The world of marketing and advertising has always been fast-paced, but it seems things move even faster these days, especially when it comes to technology innovations, tools and trends.
Think about it for a minute. The Facebook Like button is only 2 years old. Google started beta testing internet advertising on partner sites and YouTube just 3 years ago. Six years ago Twitter was averaging 20,000 tweets per day; today there are 340 million tweets per day!
Online Evolution
Just last spring, Facebook rolled out the Timeline, forcing brands everywhere to scrap their custom Facebook landing page strategies and start over. And over the summer, Google had SEO experts scrambling to make sure their clients wouldn’t be negatively affected by the new optimization rules of the Panda update.
LinkedIn recently announced they will be making changes. They are planning newly designed company pages in an effort to be more useful to brands as a marketing tool.
Facebook continues to make changes too, with sponsored posts and the new Facebook Exchange ad platform, which shows your ad on Facebook to people who’ve recently visited your website.
Locally in Indianapolis, Google is now offering 360 degree virtual tours for businesses to show off their store, restaurant or office. (Check out Fat Atom’s here.)
Here at Fat Atom, our web developers build websites they wouldn’t have been able to build last year thanks to ever evolving web technologies. Our teams buzz with excitement over new advertising and messaging opportunities available to our clients.
The Rise of Mobile
The iPhone launched a short 4 years ago, and almost immediately changed our expectations of not only what a mobile phone should look like, but what it should be able to do. Whether you have an Apple or non-Apple smartphone, you probably use apps to enhance your phone’s capabilities.
Visitors to brick and mortar stores can (and do) scan bar codes and compare prices on their phones before buying. Twenty-seven percent of all emails were opened on mobile devices during the second half of 2011, and that trend is continuing to increase (Source: Knotice Mobile Email Opens Report). And accessing the internet by mobile device is projected to overtake desktop access by 2014 (Source: Microsoft Tag).
Adapt or Die
It’s more important than ever to have a marketing strategy that uses multiple channels to reach out to prospects. Businesses MUST be willing to try new things, take risks and make marketing decisions quickly. What works for one type of business may fall flat for another. What worked six months ago may need to be re-evaluated today. Mistakes should be seen as opportunities to learn.
Whether you view these constant changes as frustrating or exciting, there’s no denying their effect on your marketing. And there’s no denying that tools and trends will continue to change over the next weeks, months and years. Are you willing to change too?
