Performance marketing is a significant force in online marketing that will continue to grow. In January of this year, close to 80% of business-to-business marketers planned to increase their digital marketing budget for market expansion and performance enhancements. With the effectiveness of digital marketing channels such as content marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click and call tracking, marketers are likely to spend more and more of their budgets on digital marketing platforms. The internet has completely changed the way people do business these days. The way businesses market to consumers has not just changed, it has fully transformed. Businesses have generally moved from outdated and overly expensive traditional marketing towards flexible, less expensive and effective inbound marketing strategies that guarantee business success.

4 Online Performance Marketing Trends

Content is King Consumers are always looking for engaging and relevant content that allows them to interact with your brand, your product and your personal story. Since the beginning of 2014, content has been used as a tool to inform users about brands and products, not to pitch products with an intention of making huge sales. Attractive, engaging and relevant content motivates consumers to buy and establish a long-term relationship with a brand. Today, content marketing, a performance marketing approach, is the fastest growing job title in the market. Generally, more companies are recognizing the value of original content creation and are therefore hiring in-house and freelance content creators to create fresh content for their businesses on a regular basis. General content writing is no longer valuable. Companies have put their focus on only original, relevant and up to date content that directly targets their specific audience. Pictures are Still Priceless If a picture is worth a thousand words, image-centric content is definitely priceless. In fact, use of images together with written articles forms one of the hottest and the most effective marketing trends in 2014. Usually, image content is relevant, engaging and tailored to the way the brain can naturally process information. Images are all about visual information, and therefore a critical element to use in marketing because it can help a business stand out against the competition. People will want to read written content , but they will also want to view it. Pictures will act as visual help that you can blend with written content to tell your story in a better way. Your story will help brand your company and effective branding will help you build complete brand loyalty. SEO Isn’t Dead Yet Search Engine Optimization remains an ongoing process that needs to be monitored, optimized and maintained on a daily basis. The core of any SEO strategy is to ensure you stay up to date with the algorithm updates and making sure that the changes reflect on the architecture of your website. SEO is not dead. It is still in use in 2014, so marketers need to make sure they maintain a daily strategy for keeping up with SEO updates. PPC and CM Go Hand in Hand The market share of Pay per Click is expected to increase 76% of paid search by next year. There has been a tremendous spending in PPC markets and an increase in budget for content marketing in 2014, which means that the two platforms have become completely relevant to one another. Integrating ads with content is a great online performance marketing approach to expand the reach of your content and grow your leads.