It’s been a whirlwind year full of marketing dramas and crises, excitement, gloom and doom. Here’s the top 5 marketing lessons to learn from 2011, possibly the most exciting twelve months marketers have enjoyed for decades.
2011 marketing lessons
- Google algorithm updates wreaked havoc with search positions and as a result fresh, good quality on-site content became more important than ever. What to do in 2012? Keep your site fresh and pack it with interesting, relevant, useful information
- Social Media Marketing grew to epic proportionswith Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn leading the pack. Is Google Plus a social network too many? Only time will tell. The only certainty is things will continue to change… fast! So stay alert.
- Conversion analysis came into its own, with more online businesses using their web stats to determine how to turn more visitors into buying customers. Remember that knowledge is power and keep a close eye on your stats for 2012
- Keyword stuffing finally died a nasty but well-deserved death. Once much more clunky, today’s search engine algorithms are sensitive enough to ‘see’ what a web page is about without site owners having to resort to gobbledegook. So you’re free to write well!
- Mobile web took off like a rocket. Owners of complicated, fiddly, fancy websites found they didn’t display correctly on a small screen. But sites with flat, simple structures and clean code performed perfectly well on mobiles, smartphones and tablets. Good news when search engines and most humans prefer simplicity and clarity too
On a personal level this year, my sixth as a freelance writer, has been a gem. Thank you so much to my lovely clients, who have trusted me to make their businesses work better using the power of the written word. It’s been great. Here’s to 2012!
