10 years back: the marketing trends from 2011 to 2020

Owner Telegraaf Media Groep suffered a huge loss in March 2013. Until the end of 2013, Hyves had the opportunity to prove himself as a media platform. Unfortunately, on October 31, 2013, it was announced that the social network could no longer be saved. On December 2, 2013 it was over; the “scribbles” became “likes” and little by little the large group of users shifted to the American platform Facebook. In February 2014, Facebook celebrated its 10th anniversary and now, 6 years later, Facebook has 829 million users. Despite its success, 30-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is increasingly criticized for his company's actions. The renewed online world unfortunately also entails privacy risks.

The increasing importance of the website
About 84% of marketers indicate that there is an increasing focus on online. In recent years, a website has served as a business card to introduce a product or service to the consumer and to persuade them to use it. You can ensure that the (potential) target group comes to your page using various tools and channels. For example, brands are increasingly using SEO, social media, content marketing and link building - to generate as many people as possible cross-medially to the main channel, the website.

Complexity of SEO
You have undoubtedly heard of SEO: optimizing your website to become easier to find for search engines. More and more companies are using SEO. Still, it remains a challenge to remain findable in an ocean of online data.
SEO works with keywords, sentence constructions or links that make it even easier for Google to place a website on top. Metadata is also becoming increasingly important. Metadata describes what data is in a blog article or landing page, very important for findability. Fortunately, there are tools that make SEO easier. Plugin Yoast for example. The plugin tells you what you need to have the perfect SEO.
Google is no longer expected to be the only major search engine. In the US, search engines such as Bing and Baidu are increasingly emerging. This means more complexity for SEO, but also opportunities to use other search engines as a company.

Growth of Instagram & influencer marketing
A picture paints a thousand words. Instagram is a perfect example of this. In 2019, the platform rose the most in terms of use (a growth of 26%), and that is not surprising. Since the emergence of influencer marketing campaigns, the social media platform has been running at full speed. The platform is not just a channel for sharing attractive images. Today, Instagram is widely used by brands, influencers and a combination of the two.

Brands are looking for new ways to reach their target audience. They no longer do this in their own name, but they give that task to influencers. These are people with a lot of followers and a large reach. By means of posts, stories or a short vlog video via IGTV, the product of the brand is featured on the influencer's channel. Instagram is therefore the perfect channel to distribute this content because an influencer can easily share a link that generates valuable traffic to a website.

Shift to personalization
Another booming trend in the marketing world is personalization. Thanks to current techniques, we have increasing access to 'big data'. Geographical information, information about someone's device or information about what kind of music someone likes to listen to. Nowadays, a brand can do a lot with these data. You just need to know what your target audience needs and then you can promote your product or service in such a way that it becomes interesting for the consumer.
The possibilities have become much more specific in recent years. Anonymous visitors can also be targeted based on search terms, URL references, and location. This makes it even easier for a brand to show ads to potential consumers.

Rise of AI
Messenger bots even go a step further. Take airline KLM, for example. The KLM bots book a flight for you, check-in your luggage and ask if you had a good flight. All automatically via the Messenger bot.
There are more and more ways to reach the consumer through artificial intelligence. Google Home and Alexa are the perfect example of a home assistant that not only helps the consumer with small tasks but also has an infinite amount of information from this person. A handy way to respond as a brand.

Rise of TikTok
TikTok was launched on August 2, 2018. This platform for young people makes it possible to share music videos from 3 to 15 seconds. In the last two years, TikTok has grown with 830,000 users from 6 to 18 years old. The enormous data that the app has can be of interest to brands. The platform allows you to share targeted content that suits the target audience but also ensures conversion or brand awareness.

Predecessor Musical.ly appeared in 2014 and already had 90 million users in 2016. An average of 12 million videos were posted per day. In 2017, the platform had more than 200 million users. In late 2017, owner Musical.ly combined with TikTok Influencers in India, making TikTok the only platform for fast, interactive videos.