11 Website Marketing Trends and Facts You Should Know in 2015

Posted: 26 Jan 2015 08:43 AM PST

The only constant is change.

And if you have a website, you can’t ignore the marketing and usability trends because they drastically impact how or IF people interact with you and your website.

I pulled some noteworthy stats from a curated article published by Business 2 Community last month, and I want to share my thoughts.

1) 46% of People Say Website Design Influences Website Credibility

Content may be king, but if your site looks like it was designed in 1997, it can be horribly distracting.

And don’t forget about the importance of having a mobile friendly/responsive theme. With more people using mobile devices and site owners switching to responsive themes, people have less patience with sites that make them pinch and zoom.

Also, if you use a responsive theme and you notice your larger images are cut off in the mobile view, remove the width and height attributes from the code. Just know that those values can help improve page loads, but with most people on higher internet speeds these days, the impact is minimal.

2) Posts with videos attract three times as many inbound links as text posts.

Believe it or not, this is something I’ve never really measured.

I rarely check inbound links earned on individual pages, but I’m more interested in traffic and engagement on posts with videos compared to posts with just text.

I quickly went through some content with embedded video and compared them with those without and saw no concrete correlation with regards to engagement and shares.

I’d love to know if you’ve tested this on your site.

3) 75% of Smartphone Users Watch Videos On Their Phones

If you publish videos, this is why it’s so important to use the zoom feature on screencasts when showing small text.

The other thing to consider is clickable annotations on YouTube don’t work on smartphone and tablet devices, so if you use them, provide an alternative. Put a small notation underneath the annotation that says something like “See description for link.”

This is something I often forget. I don’t watch that many videos on my smartphone, so I have to remember that I am in the minority and make sure I accommodate both groups.

4) Pinterest is Becoming an Ecommerce Force to Be Reckoned With!

You can sleep on Pinterest if you want, but site owners are discovering that it’s more than just a site for women who like to gaze at wedding ideas and 6-inch stilettos.

The platform grabbed 41% of social ecommerce traffic in 2014 compared to Facebook, which was at 37%. In other words, retail companies that track social traffic found that Pinterest is now bringing them more traffic than Facebook.

Pinterest also generates over 400% more revenue per click than Twitter and and 27% more than Facebook.

What’s more interesting is that even though men make up just 20% of the user base, they tend to use Pinterest as a shopping tool, while women use it more for ideas. I learned that little tidbit from Jay Baer’s article on ConvinceAndConvert. Interesting!

And if you think Pinterest only works for visual sites, think again. Amanda Hoffman proved this isn’t always the case. She’s had tremendous success with a bookkeeping site. Yes, bookkeeping!

Many of you already know I’m a huge fan. Check out my podcast on Pinterest.

5) Companies That Blog at Least 15 Times Per Month Get 5 Times More Traffic

Excuse me while I cringe.

This is one of those stats that needs a “BUT.” Obviously this is true if what you’re putting out content that meets the needs of your reader, but if no one is reading your content when you post 4 times per month, adding 11 more posts to your monthly publishing schedule won’t necessarily do much.

Quantity means nothing without quality. So I’m OK with that stat as long as there are some caveats.

6) When it Comes to Conversions, Email Marketing Ranks 1st, SEO is Second and Banners Are Last

For some of you, I bet you’d swap email and SEO either because you don’t use/have a list, or you don’t get many conversions from it.

When I first started my site I relied completely on SEO and ignored email, but that all changed. More sign-ups for my courses came from my email list than site links.

People on your list are usually your biggest fans. Think about it. They’re giving up something that many people guard so closely thanks to spam and receiving too many emails. So it’s no surprise site owners report email converts best.

7) Almost Half (48%) of All Emails Are Opened on a Mobile Device

What’s even more interesting is the article also revealed that only 39% of site owners actually optimize their emails for mobile devices. So there is a gap.

Most email marketing services like AWeber and MailChimp have test features. Don’t forget to test your mobile layout.

8) E-mail open rates are noticeably lower on weekends

Email Open Rates by Day — Data Source: SuperOffice.com

Open rates have been pretty consistent since I’ve been online, but this is definitely worth mentioning — especially if you’re new to Internet marketing.

I never send emails out on the weekends. People are busy and they get behind on checking email. And the older the email gets, the less likely they are to see it.

Studies have shown Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesday are the best days to mail your list, but as you can see above, the numbers are very close.

Some don’t like to send anything on Mondays because many people take long weekends or are catching up on email sent Saturday and Sunday.

9) 33% of clicks from search results go to the top site on Google

(In case you’re curious, rank #2 and #3 get 17% and 11% of the traffic consecutively.)

This is another stat that hasn’t changed much over the years, but I wanted to include it because I get lots of questions on a related issue.

If you’ve been online long enough, you may remember a time when you could estimate how much traffic you would receive from a keyword if you rank for position #1, 2, 5, etc.

For example, let’s say you rank #1 for how many in a bakers dozen and you know the keyword gets searched for 10,000 times per month. Based on the above stat, you would be able to estimate about 3300 monthly visits from that phrase (10,000 x .33).

Well that’s changed and it’s likely you are getting less traffic than you would have years ago.

There are a couple of reasons…

1) Search is still somewhat personalized based on people you’re connected with via Google Plus, sites you’ve visited, etc. So you may be #1 on your computer, but #3 on someone else’s.

2) Google continues to change how results are displayed and the company also uses its own knowledge graph (a database of information they collect.)

Try typing How many in a baker’s dozen and notice how Google displays the answer so you don’t even have to click on any result. This really impacts websites that rank high for certain keywords.

10) eBay, MTV, Amazon and Starbucks Are The Engagement Leaders on Twitter

Sure, most of us don’t have a massive following like a major brand, but we can all shoot for better engagement with the followers we have right?

So what can we learn from these companies?

If you go to any of their Twitter feeds, you’ll immediately notice all four companies often post very high-quality, engaging pictures with their tweets and they’re not all about their brands. Some images are just fun and/or eye-catching.

Last week for Martin Luther King’s Holiday Starbucks posted the tweet below, and it was one of their most shared tweets in a long time…

pic.twitter.com/Mzu1OlraPI

— Starbucks Coffee (@Starbucks) January 19, 2015

It’s simple, yet clever and socially relevant.

So don’t forget to switch things up from time to time to re-engage those who may have lost interest, and post more images!

I post images all the time on Facebook and Google Plus, but for whatever reason do not post as many on Twitter. I need to get better about that.

11) 71% of users access social media from a mobile device

Going back to images again, this is exactly why they are so much more effective for getting exposure. When people are browsing on smaller screens, images stand out twice as much as a text update.

And with regards to visibility, don’t forget red images get shared twice as much as blue ones. So keep ‘em bright and bold!

You can see the full article from Business 2 Community here.

Create Quality websites

27/01/2015