Marketing has changed more in the past few years than it has in the past few decades. And, as we look at the present and set our sights on the future, change seems the only constant. Let's face it. We are living in a digital world - one that's progressing rapidly without showing any signs of slowing down. With that being said, here are 14 new digital marketing trends to watch out for.
THAT Agency reveals that, after realizing a three-year revenue growth of 103%, the South Florida website design and digital marketing company appears on Inc. magazine’s annual Inc. 5000 list for the first time ever.
THAT Agency ranks 275 out of 534 for all Florida companies on the list, 286 out of 489 for all U.S. companies in the advertising and marketing field and 3,432 out of 5,000 companies in all categories across the country. For perspective, there are currently 444,066 small businesses in Florida with employees, 120,000 advertising and marketing agencies in the U.S. and 28 million small businesses nationwide.
Image courtesy of Inc. 5000
The 2019 Inc. 5000 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2015 and 2018. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2015. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2018. The minimum revenue required for 2015 was $100,000; the minimum for 2018 was $2 million.
Facebook is testing a new set of layout options for multi-image updates. This option enables users to choose among four different presentation options for multi-image uploads within a single post.
Image courtesy of Social Media Today
In addition, Facebook has launched two new features designed to help businesses during the holiday push: customizable story templates and the capability to manage both your Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct messages from your Facebook Page.
Image courtesy of Social Media Today
Pinterest has developed a free e-learning platform called Pinterest Academy. The platform offers a range of educational courses and links to tools to help businesses better understand marketing strategies on Pinterest.
Image courtesy of Pinterest
Instagram is a highly visual social media platform - one that is notoriously unfriendly to clickable links. For these reasons, Instagram is not often tapped as a resource for driving blog traffic. However, it is possible... you just won't be able to track the efforts as well, because the traffic will likely get credited to organic search. This article from the Content Marketing Institute explains the methodology.
Image courtesy of the Content Marketing Institute
Instagram is now testing a number of new features including an invite sticker, a product launch sticker and tag option, and augmented reality (AR) 'try on' ads.
The new invite sticker would enable you to add basic details of your upcoming event - including title, date, and location - which you could then attach to your Instagram Story. Viewers would then be able to RSVP directly from the sticker, providing another way to generate interest and/or share exclusive events.
Image courtesy of Social Media Today
The new product launch sticker would also be attached to your Instagram Story, while the product launch tap option would appear in the main feed. The two options would enable users to set reminders for item launch dates, preview product details in-stream, and make subsequent purchases as soon as new products become available - all without leaving Instagram.
Image courtesy of Social Media Today
As for the AR ads, Instagram is working with select advertisers to provide 'try on' ads through which users can actively engage with products virtually to see how they look while wearing the items.
Image courtesy of Social Media Today
Twitter is testing a new option to stream tweets in real time - meaning that users' timelines would be updated as tweets happen. Users would get to pick which topics to follow and would see new tweets as they are shared when they're at the top of their timelines.
Image courtesy of Social Media Today
Twitter is also looking to add new engagement filters to advanced search queries. These filters would enable users to sort their query results by a set number of replies, likes, or retweets, helping users find the most engagement tweets on any given subject.
Image courtesy of Social Media Today
This new iteration of changes to the free Google Optimize tool allows teams like ours to run tests against specific traffic sources and specific campaigns of those sources. This is secretly a great hack to change page variables per campaign without much development help.
Image courtesy of Optimize Resource Hub
Say hello to a new way to truly analyze your indexed videos in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The Search Console report will reportedly be phased into user interfaces in Q4 and gets as granular as views from the regular search results, the video search results and down to the discover feed.
Image courtesy of Search Engine Journal
It's a sad day for webmasters who use review stars to increase organic click through rates. Google will no longer show review stars in search results for testimonials (first-party reviews) displayed on business websites or third-party reviews embedded using widgets or code. The change was made to cut down on fabricated details and to improve user experience.
Image courtesy of Whitespark
Previously, it was only possible to allow a textual snippet or to not allow one. Now Google is introducing a set of methods that allow more fine-grained configuration of the preview content shown for your pages. This is done through two types of new settings: a set of robots meta tags and an HTML attribute. These include “nosnippet”, “max-snippet”, “max-video-preview:”, “max-image-preview:”
Image courtesy of Google Webmaster Central Blog
Fraggles are a relatively new Google SERP feature. Part 'fragment' and part 'handle,' fraggles scroll directly to a specific section of an article, forum, or web page.
Image courtesy of Mobile Moxie
Like featured snippets, Fraggles are desirable pieces of organic Google SERP real estate. They appear on the coveted page one and are often seen in a carousel format.
Google My Business is moving messaging from SMS to the Google My Business app starting on November 15, 2019. If you're currently using Google My Business messaging via SMS, you'll need to download the latest version of the Google My Business app.
Image courtesy of Google My Business Help
Whether it’s a publicity stunt or not, Bing search console is testing out new ways to accept content from websites and publishers. A way to early API has begun testing a content submission process to cut back on the heavy lean for Spider crawling.
This news is mixed with news from Bingbot as the crawler goes evergreen with the adoption of the Chromium-based Edge browser. Since this is the reskinned version of Chrome, it will make indexing and crawling a bit easier for Bing as it’s the same as Googlebot.
Image courtesy of Search Engine Land
As you can probably tell by the name, micro animations are small animations. Their use in web design is nothing new, but their use in organic scenarios is. Micro animations are popping up in the eCommerce space to show online shoppers how clothes move and look on real people. They're also popping up on websites looking to add whimsical elements.
Micro animation courtesy of The Digital
Interested in exploring any of these digital marketing trends further? Contact the team at THAT Agency today!
Tags: Digital Marketing
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