Is Your Business Ready For What’s Coming?

Is Your Business Ready For What’s Coming? – 7 HUGE Marketing Shifts to Act on NOW

original article: Ryan Stewart – http://webris.org/future-of-marketing/

The fact that our community went crazy about “Mobilegeddon is kind of a joke.

Have you looked around lately? People of all ages live in their phones.

In all honesty, the “mobile friendly” update is nothing compared to what’s coming next.

Emerging tech (VR, AI, 3d printing) is going to impact human behavior in a way we’ve never seen before.

I’m going to analyze 7 industry shifts and the marketing adjustments you should be thinking about now, before it’s too late.

 

Fast Websites Are Critical

 

What’s the longest you’ll wait for a page to load?

We’re seeing platforms react to this with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Facebook Instant Articles (IA). These markups allow your content to load instantly within Facebook, Twitter or Google.

Google AMP:

Google AMP Update What it Looks Like

Facebook IA:

FB Instant Articles Example

 

This poses a challenge to marketers because traffic does not pass through to the site, it stays within a frame of the network. While the website will get credit for a visit in analytics, the engagement metrics will plummet (bounce rate, TOS, PPV).

This makes it difficult to gauge the impact of our content and justify spending the time / money to create it.

Takeaways from this section

The truth is, these markups are a huge improvement for users and soon they will cannibalize all clicks.   Soon, people won’t want to visit websites at all because it will be a waste of their time. Websites not participating in these changes are going to lose massive visibility online.

 

  1. Embrace these changes. Make sure your website is marked up properly to qualify instant articles and all things similar in the future.
  2. Shift your KPIs from “traffic” to “consumption”. The truth is, it doesn’t matter where people consume your content, it matters if they do.

 

Don’t get caught pissing and moaning with other marketers about the “unfair” changes. Platforms are responding with changes because this is what users want.   Embracing this mindset will allow you to be agile – reaching customers in the right place, at the right time, with the right messaging.

 

Lazy Online Consumers

 

As previously established, people don’t want to visit websites – they want information with as little effort as possible. Google has already begun cashing in on this trend with knowledge graphs, instant answers and Google Flights.

 

Google Flights

 

If you’ve traveled anywhere in the last 6 months, you’ve probably used it.

That’s not by accident – a Google study found 61% of people use search engines to plan travel. Instead of funneling that traffic to Orbitz and Kayak, Google got smart and created their own platform.

This keeps the traffic in Google and plays to lazy users who prefer to search flights without clicking to a new site.

Flights is only the beginning – they’re also rolling out a mobile interface to drive people into the travel funnel (called Destinations).

 

Google Travel Planning

 

From a consumer point of view, this is pretty awesome. There’s no longer a need to search through slow websites – you can pla….  Click Here for Complete Article

 

 

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