give significance to quality content which are unique and informative for this we need different contents. 78% of CMO think that content is the future of the marketing. This content could be of anything like printed, visual, audio, graphs etc. only one thing you should keep in mind and that is quality content and how to make it viral. A quality content which unique and exclusive can help in the increment of user engagement. Visual contents like photos and videos contribute 65% of increase in the engagement when a user saw it. In this year, it’s been said that the content or post with a visual delight like videos will attract 3 times more the usual ones.

In this writing a content doesn't mean you are blabbering about your products and services. Today, customers are really advance and their thinking has been changed. They are more aware and alert what’s going around the world. Rather than this, you should write something through which your customers can relate or able to build a trust with your product or service. And hopefully shared it with other too!

Product Marketing è Relationship Marketing

Social Media is the Savior

Another upcoming trend is social media. “Social media is no more a luxury but a necessity of an organization”. 100% of business decision-makers use social media for work purposes. In social media it doesn’t count that you have to be present on each platform however a Facebook page, a blog, and an email newsletter, or it some up-and-coming services like Snapchat, YouTube or Vine etc. remember keeping your social media accounts up to date takes time, and for that you have to make sure you have a full-time marketing person or an agency so you don’t miss the opportunity. According to MarketingTechBlog, 33% of consumers cite social media networks as a way they discover new brands of product and services. In fact, 79% of marketers have integrated social media into traditional marketing activities.

The Looming Mobile Marketing

Lastly the mobile marketing. Mobile marketing is a marketing where you are reaching your customers at their personal space so it’s very important to keep the decorum maintained and a relationship which is completely understandable and doesn’t look like a spamming. With the increasing mobile usage this year mobile banner advertising is expected to grow by 100%. In 2014, according to digital marketing trends, around 35% of all search engine traffic will be from mobile devices. 40% of mobile marketers are planning to develop mobile apps for the marketing of their product and services. However, the strategy is to showcase your work in manner that it should not look like a spam and you are able to convey your message and thoughts to the users.

One need to understand that, you don’t have to use fancy words to attract your customers or clients. A crisp and to the point message can deliver the message if it’s clear and simple. Find your target audience and make strategies and plans which can help you to attain the goals. So, at 2014 don’t miss out the opportunity!

State by State Web Usage Metrics Tool - How it can be Beneficial for Research Junkies

Chitika, the online advertising network has published a new interesting tool for all the research junkies. It is an interactive map which is categorized by the usage of operating systems as per the percentage by each state. In this, map allows users to check usage of operating systems like Mac, Windows, Linux and Google; across the United States, you just have to hover over each state to discover the percentage of use.

According to the data, we can see that there are more Americans, those are using Windows, especially in Washington, where it has the headquarter of Microsoft, with 98.3% record.







In the meantime, Google is most widely used in Utah (73%), Mac is most popular in Vermont (28.5%), and most of the Linux users are in Wyoming (8.7%).

Here if we take a general example, often marketers need to understand that at times to attain the target audience time and again you have to find out what operating system your customers or potential customers are using. Although this tool is just a handy tool which can be used to find out the vague percentage in the targeted area to know whether someone is a PC, Mac, or Linux person, in fact with the operating system you can find a lot about the personality of a person too. Like Windows users are for the masses, Mac users care a lot about chic and style and they are ready to pay for it, Linux users are deeply technical etc. just by looking at the operating system you can find out how to target them and what could be the strategy designs to attract them.

Now the point come, how accurate it is? How much we can rely on these results? So, if we look at Chitika Insights reports generated Chitika ad network after analyzing. The results through large sample sizes can be varied with network of publishers, so they can’t give any guarantees over these results. This is just a tool which find out the vague percentage to different operating system users. They claimed – “We can only measure what we see in our network”. Fair enough, therefore this tool is good for the vague analysis or just for the overview section.

What could be more fascinating if company can make such tools or solutions from which you are able to detect or identify your target audiences with some simple procedures and data feed in the system! If this can be done then companies would save plenty of time and money which they spent over market analysis and market surveys.

Nevertheless the data and capabilities of this tool is limited and it’s limited just for US and Canada only. However, Chitika claims that they are aiming to update these data points in every six months, with the next iteration of Google-by-state data coming in the next month or so. So just take a look and try to fiddle with with this tool, may be in near future it will make some good impressions when it comes to research and development part.

You can reach to that tool here

Google Plus: Right Platform to Start Blogging and Why?

Blogging is known as one of the oldest method of online marketing. It was the way to convey your thoughts and opinions to the people. When a person decides to start a blog, the first decision is to decide on which platform he/she want to start writing. There are plenty of decision making factors while choosing a platform i.e. on popularity basis, user reach and engagement, compatibility issues with browsers and social media platforms etc. In this, one of the important factors are user engagement and to what extend it is popular amongst the users because if no one know about that platform or if the platform is not known to people, it’s a mare waste of your time and energy while producing contents which do not have a reach to mass.
These days, Google+ is making quite an impact over the blogging segment. People had start considering Google+ not just for social media but for blogging too and it is because of the benefits and advantages it provide.

If we go back a little back in time (approximately 5 years ago); blogging was a public platform whereas social media was the private affair (Only profile connected people can access). But over the time of time, social media too become public and it allows you to access the public post even if you are not a part of community or in the list. This feature is used by the bloggers to promote their blog site.

Those days are gone when social media and blogging were two different things; now we have some platforms which provides both features in the single platform or you can say it’s a hybrid of social media and blogging. In this, Tumblr is a popular platform which allows both however, Tumblr is more for micro-blogging like Twitter but Twitter lacks in its word limits capacity. Here, who leads ahead is Google+. Google+ gave an amazing set of features like circle, hangout, communities, +1s etc. which provide unique benefits to the blogger which ultimately affects your organic ranking in the search engine.

YouTube Becomes The Number One Source in Mobile Data Traffic

Google-owned YouTube has reached another milestone in its meteoric rise to mobile supremacy. On Thursday, Sandvine – a provider of intelligent broadband network solutions – published its latest Internet traffic trends report, entitled “Global Internet Phenomena Report 1H2012.” The information presented is based on data from a selection of Sandvine’s 200-plus customers spanning North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Caribbean and Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

What report says:

• YouTube is the largest source of mobile video traffic in every region examined, accounting for as much as 25% of network data and no less than 12%.
  
• In North America, video and audio streaming make up more than half of mobile data traffic, led by YouTube, Pandora and Netflix.
  
• Mobile device usage on fixed networks: Home roaming accounts for 9% of total fixed traffic on North America’s household networks.
  
  
• Audio and video streaming will exceed 60% of North America’s mobile data by late 2014.
  
  
• Click-to-cloud smartphone photo back-up and synchronization will emerge as a significant source of traffic worldwide: the phenomena of the continuous cloud/client connection.

“Aggregate reports like our Global Internet Phenomena shed light on the Internet as a whole and inform operators on trends relevant to their business,” said Dave Caputo. “However, the real value for our customers is to take an internal census of data and trends on their own networks. Armed with detailed network data we work with our customers to develop tailored service offerings, traffic policies and usage plans.”

Facebook Test Button: Promote Content Directly from their Pages

Facebook will test a new “promote” button that makes it easier for pages to create Sponsored Stories directly from their posts, a company spokesperson tells us. The button will appear from the page publisher — the box from which page owners create posts — and on posts that have already gone live. The feature is aimed at small- to mid-sized businesses that are using Facebook for marketing, but don’t necessarily have the resources to work with a Facebook ad rep or third-party partner. The social network’s ad dashboard has become increasingly complicated with nontraditional ad types like Sponsored Stories and page post ads, but the promote button could make ad creation much simpler.

The promote button will let page owners pay to give their content additional exposure to their fans. If fans interact with the content, their friends might see that activity as a Sponsored Story, but there is not currently a way for page owners to create an ad targeting non-fans using the promote button. They will have to use the self-serve ad dashboard or the Ads API to do that. “Right now this is a very small test but we will continue to iterate on the feature based on feedback,” a spokesperson says.

Facebook has been gradually encouraging page owners to pay for distribution of their content, even among fans they formerly thought they could reach for free. As it turns out, the average page post only reaches 16 percent of fans, the company revealed in February. This is the result of users connecting to more people and pages, all of whom are generating more stories than ever before. Most people wouldn’t enjoy seeing every bit of their connections’ activity in News Feed, so Facebook uses EdgeRank to filter some stories out and highlight the ones that seem most relevant to each user. Last year the social network introduced a new type of ad that turned page posts into Sponsored Stories. That was the first time the company began to encourage businesses to spend money on engaging existing fans, in addition to running campaigns to acquire new ones. Then at the Facebook Marketing Conference earlier this year, the company revealed Reach Generator, a premium advertising solution to help large brands reach their fans through Sponsored Stories within the mobile and desktop feeds, as well as through sidebar ads. The promote button is a simple way to foster the same strategy among smaller businesses.