“Mobile First” and Multimedia Reflected in 2015 Internet Marketing Trends
Mobile visits have now overtaken desktop visits on the internet. Time spent using mobile apps has overtaken time spent using internet browsers.
Customers are viewing the internet on pocket sized 4.5″ x 2.3″ or so sized screens that use the internet and apps.
This means testing all functions and designs first on a mobile phone with desktop use taking second priority.
Site photos and graphic design need to be easy to see and read on a smartphone with a screen that may be 4.5″ tall by 2.3″ wide.
Gone are the days when most website visitors were viewing your site from a large television sized desktop monitor or even a laptop screen.
People check their email on the go by getting their smartphone out of their pocket and hitting the app button that takes them straight to their email. Graphics and leaflets in the email messages need to be designed for this type of viewing.
Read on for an in depth look at the changes happening this year. Technical aspects, search engine optimization and visual design are all adapting to big changes this year.
The internet is continuing to grow into another wave of change.
New Strategies for Getting Found Online and for Promoting a Brand
Internet Marketing Trends 2015 show the importance of adapting new strategies and customization to suit the mobile customers. There are some big shifts in the manner in which companies are searched and found online.
Brand Differentiation Through Storytelling Is a Big Trend
Differentiating a brand is becoming more important than ever as competition rises. New ways of branding include storytelling to include a compelling narrative about the company’s background that attracts customers.
Big Changes in the Apps and Search World Are Part of the 2015 Trends
Numbers show a big shift toward using mobile apps over using internet browser search for user visits from smartphones and tablets. This is important for businesses who rely on search engine organic rank or adwords ads.
Statistics show mobile users are now spending more of their time on using apps than on using the internet.
Quality Content and Mobile Responsiveness Are Important Parts of Google’s Evaluation of Sites for Ranking
Google Analytics shows the ratings for your website in terms of mobile friendliness. Starting Spring 2015 Google will include your website’s mobile responsiveness score in the formula for ranking your website in the search engine results.
Quality Content that is original and provides value is more important to Google than ever. The search crawlers can read for meaning and evaluate your content.
Google is always seeking fresh, new, original content and rewarding it with better ranking scores.
Facebook has its own formula that favors fresh, new, quality content that adds value as well. New changes in Facebook’s formula designed to weed out poor content, pushy advertising posts, photos with “memes,” and so on are changing the content that is sent from a profile or page to the news feeds.
New Ways of Accepting Mobile Payments Continue to Grow
In addition to Square and Paypal more new mobile payments are popping up. Running a business by accepting credit card payments on the smartphone or tablet is becoming more common.
Security and Privacy Are Crucial for Protecting Customer Data
Methods of locking the phone, using thumbprints to access the phone or other personal security measures, high levels of encryption, and security software continue to become more sophisticated to avoid hackers.
The list below shows the new directions for 2015.
Internet Marketing Defined:
- Selling Online
- Advertising Online
- High Search Engine Rank so users click to go to your website
- Traffic from a variety of sources to the Website in Order to Get Customers
- Copy writing to get web visitors to take action and do business.
- Quality Content to provide useful information for visitors and encourage their trust and relationship building. It is also a main way to get the site ranked by search engines and to share content online in a viral way for publicity.
- Payments online and on mobile devices
- Stores and businesses on websites with products or services
Mobile Use Numbers Point to Changes in Marketing
2015 Trends
- Mobile use numbers are rising and this has caused new directions for internet marketing strategies and trends. Mobile visits are fast overtaking visits from desktops and laptops.
- Apps used time spent has now overtaken time spent using an internet browser. Thus, the importance of having an app for your business is growing.
- Desktop or laptop searches are becoming a smaller share of the search activities.
- Mobile searches are overtaking desktop searches. This makes it more important than ever to have a website that is mobile friendly.
- Google’s Mobile Responsive scoring system now in scoring your website or blog for its search engine rank.
- Total internet presence is growing in importance. This changes the approach of having just a website alone without other types of internet presence.
- Social media continues to grow in importance for businesses online. As mentioned above, this is part of the total internet presence.
- Google is focusing on the total picture and considers your total internet presence not just your website.
- Google Adwords Results are now competing with the Mobile Apps for search customers. Adwords ads can be configured to send mobile users straight to the mobile app instead of the website. People download an app from a company in order to do something like search for rentals.
- Google’s quality content scoring grades content for adding value and this affects websites for search engine rank. So it is more important than ever to include a blog with articles that provide quality content.
- Quality Content is evaluated even more closely than ever with the newest Google search engine software, which is referred to as the “semantic” web because the focus is on reading meaning and not just on keywords.
- Google software is reading the content on the sites for meaning, interpretation and associations at a higher level than before.
- Using keywords or keyword phrases in the content is not enough for it to get ranked by Google. This has been true for a long time. Google searches and evaluates for the content to provide a benefit such as useful information.
- Originality in content is more important than ever in Google’s evaluation of the site for search engine rank.
- Facebook and Youtube account now for about half the internet’s traffic. It is more important than ever to understand how to use Facebook and Youtube to market your business online.
- Email marketing grows as the trend toward nationalization and developing relationships becomes more important.
- Getting visitors to the site and using social media to create a total online presence are both relying more than ever on high quality photos and graphics. Research shows content with a photo is 40% more likely to get a click or action than just text.
- Google Adwords has a number of new resources for the ads. Call out extensions, along with site link extensions already present previously help make the ad look larger. They are free and they add more lines to it so it stands out. It is best not to use the Google Adwords Express but to use the full featured, more labor intensive version to take advantage of the many resources. Ads can send mobile visitors straight to the apps instead of the website.
- Google Display Ads with an image do much better than with text only. This emphasizes the importance of high quality marketing photos and graphics.
- Photos and graphics of high quality make content or ads more effective for getting action from the customers.
- Thin or poor quality content is getting weeded out and downgraded by the Google search engine software more and more. To get your site’s links ranked high so it is seen and visited by customers you need top quality content.
- Competition for high search rank gets tougher.
- Mobile and wireless connections mean the site has to load fairly fast before customers get impatient and click away from it while waiting. The many slow wireless connections are a challenge. When people use faster cable connections at home it is not as much of a problem.
- Clean, uncluttered, minimalist sites are a trend since they load fast and are easier to read on the smaller screens of smartphones.
- Using email marketing to send quality content to subscribers that also has sales pitches, service offers and billing continues to grow.
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