Latest trends in digital marketing 2022
At October’s CIM Marketing Club webinar, guest speaker Daniel Rowles, CEO of TargetInternet.com who have worked with huge companies such as Apple, Google and Tesco, and is a creator of ‘The digital marketing podcast’ the world’s number 1 digital marketing podcast dived into the many digital marketing trends, explaining the scary but interesting ways they work and in turn in what way they contribute to digital marketing.
HubSpot Inbound Conference
Daniel attended the HubSpot Inbound conference in Boston where it was explained how digital marketing is becoming increasingly difficult due to increased internet privacy and content burnout. Internet live stats were presented which showed there were over 4 million blog posts written so far on that day at the time of the presentation being shown, this being put down to more people producing content, it being produced faster and AI being a huge contribution to this. Daniel shared a screenshot of his Facebook news feed to demonstrate how the content he sees on Facebook is nothing to do with his friends and family and is instead Ads and clickbait and this is due to Algorithms. It was shown how key staying up to date on algorithms is to successful content.
Importance of Community
Rowles then explained the benefits of creating a community and demonstrated how he does this for his podcast with email. His email newsletters are AD free and are not to promote sales, they are purely for community purposes and allow communication between viewers and himself for questions and podcast topics.
Artificial Intelligence
AI tools were then the next topic, Rowles gave insight to how easy it is to generate content using AI platforms such as Descript.com which automatically transcribes audio and video with automated voices, Jasper.AI which generates a block of text on any topic you ask by combining information found on Google, and Open AI which is an image and art generator. Podcast.AI and generated faces were given as an example to highlight how advanced AI can be. Podcast.AI being a podcast where AI simulates celebrities’ voices to make it seem as though they are speaking on the podcast and Generated faces being a website that can produce an endless number of random faces based off characteristics given by the user. Although AI is a great advancement in the digital marketing world, it will increasingly result in a high amount of content being published at a fast rate, with a lot of that content being of low quality and low effort.
Privacy
Rowles then moved on to talk about privacy, content, and SEO challenges. Phones now give options for whether users allow apps to track their activity, meaning companies are unable to micro track users and gather useful data. The increase in the complexity of SEO was also spoken about and it was highlighted how important it is to make valuable content that your audience will want to engage with.
The webinar then moved onto Rowles providing some great resources to use - see Digital Marketing Toolkit - as well as a Q&A session which covered more about GA3 and GA4, investing in community, AI content and creativity within marketing. Rowles also shared how he originally studied computer science and computer engineering and then fell into marketing when it became digital. He recommended studying marketing strategy and theory as well as gaining tactical knowledge and analytics ad measurements.
By Charlotte Buckman, University of East Anglia