Over the past couple of years, digital marketing has quickly evolved alongside the concomitant development of different types of technologies. Mobile marketing, for example, is quickly becoming a necessity for brands to reach users ubiquitously and drive them to physical and/or online stores. Social media, another channel of internet advertising, has exploded with a number of different companies monetizing their traffic in the form of paid media. Lastly, content marketing has become essential for both brand management and search engine optimization, giving companies opportunities to drive in more traffic through organic mediums. An infographic prepared by ViralInNature provides some insights into all three digital marketing trends:

Mobile Marketing

– Global smartphone users are expected to hit 2 billion by the year 2015. This is not surprising as mobile technology continuously evolves, especially now that smartphones and tablets provide a lot of functions that can be found on desktop computers. Reaching users on the go and pushing them to either transact online or to visit physical locations is becoming easier every single day with the use of digital marketing.

– The mobile share of all internet traffic has increased by 25% this year alone. Additionally, mobile internet traffic is expected to grow at a rate of 3.5% every month, illustrating the value of investing in sound digital marketing strategies for mobile platforms.

Social Media

– Even though the social media world is dominated by Facebook and Twitter, other social sites have made an impact. For example, LinkedIn has over 200 million users, whereas multimedia sites such as Pinterest and Instagram are quickly rising in popularity: the former has over 50 million users, and over 40 million photos are uploaded to Instagram on a daily basis. Lastly, Google has pushed it’s own social network, Google+, to the forefront by integrating it with its other services such as YouTube and Gmail. As a result, it’s monthly active user database has pushed past 300 million, making it the second biggest network in the world.

– There’s no doubt that Facebook is the king of social media: over 665 million users are active on the site every single day. In fact, 23% of Facebook users will check their account at least five times a day, showing how valuable it is for brands to produce engaging content that will be seen in news feeds (especially for mobile users).

Content Marketing

– Search engine optimization professionals have known the following fact for the longest time: content marketing is crucial to the viability of any SEO campaign. Additionally, producing fresh and engaging posts on a consistent basis is also important for community building on social channels. Visual content in particular proves to be effective in driving engagement, as articles/posts with images have proven to generate 94% more views than content without visual content.

– Content marketing can be a mix of social media posting, off-site article writing, and on-site blogging. A blog in particular effective vehicle for brands to pull in new users via long-tail keyword searches, as well as providing a wealth of information to keep site visitors engaged. On the technical side, blogs can give websites significantly more pages that can be indexed by search engines and additional links, increasing the effectiveness of SEO campaigns.

What do these trends mean for my business?

If your brand has not yet capitalized on these emerging trends in digital marketing, don’t fret: it’s not too late. However, it’s essential to start strategically planning on how to catch up with the evolution of online marketing and create the foundation to effectively generate leads/sales via the digital marketing channels mentioned in this post. If not, you may just miss out potential revenue streams…

Source for stats: ViralInNature