Keeping on top of marketing trends is essential if you want to stay ahead of the competition. Continually identifying new trends can maintain your digital marketing strategy in order to be relevant and effective.

Subscribing to information resources which are relevant to a range of digital marketing disciplines will ensure that a variety of latest news and ideas are continually delivered to you.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a service that emails you when it finds newly posted results on a topic that you have flagged. For example, you can get alerts about specific marketing trends you want to follow. This can save a huge amount of time as it removes the need for manual research to be done, with the whole process being automated instead.

Subscribing to Google Alerts can help you to stay on top of your digital marketing because the results will be tailored to your exact keywords. It means you will be able to receive updates not only concerning your competitors, but also news from different sectors which enables you to keep up to date with niche terms and trends.

Blogs

Blogs are a good way of producing content that can rank well in search engines because of the opportunity to generate content that can be written on niche subjects, and specifically with SEO in mind.

Look at factors like the sector that you are working in when finding blogs to follow. This will allow you to identify blogs that might provide more relevant information when it comes to niche marketing trends. For example, in the legal services sector, you could look at people who blog about legal marketing.

If you subscribe to the blogs that are most relevant to your business it is very easy to identify new marketing trends that can be applied to your own digital marketing strategy.

Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are a great way to keep an eye on the latest marketing trends because they can save you having to look through lots of content. The best pieces of content will have been condensed into a concise email newsletter. Therefore, if you find good sites to subscribe to, it can save you a lot of time searching for relevant articles to read.

Some businesses also just have a newsletter that they send out regularly to their subscribers. Subscribe buttons will often be found on the footer of their websites or highlighted within news areas.

Social Media

Digesting content via social platforms is a great way to stay up to date with digital marketing trends. Being active on platforms such as Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook and making sure that you follow people in the industry will help you keep up to date with the content key figures are talking about.

It is important to make sure that the connections you make are relevant to your sector so as not to clutter up your news feeds with content that is not relevant.

You may also be able to get some marketing trends from businesses or peoples social media, looking at things like hashtags on twitter for marketing trends and see if there is one relevant to your business would be good. If you find a business or person that you relate to you can follow them and this will apply for any social media.

Engage with People

Replying to people’s posts, answering their questions or simply talking to people is a great way to keep up with trends. You can use these conversations to view an industry from your audience’s point of view and use this information to improve your marketing efforts. Clients are likely to be active on your social channels posts and blog posts on your site. This means that you need to be checking these regularly and replying to a couple of people each time you log in to make sure that it is beneficial.

The customers are one of the best insights into digital marketing because they are the ones reading your content and using your services regularly. Their insights are very important when dealing with the trends of a business.

SEO

Using tools like Moz is very helpful because you can scan for keywords and identify what the trends are that people are searching for. It’s a software that sells inbound marketing and marketing analytics subscriptions. By using tools like this, it can help with your rankings in Google as you can research which keywords are trending in your sector and use them to your advantage.

Some of the topics that you pick may not be having a lot of traffic to them at the moment but that could pick up if you have gone with the trends, this way your business could be able to fill a market gap so it’s really good.

Network Inside and Outside Your Industry

Networking is a great way to see how people in your industry deal with some of their issues and how you can use their knowledge to your advantage. It is dedicated to getting you in front of both colleagues and experts in your industry.

There are networking websites that display events near you and you can adapt the topics of the networking to what you want to be going to listen about. For example, you can go on Eventbrite or Meetup.

A fresh perspective on the challenges you face can be very helpful and eye-opening. It also helps you gather feedback and advice from others in the industry that could better your own business.

This is good because it means that you can use their advice to improve their level and you can use your knowledge to help businesses lower than yours succeed.

Keep an Eye on Competitors

Observing what your competitors are doing is key when keeping on top of new trends, news and opportunities. You can use them for a few different ways finding blog post ideas that are trending for customers. Or have you seen that they have developed a video marketing strategy, which is something your firm is yet to get on board with?

Looking at things like your competitors social media, blog posts, website designs and others can help to gain more information on the trends that they use for their marketing and can give you more ideas for what you could be doin.