Digital Marketing

Trends In Marketing In The Last Decade LoyicaBlog

Marketing trends can be difficult to follow because they are always coming and going. As a result, it can be all too easy to get lost

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Author
Loyica Team
Feb 21 2020
Trends In Marketing In The Last Decade

Marketing trends can be difficult to follow because they are always coming and going. As a result, it can be all too easy to get lost in pursuit of “the next big thing.” However, this does not hold true for all marketing trends. Some developments have made a lasting impact on the way that we market our products, and some trends continue to evolve in terms of what their presence means to the community.

With that said, here are some of the top trends in the last decade that have definitely left a huge mark in the way we go about marketing our products.

The Rise Of The Smartphone

Our target audiences used to rely on desktops or laptops to surf the web, because traditional keypad phones were not capable of providing the same experience. So when smartphones hit the market, it became a global sensation. Suddenly, it was crucial for just about anybody to have a smartphone so that they could remain connected with their peers, friends, and family through a variety of platforms—all on the convenience of a touchscreen phone.

When smartphones broke through the international market, it changed the way we use the internet. Brands and businesses responded accordingly in terms of mobile marketing, platform optimisation, and connectivity. Everybody suddenly went online simultaneously and as long as they had their smartphone on their person, they rarely ever went offline. Infiltrating your target audience’s smartphone space by finding out where they would go on their phones and for how long became an important new goal.

Peer Marketing

Regardless of where you are going or who you are accompanying, you’re bound to have reached for your phone to find out what the place you are going to can offer you. It could be a restaurant, a tourist attraction, or a residence—our first reflex is to find out what other people have to say about the place. 

Reviews are important, not just for giving your place a positive reputation but also for giving SEO engines the traction they need to mark your online presence and give you a good web page ranking. This is why there so many businesses incorporate a Reviews section on their website, because it helps drive and direct the right traffic. 

What used to just be word of mouth has transformed and become automated. It has adapted with the times and still remains as relevant as ever. This is what makes a good marketing team so crucial; the permanence of any posted information in the internet means that it is harder to recover from bad press once you attract it. While nobody can ever assure you that your business won’t get a harsh critique every once in a while, you can be confident in the fact that there are experts who know how to mitigate the consequences of these reviews.

Social Media Dominance

Here’s a quick list of all the social media platforms that have popped up ever since the early 2000’s:

  • Linkedin (2002)
  • Myspace (2003)
  • Facebook (2004)
  • Youtube (2005)
  • Twitter (2006)
  • Instagram (2010)
  • Pinterest (2010)
  • Snapchat (2011)
  • Tiktok (2016)

Not all of the social media sites remain relevant today (rest in peace!). However, each platform gave us the opportunity to bond with our family and friends while remaining a little connected to other communities—those formed by proximity, or similar interests, or other personal needs. 

We spend a lot of our time on social media. As a result, it has become one of the most transformative trends to happen to the marketing sector. Marketers are eager to use whatever data that these sites can provide to target the audience they need and reach them in as little time as possible. 

Beyond the location of our target audience, it has also changed the way we expect businesses to interact with their consumers. Later generations make it one of their top priorities to invest in a business that knows their way around social media. This includes staying connected with whoever is commenting or messaging, and sometimes even actively engaging on certain topics. In a way, social media calls for a more in-depth humanisation of what businesses are all about and how they go about their work.

Finally, social media platforms have paved the rise of user-generated content. Businesses aren’t the only ones encouraged to interact—their customers also enjoy being able to reach out to them through the convenience that social media provides. This, in a way, functions as an evolved form of peer to peer marketing because other people see that a real-life person is proud to post about their experience with a certain organisation and it boosts their confidence in the capacity of that organisation to deliver the same experience to them as well.

Voice Assistant Devices

Search engines have established themselves as the reliable point of contact regarding anything and everything under the sun, especially Google. So when these search engines started linking up with Voice Assistant devices, it changed the way that search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts panned out.

Marketers, specialists, and writers now needed to think of how SEO and AI would interact to process certain queries made by people as they go about their lives. Yes, voice assistant devices are so effective that it has become a part of their owner’s daily routine. 

The call for clear, concise, and straightforward content now intensified as the race of information stepped up its pace as well. With users more empowered to use search engines at their own convenience, marketing teams needed to continue developing new ways to solve user queries while staying reliable to the brand.

The Ethics Of Data-Gathering

Throughout the years, we have lived through some of the biggest controversies regarding the way online platforms handle our data. It has made us more conscientious about the information we give out, even on social media platforms where we feel most comfortable in. The reality is that we release a lot of ourselves on the internet and we often do not know what happens after we send it across. We are unaware of whether it is being used for another entity’s personal gain or whether it can ever be completely scrubbed off the face of the web. It is a terrifying and sobering realisation amidst all the advantages that the internet has given us.

A few years ago, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Act was implemented in the European Union. This was a step towards making the internet a safer place for everybody involved, even for those who had willingly given up precious tidbits of their data in the years that have passed. The GDPR will begin limiting the amount of data that is available to marketers and give more power to internet users, as it should be. The struggle from hereon now concerns how marketers will work with this new set of data—that is, how much more they are capable of generating with much less.

Conclusion

Some of these trends continue to evolve even today. When someone innovates something with such a tremendous impact, it is hard to say how far it can go and what form it can choose to take in the future. These are only a few of the most important landmarks regarding marketing today and they are bound to change even further at our current pace in development.

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