Many new developments have taken place in the last five years in digital marketing. In addition to helping businesses achieve their goals, digital marketing significantly impacts how we do business. From running a website and making that website visible on search engines to increasing web traffic and offering a better customer experience – digital marketing has been easing it all.

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Digital marketing and associated technologies have elevated the ease of doing business, allowing us, entrepreneurs, to stay focused on what’s essential for our company. In fact, it is one of the most crucial parts of business strategies. A considerable part of the inflows and outflows of a business is on digital marketing.

This post talks about some of the hottest and most practiced digital trends at present that help you keep your audience hooked. 

Artificial Intelligence & Chatbot

Everybody is talking about artificial intelligence. It is the part of digital technology that, if deployed strategically and correctly, can help bring down the cost of human errors while amplifying the profits of your process.

Chatbots, a kind of AI application, is also making a big score these days. With their programmed artificial intelligence, the bots can accurately sense and solve the issues and queries of your customers quickly. There is no need to deploy your experienced professionals to handle primary and initial conversations. Introducing chatbots in your web CMS saves your agents time so that they can focus more on your organizational goals.

AI offers exceptional opportunities in the sky of digital marketing. AI applications will have a significant role in predictive analytics, bringing out better experience, and targeted and re-targeted marketing.

Live & Video Marketing 

A picture is worth a thousand words. That’s an old saying. But, a high-quality video can speak better than pictures can. Video is a versatile and engaging content format.

Video marketing has emerged as a key driving factor in the field of digital marketing. It is a way of using videos (whether live, pre-recorded, or edited) to promote your brands, products, or services effectively. Live videos are an excellent way to increase engagement and brand identity.

Video marketing has become a popular trend nowadays. You can see it for yourself by checking out your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn feed. You will see videos and video ads mostly.

Going live is another effective way to engage and convince your audience. Live videos are a part of video marketing strategies at leading brands that often do Facebook Live or YouTube Live.

Visual Content Marketing 

Promoting your products using appealing visuals – such as graphics, infographics, memes, or texts written and arranged in a visually attractive way – can be labeled as visual content marketing. Visual content marketing also involves video marketing. And it is quite a popular digital marketing best practice presently.

“11% more B2C marketers than B2B marketers say visual content is the most important type of content today.” ~ Social Media Examiner

It is different from traditional practices: content (text) marketing, video ads, and pamphlet/brochure distribution. In a digitally-driven era, visual content marketing occurs on your website or on your social networks, from where you get most of your traffic and engagement.

Visual content is easy to digest for consumers. Once digested and your message is delivered, your audience is already convinced. If you are considering visual content marketing, you have a wide variety of content formats to use. These are some of the most popular types and formats of visual content which you can use in your visual content marketing campaigns.

Social Media Influencers 

People having an influential presence (or following) on social media are social media influencers. They are celebrities of social media and also, often, in real-world scenarios. Their followers listen to them. Influencer marketing can give 11 times more ROI than traditional online marketing.

For a modern business, influencer marketing has its own benefits. You can keep your audience with you with the help of this new-age marketing technique.

You could find and hire a social media influencer to promote your brand on social media. Even top brands are chasing and following social media influencers; you could follow the trend for your business or become one. 

Database or Customer Based Marketing

Database marketing is still a top trend. However, in this technologically advanced era, you pitch your product online through social networks or email marketing, making the most of your customer database. Database marketing this way is the direct marketing of the modern digital world.

Real-time data, insightful performance reports, and enhanced customer views are the key to modern database marketing. The market can create and implement strategies – all thanks to highly advanced database marketing applications.

Database or customer-based marketing involves gathering information from customers such as their name, address, email, phone number, and many other details through social media, paid advertisements, or direct form fill campaigns. Once the database is ready, it is segmented and ready to be pitched.

Database marketing stands as a powerful support to your SEO efforts. They have the potential to boost traffic and sales for your online business. However, you will need to make sure that your website is ready to handle increased traffic to avoid penalizing search engines. You will need to devise thoroughly calculated database marketing strategies to obtain desired results.

Bottom Line

Once, digital marketing itself was a trend. Today, it has dozens or even more sub-trends impacting the performance of your website or online business. The trends keep changing, but it takes a wise entrepreneur to identify and make the most of those trends before becoming an old school. The trends, technologies, and techniques underlined in this post will have a huge impact on how businesses are done online and how digital marketing is implemented.

This article first appeared here.