Factors That Changed Internet Marketing in 2012

We have seen noteworthy changes and incitements in internet marketing in this year so far. Recently, twitter introduces 'negative keyword targeting' to make ads more relevant. Amazon introduced ‘Amazon Pages’ for businesses to promote their brands and ‘Amazon Posts’ for social media marketing. The SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) became the largest protest in the internet’s history.

Social networking websites and search engines also made alterations that changed the whole scenario of digital marketing. Here are four of them which played a crucial role in online marketing industry:

Google+ Gained The Grip

Google Places merged with Google+ and became Google+ Local, which changed the approach to local SEO. Now users see personalized results on Google based on social data from Google+. Google plus Local has aimed to make reviews, recommendations and opinions, which helps in showing targeted results to user.

Panda Update

Google launched a number of Panda updates throughout the year. Most importantly, these updates marked down those websites which held low quality content, ad-heavy pages. This change encouraged websites to deliver high quality content.

Google Launched Knowledge Graph

Google launched ‘Knowledge Graph’ to offer additional search results to help users find the right thing faster and receive a bigger summary that is relevant to the search topic. The idea behind Knowledge Graph is to help people do less time searching and more time discovering.

Author Rich Snippets

This factor has given the opportunity to online marketers to build their author rank by linking their Google+ profile page to the content they write by using “rel=author”. By utilizing rich snippets users can show up their photo in the search results along with their content, which builds author authority.

Top Marketing Trends for 2013

Today’s consumers expect personalization and refined online user experiences. They’re looking for content that informs, entertains, and adds value to their everyday lives. To deal with digital marketing challenges, businesses need a new approach towards consumer and their engagement. You can do this by producing large number of quality content that is exceptional, personalized, and relevant, along with that you need a marketing strategy which can make that content viral. Hence, I am going to brief here some marketing trends which are going to make an upside down change in the industry:-

• Social, Local, Mobile:- The short form for this is SoLoMo, meaning is people access social networking while being local place on mobile. These are really important factors of digital marketing in upcoming year. Business organizations must optimize all these factors with full of energy to maximize their reach.

• Mobile Era:- Over 800 million smart phones and tablets have been sold in 2012 so far. Now more people access the Internet via mobile, in that case an organizations need to play good on mobile devices of all sizes.

• Video and Audio Marketing:- In next year we will see businesses use video and audio as tools for online engagement and content marketing. Interactive video ads, podcasts, audio-blogs, video blogs, and social video productions, they will create a massive impact on market and content will become part of the digital marketing in forthcoming year.

• Content Marketing:- As consumers realize the possibilities of SoLoMo, they’ll demand even-more personalized content. Businesses will have to create contextually-relevant content that speaks to the needs of each segment of their target audience.