What Are The Challenges And Pitfalls Of Digital Marketing?
There are over 240,000,000 active websites on the Internet at any given time, and a total of somewhere around 1.5 billion websites if we include inactive ones. How can you make sure your website, content, services, and products are not only visible to your market, but relevant as well?
People are complex and dynamic, and markets reflect those elements of humanity. A hundred years ago a print ad would be placed into a magazine or newspaper and it would drive the market with its newness and reflection of what the businesses wanted to sell.
However, with the advent of the Internet and more educated and connected people in markets, fashion, trends, and “newness” fluctuate day-to-day and even minute-to-minute in some cases.
Besides Trends in and Changes to the Digital Marketing environment, the powerhouses that drive advertising and Internet traffic – Google and Social Media outlets like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram – are constantly updating their search and display algorithms.
Managing Trends And Changes
When Google launched for public use in 1998, most of the Internet was sorted into directories created by people to organize the increasing amount of data on the web. Google changed that by responding to search queries based on the number of relevant sites that linked to a target website – something new in the world of search engines.
Today, Google uses complex marketing algorithms, advertising, and other proprietary tools to sort searches based on smart indexing and AI understanding of user searches. Essentially, it still relies on click-throughs and the final destination people end up at after searching for specific terms.
However, Google is now an adaptive service that is being constantly monitored by websites, host services, and companies to try to keep up with trends. This means that all of those people are reacting to the changes as they happen in order to maintain traffic and interest in their websites.
At the same time, Social Media provides more depth for your brand, products, and services. Facebook wants to generate traffic to its website, and it is one of the most-visited websites in the world still today. So if something like Google can cross-reference your site and your Facebook page and your Instagram page, it is more likely to provide access to a through-link to your final page. Whether it’s through a blog on LinkedIn, a video on Instagram, or a celebratory post on Facebook, Google looks across all of those other platforms to provide a solution to the end-users search.
Current Trends (Subject to Change!)
One of the more current trends that many businesses have failed to update is how Google tracks written content on websites. In the past, the focus was on keywords – much like a “topic” to sort results by.
For example, if your web store sells race car parts, you would want to have keywords, such as racecar, race car, car parts, NASCAR, stock racing, and so on. Google used to look for those words and would sort, using its algorithms, provide fairly good search results.
As the web has gotten bigger, and as Google has become more than just a search engine, that no longer makes sense, so Google has started using phrase and sentence filters instead.
“What’s the difference?” you might ask. Among other things, it means that simply throwing keywords into your material will not necessarily help drive your product any longer. It also means that your website needs to continue to update and keep up with the markets and the Internet as a whole in order to maintain viability and effective search results.
What Can You Do About It?
Keeping up to speed with all of the latest trends and tools in marketing is more than a full-time job. Unless you’re a Fortune 500 company, creating a marketing department at your business is likely going to create a cycle of burnout and will almost certainly cost your company a lot of money to build and maintain.
Fortunately, professional Digital Marketing firms, like PixelPop Marketing, have the most effective solution to your marketing needs. Marketing teams have experts in the various elements of Digital Brand Management – from web developers, writers, and artists, to videographers and studios to record your next video or audio commercial.
These services are much more affordable than hiring your own marketing staff, but also more cohesive teams with experience working together, monitoring the volatility of the marketing world, and implementing solutions before you even know something has changed.
Having someone on your side to ensure your brand is relevant, effective, and maintained to the highest standards of your industry is not just good business – it’s good for your business.
Find out more about how PixelPop Marketing can help you overcome the pitfalls of Digital Marketing so you can focus on doing what you do best.