Here are the most commonly seen marketing trends from the year 2012. They are in order of the amount of priority a business will give them. For example, there has been a big push towards mobile marketing this year, most likely due to HTML5 and the increasing popularity of mobile devices.
1 – Mobile marketing
This has taken a few forms, with the most common one being to create a mobile version of your website. Many have done this by creating a mobile website that is similar to their desktop website. The more-savvy online marketer has made their desktop website into a responsive website so that it will adjust itself to the size of the screen it is being viewed with. Mobile marketing has also meant that people are able to make apps for their websites and apps for mobile devices. These apps have become very good little carriers for marketers to plant their message within. Mobile marketing has also gone a long way to help people find their local businesses with things such as Google Maps.
2 – Blogging
Online marketers have enjoyed the benefits of paying writers to create blog posts for them, so that they may enjoy the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits. Blogging helps to create links that can be used to point at ecommerce sites so that they rise in the search engine results pages. They are easy to share and can hold marketing messages too.
3 – Social media marketing
This has become very popular, and thousands of “Advisors” have come out of the woodwork to give advice on this new fad. However, even though social media is free, most online business has prioritized blogging and mobile marketing over social media, because it is harder to get a return on your investment with social media. A business can spend hundreds of staff hours gaining support on social media, for it to translate into a handful of sales.
4 – Videos
The days of trying to create viral videos seem to have gone, but the changes to the Google algorithm for indexing videos seems to have helped maintain marketing interest. There are still a lot of online businesses who are marketing through “how to” videos and demonstration videos.
5 – Location based apps
These have seen an upsurge in popularity. They involve things revolving around local customers and local business, but can also involve special offers, contests and achievement badges.
Summary
Mobile marketing has been prolific over the year 2012 because of new mobile devices hitting the market and new mobile programming codes becoming available; compatibility is now easier, app building is now easier and mobile device sales are still climbing. This was followed by blogging, which is still the staple diet of the online marketer. Social media is hard to manipulate if you want to pull sales from it, but this has not stopped people marketing on it. Many online marketers have tried spreading their message via videos, because the increased bandwidths available and the reliability of 3G has made videos a more viable information dissemination device. Finally, location based apps are currently the easiest way of drawing in local traffic and online marketers are still using this method on a regular basis.
