We get it: you’ve got a busy lifestyle. You have a business to run, staff to pay, customers to please, and on top of that, a website to look after. Marketing and promoting your business and checking up on your website are probably not your biggest concern.
On top of that, have you ever noticed that almost daily, there seems to be a new trend, or a new app on your phone to improve your work day? It seems like every time we feel we’re on top of our A game, something shifts and the things we know now are no longer valid or worthwhile.
It’s important to stay on top of marketing trends and website information for a lot of reasons; it’s cost-effective, it keeps you up to date on what customers are paying attention to, and you will find greater prosperity and success for your website by keeping informed. That being said, there are a lot of reasons why doing this is so difficult, which is what we’d like to address. These reasons are why it’s so hard to keep up with the latest marketing and website trends today.
Information changes almost daily…
Some of the best articles you may see online were written nearly 10 years ago. There is a reason for this, however. A lot of information we read about can be considered ‘evergreen’ content, i.e. content that is consistent with facts and common knowledge that we have even today. Evergreen content can be found in all of the industries such as veterinary care tips, parenting, food, etc.
However, even some evergreen content doesn’t stay that way for long. The best example we can give is marketing (after all that is mostly what this article is about). Some marketing tips such as for TV have definitely gone out of style since everything has and continues to shift online. You may even find there are some tips about certain things, such as photography, that have changed almost daily since the technology used there is also rapidly transforming.
…So does Google, for that matter.
Did you know that Google changes its algorithm almost daily? It changes so much so, in fact, that it can feel impossible to keep up. The best example we can give is its fickle decision-making regarding the description tag (which you can read about on our blog starting here, and then go to here to see an example of how much Google changes things!).
Another example we can provide is their ruling on optimization for mobile. A new rule was yet again rolled out in the past year and a half called mobile-first indexing. If your website is not already responsive to mobile devices, this rule can negatively impact your site traffic results and ranking, among other things.
With new technology and information come new trends…and new dangers
According to a recent study, it’s estimated that there were over 4 million articles published online daily in March 2019 alone! With new phones, computers, tablets, cameras, etc. coming out year after year, getting new information has never been so easy.
But with new power comes new responsibility, and also danger. Information overload has now become a condition in people who are exposed to social media and information online at an almost unhealthy rate. We now have articles that talk about how to actually unplug yourself from the Internet and daily exposure to our smartphones.
Not to mention, your brain could be overexposed to information that you don’t need. News and fashion trend articles come and go, but for some reason things like cybersecurity and new phishing scam threats never seem to stick when you need them to. While this is definitely not the case for us—we’re all about security, and it’s included in some of our plans for business websites—it can be scarily easy to stumble into a cyber threat when you’re being distracted by other information as well.
The reason for so many new cyber threats? It’s because for all of the newest tech out there, we cling to older websites and devices. Maybe it’s because we feel the newest tech doesn’t feel right, or it’s so new that we don’t know how to handle it or our lives are so busy enough already that we feel like we can’t learn more…because of information overload.
Some trends never go out of style
Regardless of how many new trends in marketing keep popping up online, there are a few trends we’ve noticed that have yet to go out of style or fade away completely. That’s because rather than being trends, they are in fact effective marketing strategies that can benefit any business.
- Content is king. This can be hard to believe given the statistic we provided earlier, but the fact remains that despite how much content is being released, it’s the quality of that content that has people coming back. This is why we continually insist that your website has a blog, and that you promote your content across all of the channels you use. You may not see results immediately, but the long-term results are worth it.
- Engagement, engagement, engagement. Regardless of whether or not you like social media and it contributes to information overload, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. As a matter of fact, for all the talk about bots on Facebook, the majority of users on there are still real people. Social media is where people come to engage with businesses, and you have to reciprocate in order to keep that engagement going.
- Updates are necessary. Especially security updates to avoid phishing scams and hacks from infecting your website and, gradually, your customers’ computers as well (see our articles on the different types of cybercrimes, plus how to identify them if you’d like). Other updates should be to the software supporting your website, plugins, and the overall design. Talk to anyone outside of marketing and they will tell you that they trust a secure website with an up-to-date design over an older site that looks like it belongs to the 1990s era of websites.
- A website helps businesses get found. As we mentioned Google has now enforced a mobile rule (which may or may not change over time…we’ll see!), which goes to show how many people are using computers to look up businesses and information daily. If you’re not on Google, or you’re not putting in the effort to make your business be found online via a website, you’re as good as non-existent.
It can feel like a monumental task to stay on top of the latest marketing and tech trends, but we think you’ll find in the long term it’s for the best. If you need some help, or you want to get your website caught up with the times, give us a call at V3 Media. We’d be glad to help you stay informed—we have been around since the 90s, after all!