Navigating the Evolving Digital Marketing Trends

The digital marketing landscape. There are 5.41 billion active social media users worldwide, representing 65.7% of the global population as of early 2025. This figure indicates consistent growth with 241 million new users joining in the past year.

And you can see it's spread out across a variety of platforms. Some of them are region-specific, and others are global. And collectively, over 5.41 billion people are active on social media each day.

And digital marketing advertisements, which are targeted towards these 5.41 billion people continues to grow steadily, expecting to reach 830 billion by 2026. If we were to have extended this charge to the left and included the years of 2019 and 2020, we would have seen a dramatic increase from 2019 to 2020 and 2021, obviously as a result of the pandemic and the fact that more people were at home with a lot more time on their hands and they use that time to engage on social media as well as to make purchases on the e-commerce sites. So that definitely resulted in more brands looking for ways to reach these people by increasing their advertising on social media.

Another way of looking at traditional versus the new digital approach is just seeing how things have changed over time. Back in the day, TV was the dominant visual medium. Now it's fast becoming streaming video.

Then radio, today, podcasts. Then, snail mail or direct mail campaigns like the ones that I would do for American Express, which would send out millions of solicitations to customers across the country each and every month. Today, email.

Then billboards, print ads, flyers, today, digital ads. Once upon a time, when people were discussing social issues, trends, et cetera, they would gather around the water cooler and their respective offices and have these discussions. Today, these discussions are on social media.

You can go to X, Facebook, various platforms, and see people offer opinions on a variety of subject matters from politics to sports to entertainment to whatever else. Then, brick-and-mortar retail was the primary distribution channel. Today, we also have e-commerce retail.

Now let's get into some of the pros and cons of these individual channels. Social media marketing. It's a great vehicle for brand exposure and content distribution.

It's on social media that a lot of content marketing takes place. It allows for targeted advertising and facilitates customer engagement. When you do posts, you can go back and forth with your customers.

You can ask questions, which results in additional customer insight, as well as the understanding of which of the posts people seem to be engaging with the most. Which ones are they liking the most? Which videos are they viewing the most? That can give you some understanding of the topics that are most relevant to them. And it's cost-effective.

Meta campaigns are among the least expensive ways of developing greater brand exposure. You can purchase millions of impressions or views of your advertisements at a fairly cost-effective budget. However, there are some drawbacks.

As we discussed with content marketing and organic marketing, it's difficult to generate organic growth. You need to have a very clear understanding of the algorithm on a platform. It requires a commitment to consistent content creation and reviewing the results of the content that you are distributing, in terms of how the audiences are engaging with it, and optimizing your content strategy accordingly.

It's frequently impacted by changes in the algorithms. You have to stay on top of that. And there's platform saturation.

You're not the only brand that's attempting to do this. You're not the only brand in your category that is looking for ways to provide relevant information to its audience. It requires consistent effort, resources, and time.

And there's always the potential for negative customer feedback. You might run an ad or a post and people may say something negative about your campaign and they're doing it about your brand and they're doing it in a public forum, which is why it's very important if you as a brand are going to engage on social media that you address these questions or negative comments that people may have because people are watching. Other audience members, including potential customers, are seeing how you might be dealing with a customer complaint.

So it's important that these things are addressed, but it's one of the risks of marketing on social media platforms, that they are so public in nature that, in some cases, this could be negative exposure for your brand. Search engine marketing, right, that's running a Google Ads campaign. The most powerful factor of search engine marketing is that you're reaching prospects with high intent, right? Customers or potential customers who might be in the consideration phase of the customer journey.

If we say the first step of the customer journey is awareness, a customer needs to be aware, a potential customer needs to be aware of your brand before they can potentially purchase your brand, right? The next step might be consideration, where people are looking at or comparing your brand to other options. And how do we know that they're doing this? Because they are typing Google searches where they might ask questions, the SUV with the best value in this particular category, et cetera. And that means that the individual asking those queries, Thai food near me, shows intent.

Yeah, you're not gonna type Thai food near me unless I'm looking for a Thai restaurant and one that's close to me, right? Search engine marketing also allows for sophisticated audience targeting in addition to the general demographics. We can target based upon interests because the Google ads will look to see what other websites this person may have visited in a particular period of time to show that they might be interested in making a purchase in this particular category or shows what pursuits they're interested in. They are yoga enthusiasts, they are foodies, right? That type of information can become available, as well as their behavior.

You can target people who have already visited your website, people who have already made a purchase on your website. Search engine marketing enables that level of sophistication with the targeting. Search engine marketing ad campaigns provide immediate visibility in the search engine result pages, right? You might normally rank 100 for a certain keyword, and you're not gonna show up until a person goes two, three, or four pages deep into their search, and who really does that? Most people will make a choice on the first page or maybe the second page.

Well, you can get immediate visibility. You can be on the first page, you can be on the top of the first page with a search engine marketing campaign, and that visibility can lead to immediate results. You'll get more visits overnight, which could potentially lead to more leads or more sales and enrollments.

However, there are some drawbacks. Search engine marketing can be costly in particular industries. They have a high cost per click for important keywords.

If you consider an industry like personal injury law, a lead in personal injury law could result in a settlement that's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for that particular legal firm. So that means that the keywords that people use when they're looking for a personal injury lawyer can become very expensive. It could be $50 or $100, even for a particular keyword.

Limited long-term benefit. Once the campaign is over, you're gonna go right back to whatever ranking you previously had. It's only SEO that's going to drive you up the rankings in a much more permanent way.

And search engine marketing campaigns can be complex to manage effectively unless you are experienced in Google Ads or a similar search engine ad manager. It can be a complex campaign considering all the keywords that will have to be looked at on a regular basis, ensuring that you always have the optimal keywords and you're bidding within the optimal range for those keywords. Another potential risk of search engine marketing is click fraud.

That's when competitors will use bots to run searches and then click on your ads, driving up the cost of those campaigns, but you're paying each time someone clicks on these ads. In this particular case, there is no intent from the clicker. It's just bots that are just doing this to drive up your campaign.

The good news is campaign costs. The good news is that search engine ad platforms like Google Ads do have algorithms that try to detect this and prevent this from happening, but it is something that still remains a risk.