5 Digital Advertising Trends

1. Omni-channel Marketing

Nowadays, the way customers buy has been affected by the ever-growing number of tools clients have at their fingertips to make purchase choices. For instance, before the advent of the internet, if you wanted to purchase an item, you had to go the physical store to get it. Even if you went a few different stores, for the most part, it was a one, two, or three-stop-shop.
Now we have so many new inventions such as the internet, TV, magazines, smartphones, and brick-and-mortar businesses. What was a one-stop-shop has now morphed into a journey in which clients interact with your business in many different ways?
That shift has created a new style of marketing which is known as “omnichannel,” and its focus is on delivering a seamless experience across all channels. If you happen to be a brick-and-mortar business with a website, you want the experience of moving from that website to your physical shop to be as easy as possible (seeing a product on TV, research desktop, ordering it on your mobile, and having it ready and waiting for you in the store, for instance).
62% of companies already have, or have made plans to have, an omnichannel marketing strategy, according to AdWeek. Also, about 70% of businesses say that omnichannel strategies are significant, very significant, or critical to their success:

Take Disney for example, which allows users to book trips right from their website, then plan them step-by-step with the “My Disney Experience” tool. You can locate where to eat, choose where you’ll pick up fast passes, and also get info about attractions (like where they are located, and approximate wait time) direction from your mobile phone.
The swift change from a desktop, mobile, to in-park experience is a model that many brands today try to copy.

2. Marketing Automation

In a period when digital marketers need to be everywhere and keep an eye on everything, marketing automation technology has become a must-use. These tools do not only save employees time, but they also give managers more insight into what pushes their business.
Today almost half of all companies make use marketing automation technology, and 91% of the most successful users say that it’s “very important” to the total success of their marketing across channels. They use automation like this:

When it comes to email, tools such as Autopilot allow marketers to keep a record of their prospects’ behavior and send automated messages which are based on that behavior.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software from companies like Salesforce aids businesses in sorting out their customers and prospects into groups for more personalized communication.
In social media, Facebook’s advertising tools help you target users based on which pages of your website they’ve visited. To track everything, Google’s free analytics platform is used by the best marketers in the business.
63% of the successful adopters say they intend to increase their marketing automation budget going forward. And to become successful? Experience is a major key, as 79% of top-performing companies have been using automation for more than two years

3. Google AMP and ALP

In the UK, internet users can browse the web 5x faster than we do in the US. In Venezuela, twice as fast. In a ranking of internet speeds around the world, America doesn’t even crack the top ten, which, statistics show, is bad news for businesses.
A lot of retail mobile websites take about 6.9 seconds to load, double the length of time that almost half of all internet users will wait before they give up a web page. Some professionals approximate that ultimately translates to $500 billion in lost revenue for the e-commerce industry.
So, to improve user experience by speeding up the mobile web, Google rolled out its AMP (accelerated mobile pages) project last year, and even more recently, its AMP for ads and landing pages.
The AMP build allows designers to create “lightweight” pages that load at super-fast speeds. It includes:
• AMP HTML: A version of HTML without all the bells and whistles, like custom tags, for example.
• AMP JavaScript: This lighter version of Java is, like AMP HTML, a restricted version of-of its parent programming language that doesn’t allow third-party JavaScript.
• AMP CDN: This optional “content delivery network” allows you store a cached version of your web page on Google’s servers, which makes for even faster delivery to the internet users requesting it.
When it is built correctly, these pages will load in less than a second, and they’re easier to locate, featured predominantly at the top of SERPs.
The only problem with them, at the time, was that fast experience didn’t necessarily mean ads on AMP pages or their corresponding landing pages. But that changed when Google recently declared a new upgrade. As of some months ago, the AMP framework is no longer focused solely on optimizing static content. Now, you can make ads and landing pages that load just as fast.

Google expects these new AMP ads and landing pages to satisfy everyone for three reasons:
• Web users will be more likely to click on a result if they know they’re guaranteed a positive experience.
• That improved user experience will result in higher conversion rates for marketers and advertisers.
• Publishers boost their revenue while allowing users a way to return to their content.
So should you AMPlify your pages and ads? Find out here
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4. More landing pages

There are no doubt landing pages have become a more popular marketing tool in the last few years, and recent data from Search Engine Journal shows that’s not changing anytime soon. The contents which marketers find the most success with are ebooks and whitepapers, according to their State of Digital Marketing report. You might wonder what that has to do with landing pages?
More often than not, landing pages are where users get those ebooks and whitepapers from businesses who offer them in exchange for something in return, like name and email address.
These standalone web pages, which use highly persuasive elements like social proof and benefit-oriented copy to convince visitors to convert, can be a powerful addition to every stage of your funnel.
At the peak, squeeze pages might sway your prospects to part with their email address so you can guide them all the way to the bottom, where sales pages get them to make purchases.
In between, lead capture pages help you learn more about those prospects — a lot more. Research shows that companies with over 40 landing pages generate 12x more leads.
If your biggest goal, like all digital marketers in 2016, is to “increase lead generation,” then landing pages are the weapons you need to add to your arsenal.

5. Remarketing Ads

You might think that nobody favors remarketing ads because they are creepy, annoying, and ineffective.
Well, Search Engine Journal, thanks to the Data from their recent State of Digital Marketing says you’re wrong. The report shows that about 91% of search professionals use remarketing, and attest to the fact that it’s an effective tactic:

And with regards to it being creepy and annoying, Data from WordStream proves that’s also false.
We simply cannot say that remarketing ads are irritating and annoying if their conversion rates go up the more they’re displayed.

We also cannot say we’re creeping people out if findings prove that these ads fatigue at about half the rate of the usual and normal display ads.

We can not say that! At all! What we can say, however, is that remarketing methods have aided some big brands in producing big ROI.
When Watchfinder tested out remarketing ads, they boosted ROI by 1,300%, and PPC Hero reduced their cost per action by nearly 80% when they began to use it. So what is it about this method that makes it so compelling?
The answer is simple- using remarketing, you can target prospects with ads which have seen a particular product or individual web pages — giving you a highly significant and personalized user experience. Since as many as 96% of people who visit your website aren’t ready to buy, the method has become an excellent way to bring those prospects back into your conversion funnel.

What will digital advertising trends you capitalize on?
Are any of these trends familiar to you? Have you ever tried them out?
Let us know in the comments section, and you can start capitalizing on trend number 3 by building a professional landing page in minutes with the help of Instapage’s designer-friendly platform.