Inbound marketing is an essential part of attracting and interacting with visitors. If you are not able to stick to the trends, you are quickly going to fall behind the competition, no matter what high-quality tools you have available.
In this article, you are going to learn about the main inbound marketing trends to look out for over the rest of this year.
User-Generated Content Is Up
Everyone knows by now that companies investing in maintaining an active blog are going to generate more leads. Content marketing is an essential part of everybody’s marketing strategy, and if it isn’t it’s about time you changed that.
But what’s really on the up is encouraging users to generate content for you. How do you do this? You have to make it fun and you have to give them a reason to. One example is Starbucks and their white cup contest. Users were given a white cup and were encouraged to decorate and send a picture of it. Starbucks landed a huge amount of engagement and publicity as a result.
Guest Blogging for SEO Is Down
It’s been coming for a while now. Guest blogs are always useful for tapping into someone else’s audience. It’s also useful for providing a fresh voice for your blog. But for SEO purposes, it’s becoming a thing of the past.
Building links via guest posting is likely to cause more harm than good as Google continues to clamp down on link building. There are still some benefits, as described above, but you shouldn’t spend too much time working on this part of your company.
Marketing Analytics Help A Lot
Successful Internet marketing requires you to know what works and what doesn’t. The power of analytics can’t be underestimated. Every marketer will spend the majority of their time in 2016 crunching the numbers and figuring out what users want.
Analytics will become critical for every new marketing campaign. New analytics tools will make acquisition of data faster than ever before. It’s why marketing analytics is expected to grow at an incredible rate.
Visual Story Telling Is a Must
Images and videos say thousands of words more than a simple piece of written text. As the mobile revolution continues, this is becoming more profound. Many mobile users consume mainly image and video-based content these days.
What does that tell you? It tells you that you need to tell a story in a way that entertains. You have to stand out from the crowd and do something truly unique. Interactive storytelling is that unique thing. Tell the story of your brand and give your company some character. Tap into the emotions of your target audience while simultaneously delivering your marketing message.
Email Marketing Is Striking Back
As recently as 18 months ago, many commentators were saying that email marketing is dead. But this is quite clearly not the case. On the contrary, email marketing is as strong as it ever was and there are no signs that it’s on its way out anytime soon.
Email conversion rates are still extremely high and a healthy email list represents the best possible asset for a company relying on platforms like Facebook and Amazon to connect with their customers. Your email list is one of the few marketing platforms under your direct control.
Inbound marketing in 2016 will still feature email marketing heavily. The goal for many companies will still be to increase the size of their lists.
How Much Should You Concentrate on the Trends?
2015 to 2016 has seen some changes, but the landscape hasn’t changed entirely as a result of this Google update or that Google update. Inbound marketers will see 2016 as the year of making some minor tweaks. The drive to concentrating on users over SEO will continue on its current path.
But what inbound marketers will discover is the biggest change is in the way they communicate with their target audience. They will no longer write to them, they will send them video content and image content. If you already have a successful inbound marketing campaign, you have no reason to make any radical changes.
