What’s new in digital marketing? Find out how to focus your content planning, why climate scientists need lessons in Plain English, why Google still rules and more.
What’s on the digital marketing horizon?
Here’s some more news and views from the digital marketing world.
How to decide which content to focus on next?
You’ve laid aside time to create fresh content for your website, but how do you know which subjects to concentrate on and when?
- It’s easy to lose track of what you’ve already said and what you’ve not yet talked about, especially when you’re blogging frequently. If you run a WordPress site, you can search blog posts and pages to identify what you’ve already said about a subject.
- Keep a spreadsheet of subjects you’ve covered and the dates you covered them, split into categories like evergreen content, news, ‘how to’, video, infographics, problem solving and so on. This’ll help you spot and fill gaps in your coverage
- Design and plan content around how well – or not – you’ve covered every aspect of the sales funnel, each point at which prospects and customers engage with your business, from the first contact to post-sales
Recycling is good – Remind people about existing content
It’s great adding new content to your website. But you can also re-promote and re-share existing content, especially when it’s evergreen content or something that’s suddenly become relevant again, say because it’s seasonal. You can also update existing content with a fresh slant, adding commentary based on the current Zeitgeist, new information, research, even new opinions.
A Plain English marketing lesson for scientists
A lot of people wondered whether the recent floods had anything to do with climate change. It’s a sensible question since, like ‘tactics’ and ‘strategy’, ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ are entirely different things. Was Storm Desmond caused by climate change? The scientific answer was this: it’s impossible to say whether a given flood event is or isn’t caused by climate change.
It might be true. But it feels like they’re ducking and diving, the kind of weasel words we get from politicians. People want straight answers. A quick lesson in Plain English and marketing-inspired common sense delivers a much better answer: There’s no telling with any particular storm. But one thing is clear, climate change will bring more storms like this.
Duck Duck Go has a bright search engine future
I tested the private search engine Duck Duck Go a while back and still use it. Now the word on the street is DDG is getting more popular by the minute. Some SEO experts say it’s“truly as good as Google”, and they’d switch over if they didn’t have to take Google-driven SEO into account.
Google’s 2015 market share was a whopping 91% globally and they’re looking as unassailable as ever. But things might change, especially if someone like Amazon makes a successful bid for Duck Duck Go. Google is in disgrace over its UK tax shenanigans and under fire for data privacy. Their ‘do no evil’ message is starting to look threadbare. Keep an eye on DDG – it might just become the next big thing, the place businesses – and people – most want to be.
Mobile growth tipped to slow in 2016
Along with a slowing in the growth of mobile adoption through 2016, industry pundits are predicting a plateau for laptops and desktops. Creative work, programming, gaming, copywriting, authorship, there’s plenty you can’t do properly with a tiny screen and weeny keyboard. Big monitors, mice and full keyboards are far from dead.
If you’ve found plenty of mobile-unfriendly sites via your smartphone, you’re not alone. They’re everywhere. Much as I’d like to engage with them, it’s impossible without a microscope. How’s your site looking on mobile? If you haven’t sorted it yet, you’re at a big disadvantage. Whether or not mobile slows this year, mobile-optimised websites remain a must.
