What is the future for Online Marketing April 8, 2019
What is the future for Online Marketing
Online marketing is a very dynamic area and moves and innovates very rapidly. Until recently it has been a immature market but as the importance of and understanding of the online world has become more widespread it is now very much a mainstream area. So what does the future look like?
Like it or not the importance of big business and big brands are going to only increase in their importance this is because Fake News and legal disputes over user generated content (UGC) is rising and the law around the world is now moving to hold the publisher of this problem content responsible. Big brands are more likely to have their own quality control teams, online marketing teams, and other online professionals than smaller outfits and also to have larger promotional budgets.
Video content has been very popular from day one, but now high speed fibre broadband is really spreadingly large players are starting to make their moves to capture the offline world, ie television audiences. Brands such as Facebook/Youtube and the like are after breaking into the setting room next!.
How can this trend be of use to non big brand business wanting to do well with online marketing? Well the answer is to grow your own brand, by using a multi-channel approach you can expand using different channels to market your business and create and promote content that includes video. That means creating semi professional promotional videos for your business and making use of that to promote your product around the web.
The other important change is the performance of website, both in terms of speed and of user experience, Google has been refining its online marketing algorithm since 2010 with both of these factors in mind, increasingly the younger generation expect websites to be very responsive and mobile friendly. With the vast amounts of data available to it Google, not to mention the huge number of Phd’s they employ they have been able to infer users experiences using metrics they have access to. Google is able to gather data from its Chrome browser and combine it with data it buys in from ISP’s and other browsers such as Firefox, plus of course Google Adwords, Google Search Console and Google Analytics data. All of these sources together gives it very significant insight into what pages on a site users visit, for how long, and where they go next.
What is the future for Online Marketing
From its Google streetmap data it knows the IP addresses associated with each area and can therefore work out if a website appeals to a location specific area or for more national or international audiences. By comparing the results for the same query it can identify sites that users like the most and the least, based on their bounce rates, time on page and what happens to the user in future, if their IP regularly visits a site that is a sign of either an association with it or one that has a loyal customer. Crunching these huge datasets then allows Google to assign a user metric quality score to a website based on the “experience” as measured by all of these factors.
A trend that is increasingly important for online marketing is the user experience, Google the leading search engine has invested a lot of time and effort into measuring this in a quantifiable and scientific way, they are using measures such as Time on Page, Bounce rate and time to last contextual paint (load time) to compare websites to their peer groups, sites that don’t then measure up and pushed down in the rankings and therefore loose out on traffic. Users are increasingly expecting sites to be responsive and fast, particularly the younger age groups, generation X for example, and Google is responding to that by rewarding sites that are fast.
Building links from quality sites is also a great way of increasing the Authority of your website from the Search Engine point of view. If you need help in areas like this, then why not contact us we offer Finance Directors on a part time / Portfolio basis but also have FD’s who also have more than 15 years on online marketing experience, that is a one of the Unique Selling Points of an FD Capital FD! To learn about what Domain Authority is and why it is important for SEO read our recent blog post on it. Quality links are hard to acquire particularly from diverse websites within a niche, and so again are an indicator of a sites quality. The rate of link acquisition or loss is also a useful indicator as it highlights if a site is on its way up in the world or is a former well known site in decline. Measuring link velocity in this way then gives Google another insight into how users rate a site, and how active its owners are in its promotion, all again indicators of quality, or at least quality as defined by Google.
What is the future for Online Marketing
So the future is likely to be dominated by larger corporates who have the budgets to market their websites building significant backlink profiles and having the resources to invest in high quality user experiences with fast and slick websites that work perfectly on different devices, PCs, tablets, phones, watches and more. There is always of course room in the market for competition, but to succeed in the new online world, you need a strong understanding of how the Search Engines work, and the capability to build a website that users truly enjoy using and find the products or services they want from it.
If you are reading this post and wonder how FD Capital can help, the answer is we have Finance Directors and CFO’s who have strong E-Commerce, online marketing and SEO skills as well as being qualified accountants. We offer FD’s with E-Commerce experience and can help you with SEO services via our network of Search Marketing professionals. FD Capital are based in London but we service the London area and the West Midlands and now have professionals in more locations including Manchester, Oxford, Leeds and Bristol. If you need an FD or CFO for you business, make sure to reach out to our team today.
