There are quite a few trends in the field of marketing. Over the past two years, we have seen a sharp increase in online purchases. According to CBS, in 2019, 64 percent of people over 12 said they bought something online in the three months before the survey. In 2020, the figure was 71 percent, and in 2021 it rose to 77 percent. This also means a few things for our online marketing efforts. What trends are visible and what should we look out for?

1. Features snippets from Google

Say trends, you say Google. Google's featured snippets are becoming increasingly important. A featured snippet is a highlighted search result that provides a short and concise answer to a search query. Sometimes that's an answer from Wikipedia, sometimes it's from another Web site. SEO and SEA, most companies have that covered by now. So now it's time to also focus on features snippets. To increase the chances of your content appearing in such a featured snippet, you first need to answer your target audience's most important questions and to have a spot in the top 10 search results.

2. Usability

This trend, too, is actually driven by Google. The usability of your website weighs more and more heavily in determining what position you end up at in Google. Good content alone is not enough. Your website must also be mobile friendly and the loading speed must be good. That loading speed is a number between 0 and 100. With Google's PageSpeed Insights you measure the performance score of your website, for both mobile and desktop, and get recommendations to improve the loading speed.

3. Influencer marketing

In this form of marketing, you get influential people on social media to recommend your product or service. It's a popular way to gain the trust of your target audience, and it's increasingly being invested in. There is one catch, though. If you work with an influencer who becomes involved in a scandal, it will reflect on your brand. You may wonder if you actually need it.

4. Voice-search

More and more devices we can control with our voice. Voice search - the voice-activated search for information - is also becoming increasingly popular. We are getting more and more used to it, and the questions we ask are becoming more complex and longer. This growing popularity is causing more and more companies to think about their long-term voice marketing strategy. What voice search queries is your target audience using? Are you findable at all through voice search? What is the tone of voice you aspire to on voice-assistants? This is where featured snippets come into play again. Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Samsung Bixby and Amazon Alexa search at lightning speed for the website where the question asked is well answered. How do you make sure that's your website?

5. Artificial intelligence

Ray Kurzweil, inventor, scientist, author and trend watcher, predicts that by 2045, artificial intelligence will be a billion times more powerful than the combined human intelligence of today. Fully monitoring your brand through AI is still in the future, but there are already many tasks that will become a lot easier thanks to AI. Consider, for example, tagging your content using image recognition.

6. Virtual Reality

By no means everyone has virtual reality glasses at home yet, but it is growing in popularity. Meta, Facebook's parent company, is even working on the metaversum, a network of interconnected 3D virtual spaces. With virtual and augmented reality glasses, users can interactively move through this world. In this way, the real and virtual worlds come together and you can watch Netflix with your friends in a virtual living room, so to speak. I don't see myself doing it so soon; I'm a big believer in personal contact. Home workers can already work in a virtual world. Because even though working from home is completely established, we miss the social contact with each other. Through immersed.com, it's already possible. Immersed enables users worldwide to engage in a digital, distraction-free workspace. According to the company, this allows people to concentrate better, which benefits productivity.

7. Video Marketing

Video marketing is another trend that keeps growing. Google foresaw this trend and acquired YouTube back in 2016. According to research by Wyzowl, 86 percent of businesses use video as a marketing tool. This is an increase of 41 percent compared to 2016. Also, video marketing and influencer marketing have completely found each other.

8. Marketing-automation

Back from never before is marketing automation: using various automated systems to help your potential customers through the customer journey. You do that, for example, by using good workflows for emails, events and forms. But in an increasingly complex online world, you also need to manage everything properly. The right content needs to be put out into the world at the right time through the right channel. With a consistent look and feel, of course, because you want your brand to be easily recognizable. You won't succeed with a manually maintained spreadsheet, that much is certain.

Curious?

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