Had a great year so far? Here’s how to stay ahead of the digital marketing game

If you’ve had a great year so far in terms of marketing online, well done! If your digital marketing campaign was successful the previous year, you increased your targeted traffic ten fold, and you have new customers, don’t think you can start sitting back and the success will carry on. While it’s always great to have a couple of successful Internet marketing months, in reality the digital world is driven by momentum.

The time you are wasting doing nothing will be the time your competitors are taking to get ahead of you. Your internet marketing strategy should always be aligned to your business objectives and be flexible (agile) so that you can make amends for all the changes happening in the industry. How can you stay ahead and make sure you continue to have success with your marketing campaigns?

Find below a couple of ways you can use to make sure you are always at the top of your online marketing campaign and that will help you so that you don’t lose any momentum.

New trends and technologies
The digital world is changing at the speed of light and many new technologies and channels will be introduced. As we are moving closer to the fact that we don’t need a pen and paper to do business anymore and basically only digital devices (smartphones, tablets), finding new ways for your target audience to utilise your services and products digitally is a necessity. Stay ahead of the game and look for changes in your industry and online. Start a process where you can regularly research of what is new online and how you can integrate this into your campaign.

Content is still king

It’s getting more chaotic everyday online. Content is still the best way to increase your visibility online and to engage with your target audience. Offer your customers regular fresh interesting content that they will want to share with their own social media circles. Not only will this build credibility for you, it really helps your organic SEO efforts as well. This doesn’t mean you should publishing content just for the sake of content, make your content magnetic, and you will be rewarded for it.

Everyone despises spammers
Google has been very active over the last couple of months with all their algorithm updates to fight spam. As more people are getting online, and more content gets spread digitally, I believe Google will release more updates this year to dump all the spam from their results. Google’s algorithm has very strict penalties for any site with black hat SEO and spam tactics. Help your reputation and SEO and do your SEO the right way.

Local marketing
Local search on Google is becoming more important everyday. Google is going to make their local search results a big factor in their algorithm. As a result of all the new mobile devices popping up and many mobile users are using Google to search for local results, mobile and local search is starting to work together. Take advantage of this, as it’s busy happening.

Use rich media with your social media campaign
Marketing on the social web using rich media such as video is gaining momentum. Videos and audio have always been a big draw for new clients. Create short how to videos and podcasts that you can use on your blog, website, and social media profiles. The nice thing about using videos is that you can upload your videos on your own YouTube channel and then use that video on all your other channels to promote it including your blog and website. The nice thing is that if you use video and audio in your campaign, it’s also mobile compatible.

So far this has been a great year for many. Focus on making your social media campaign better in the next months so that you can look back with a smile in January 2015 to what you have achieved.