Social Media and Facebook Advertising

Social Media Advertising

At the beginning of it, social media was used for entertainment, but in time it evolved to a strong marketing tool. It’s primary purpose is to connect people, but there is also another important role and that is to connect marketers with current and potential customers. (Statista, 2022).

Today, the use of social media in marketing purposes got to a significant point. For example, according to Statista (2022), 91.9 percent of U.S. marketers in companies largest than 100 employees were expected to use social media.

In simple words, Social media advertising can be defined as advertisements served to users on social media platforms. User information are being collected by social networks and then used to with the purpose of serving relevant advertisements based on it interactions within a certain platform. Therefore, social advertising can produce high increases in conversions and sales when applied properly. (Haylee Reed, 2022)

For instance, an important aspect to consider when advertising on social media, is for sure to determine the target audience, and then the message intended to this specific audience so a proper connection is assured. In other words, to guarantee the success, a business needs to know what works for each generation so their advertising efforts target the right consumer base. (Rebecca Kowalewicz, 2020)

Considering that currently there are more than 4.2 billion active social media users around the world, the benefits for businesses are numerous. Therefore, they should take full advantage of it by making it a big part of   their digital marketing efforts

When it comes to brand building, social media advertising can have a positive impact. Some of the benefits to mention here are increase brand awareness, humanize the brand (the ability to create real human connections), or establish the brand as a thought leader. (Stacey McLachlan, Christina Newberry, 2021).

Some other advantages of social media advertising which should be considered (Sam Medlicott, n.d.):

Improved brand loyalty - Social media advertising can be a great demonstration of social proofing, and this can improve brand loyalty and turn one-time visitors into a permanent customers.

Higher conversion rates - Social media advertising can help a business generate more conversions

Boost leads for your business - social media advertising is a great way to get a business in front of more people and expand a business’s customer base.

Low cost advertising - social media advertising can be a cost-effective solution for a business.

User-friendly interface - Most social media networks offer a user-friendly advertising platform.

In-depth analytics – advertising through social media gives the privilege of having access to a wealth of analytics and statistics.

Facebook Advertising

1.      The key objectives that can be satisfied with Facebook Advertising

When creating a Facebook ad, it is important you know what you want people to do when they see it, and that is actually your objective. In other words, you need to know exactly what you want to achieve through your ad. But before determining the objectives, first you need to determine your business’s goal. There are three main goals and under each of it there are a series of key objectives as follows (Meta Business Help Centre, n.d.):

-        Awareness includes those objectives through which your ad can generate interest in your product or service. Brand awareness and Reach are the objectives under Awareness goal.

-        Consideration includes those objectives that may get people to search more information about your product or service.  Objectives such as Traffic, Engagement, App Installs, Video views, Lead generations, and Messages can found under Consideration goal.

-        Conversions includes objectives that might motivate people to buy your product or use your service. Here we can count objectives as Conversions, Catalogue Sales or Store Traffic.

These objectives are usually set according to your business’s growth level. At the beginning, your campaigns goals may be directed to building awareness, but later on these may be focused on encourage people to buy your products.

2.     The main Facebook advertising formats available

Facebook Advertising offers six types of ad formats which might be used according to the advertising objectives. You can choose photo ads, video ads, carousels, canvas, collections or slideshows, in order to attract your target audiences’ attention.

Image ads helps you to present your product, service or brand through a single photo. By using this format, you can increase interest in your brand, raise awareness of your products or deliver a simple message. (Meta Business Help Centre, n.d.)

Image Ad Example. Source 
 Meta for Business

By using the Video format, you can show off your product in a unique way, or tell your brand story, you can quickly capture audiences’ attention, or make people take action by delivering a simple message.   (Meta Business Help Centre, n.d.).

Instant Experience  Ads represents the full-screen experience which is being opened after someone taps an ad on a mobile device. This format allows people to watch videos, swipe through carousel photos, view products in a catalogue, tap buttons which redirects them to other web page. (Meta Business Help Centre, n.d.).

Facebook Instant Experience example Source:Meta for business

A Collection ad includes a cover image or video with many products showcased under it. When this ad is being tapped, a full-screen Instant experience is being opened.

Facebook Collection Ad example Source: Meta for business

Carousel ads allows you to show up to ten images in a single ad, each of these having its own link, description or call to action. Some of the things you can do by using this type of ad are telling a story, explaining a process, highlighting the features of  product, or creating a larger canvas. (Meta Business Help Centre, n.d.).

This type of ad helps people to discover and purchase easier products directly from their mobile devices in a visual way. (Meta Business Help Centre, n.d.)

Using a slideshow format, you can tell a story by creating an ad similar to a video (using motion, tex and sound). These types of ads are easier to create, they load faster, and they are affordable. 

 Targeting audiences when creating a Facebook advertisement

Audience targeting helps you bring your ad in front of the people who most likely will find that ad relevant.

There are three audience selection tools: Core Audience, Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences. (Meta, n.d.)

The Core Audience can help you determine your audience taking into account criteria such as:

Location – allows you to advertise in areas where you want to develop your business;

Demographics – this audience is created based on age, gender, education, and other.

Interests – you can make your ads more relevant to some specific audience by adding interests of the people you want to reach.

Behaviour – you can define audiences according to consumers behaviours such as prior purchases.

Connections – an audience can be created by including people who likes your page or are connected to your event, or you may exclude them so you can find new audiences.

Custom audiences instead, are great tool for returning to people who already engaged with your business before.

By using Lookalike Audience tool, you can get to new people whose interests are similar to your current customers.

In other words, you can create Lookalike Audiences, and target your ad to people in these audiences. There is also the exclusion targeting option. This works by preventing a certain audience from seeing your ad. (Meta Business Help Centre, n.d.)

The key elements that make up a great Facebook advertisement.

There is no model that could apply to all ads for success.

The success of an ad comes along with many key element, and it is essential that you know your goals and objectives, but also to know well your audience and adjust your ad’s message accordingly. Knowing this is the key, depending on your goals, you should create different audiences. Furthermore, you can create a custom ad experience for the customers, depending on  the audiences you created.

For example, if you want to attract new customers, but also convince the existing ones to come back to your business, you can run different ads for each objective, with different strategy approaches.

Call to actions are important elements of a successful ad. Depending on the objective of your ad, it can be useful for people to be guided into what to do. (Facebook Help Center, n.d.)

Statistics demonstrates that Facebook post with quality images get more engagement, so this makes it clear that imagery is crucial for the success of on ad. When choosing an image for your ad, again it is important that you also keep in mind your audience’s interests. (Reach First, n.d.)

You should also observe the posts that resonate the most with your audience, and then transform them into successful ads to bring even more results.  

Testing the ads is a great idea to optimize performance. A good practice here would be to test a few ads with small audiences, and then depending on the results, run the best one in your campaign.

When running an ad, measuring the obtain results is desirable as you need to know if you reached your target. By measuring the results, you can also discovered what did not work and try to fix it for the future. (Christina Newberry, Stacey McLachlan, 2020)

 

 Reference List

Statista (2022), Social media marketing usage rate in the United States from 2013 to 2022, [online]. Available a: https://www.statista.com/statistics/203513/usage-trands-of-social-media-platforms-in-marketing/ [Accessed 15 July 2022];

Haylee Reed, (2022), Navigating Social Media Advertising in 2022: How to Choose the Right Platform and Ads for Your Brand, Big Commerce, [online]. Available at: https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/social-media-advertising/#what-is-social-media-advertising [Accessed 15 July 2022];

Rebecca Kowalewicz, (2020), What To Consider For Generation-Based Social Media Marketing, Forbes, [online]. Available at:  https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2020/01/09/what-to-consider-for-generation-based-social-media-marketing/?sh=796c06654242 [Accessed 16 July 2022];

Stacey McLachlan, Christina Newberry, (2021), 22 Benefits of Social Media for Business, Hootsuite, [online]. Available at: https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-for-business/  Accessed 16 July 2022];

Sam Medlicott, (n.d.), 7 advantages of social media advertising for your business, Commonground, [online]. Available at: https://www.commonground.digital/paid-social/7-advantages-of-social-media-advertising-for-your-business/  [Accessed 16 July 2022];

Meta Business Help Centre, (n.d.), Choose the right objective, [online]. Available at: https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/help/1438417719786914 [Accessed 18 July 2022];

Meta Business Help Centre, (n.d.), About Image Ads, [online]. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/217010726413426?id=1240182842783684 [Accessed 18 July 2022];

Meta Business Help Centre, (n.d.), About Video Ads, [online]. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1381779698788633?id=603833089963720&locale=en_GB [Accessed 18 July 2022];

Meta Business Help Centre, (n.d.), About Carousel Ads, [online]. Available at:https://www.facebook.com/business/help/773889936018967?id=563305920700338&locale=en_GB [Accessed 18 July 2022];

Meta Business Help Centre, (n.d.), About Instant Experience, [online]. Available at:https://www.facebook.com/business/help/183469315334462?id=1633489293397055&locale=en_GB [Accessed 18 July 2022];

Meta Business Help Centre, (n.d.), About collection ads, [online]. Available at https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1128914607238107?id=370281743380548&locale=en_GB Accessed 18 July 2022];

Meta, (n.d.), Create lightweight, affordable video ads from images that you already have, [online]. Available at https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/ads/slideshow-ad-format [Accessed 18 July 2022];

Meta, (n.d.), Help your ads find the people who will love your business. [online]. Available at: https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/ads/ad-targeting [Accessed 19 July 2022];

Meta Business Help Centre, (n.d.) Using Custom or Lookalike Audiences, [online]. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/572787736078838?id=176276233019487&helpref=related&ref=related [Accessed 19 July 2022];

Facebook Business Help Centre, (n.d.), Tips to Make Your Ads Resonate, [online], Available at: https://www.facebook.com/help/840059356036765 [Accessed 19 July 2022];

Reach First, (n.d.), 7 Essential Ingredients of An Effective Facebook Ad Campaign, [online]. Available at: https://www.reachfirst.com/7-essential-ingredients-of-an-effective-facebook-ad-campaign/ [Accessed 20 July 2022];

Christina Newberry, Stacey McLachlan, (2020), Social Media Advertising 101: How to Get the Most Out of Your Ad Budget, [online]. Available at: https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-advertising/ [Accessed 20 July 2022];

        

Email Marketing Best Practices

 

In a world of social media, you could wonder how would email marketing be a good option for a business.

Well, according to Campaign Monitor (2019), 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email, and not through social media. More than this, when it comes to receiving promotional content, 72% of people prefer to receive it through email.

Email marketing is a strong marketing channel that uses email to promote the business’s products or services. This form of direct marketing can help make the customers aware of a business’s latest items or offers by integrating it into the marketing automation efforts. (Mailchimp, n.d.).

Being one of the oldest forms used in digital communication, many good practices related to email marketing have been shaped in time, but there are also mistakes of which you should be aware if you want a successful email campaign.

                 Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels

Best email marketing practices

When it comes to email marketing, one of the best practices is to personalize your emails.

It is important to consider the experience and make your email recipients you're talking directly with them. It might be good to save some time through automation, but this should never be at the cost of the experience. Marketing emails should be personalized to the reader and contain information that is relevant to them.

For example, instead of using the common "Dear Sir/Madam", it could be much better using their name. This can be easily done by using personalization tokens. (Lindsay Kolowich, n.d.)  

Testing emails is another practice you should not underestimate if you are after success in your campaigns. There are many reasons to test an email before clicking the send button and  some of the most common are, according to Salmeron D. (2019): Broken email designs, Broken, incorrect, or untracked links, Good First Impressions, Spelling & Grammar Errors, Images Displaying Properly, Font & Text Displaying Properly.

In other words, it should become a habit to double-check if an email looks as good as you expected.

It is a good idea to preview what the email looks like in different email clients and devices that are popular with your audience. Another good practice is also to send a test  version of the email before sending it out for real ensuring it is properly working for everyone on the email list.

All of these actions should be considered as final steps in your email review process. (Lindsay Kolowich, n.d.)

Call to action

An email should integrate an instruction that encourages to action almost every time. There are exception like Thank you email which doesn’t have to use a Call to action. For the rest of the emails, it is necessary to have a call to action depending on what you are after. (Sean Tinney, 2021)

Practically, through a Call to action subscribers are being encouraged to go from reading the email to the next stop on the digital journey. This could be a CTA button or hyperlink which redirects subscribers to a company website, product page, blog article, or social sites. (Campaign Monitor, 2019)

Optimize emails for mobile users it is for sure another good practice to take into consideration.

It is well known that more and more people use their mobile devices to read email and navigate internet. This is why it is important to design emails with mobile users in mind. Otherwise, their user base will be significantly affected. (Lindsay Kolowich, n.d.)

There are also a few mistakes that should be avoided when sending an email.

Not sending a welcome email is one of them because this type of email have the highest open rates, which makes it a huge opportunity to connect with customers. That is the reason why you should send a welcome email immediately after signup instead of a regular newsletter.

Not letting your subscribers reply is another mistake and unfortunately it is a common one.

A subscriber will not be happy to receive an email without being allowed to reply to it. That is why you should make sure you will give the subscriber an opportunity to communicate back. (Enginemailer, 2021)

Another huge mistake will be to purchase an email list because sending emails to people who didn’t provide permission for is considered spam and illegal. When people starts to mark you as a spam, the delivery rates will decrease and your emails will start going directly to spam folders where cannot be seen. (Sean Tinney, 2021)

 

Reference List 

1.    1.     Campaign Monitor (2019) The Anatomy of an Effective Email, [online]. Available at: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/the-anatomy-of-an-effective-email/ [accessed 13 February 2022];

2.     Mailchimp (n.d.). Email Marketing [online]. Available at: https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/email-marketing/#:~:text=Email%20marketing%20is%20a%20powerful,into%20your%20marketing%20automation%20efforts [accessed 13 February 2022];

3.     Lindsay Kolowich (n.d.) 26 Examples of Brilliant Email Marketing Campaigns [online]

4.    Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-examples-list [accessed 13 February 2022];

5.     Salmeron D. (2019) Test Before You Send: The Importance Of Email Testing [online]. Available at: https://www.wpromote.com/blog/email-marketing/test-before-send-importance-email-testing [accessed 15 February 2022];

6.     Lindsay Kolowich, (n.d.) 23 Simple Email Marketing Tips to Improve Your Open and Clickthrough Rates [online]. Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/make-emails-more-clickable-list  [accessed 15 February 2022];

7.     Sean Tinney (2021) Email Marketing Best Practices for 2022 That Drive Results [online]. Available at:https://blog.aweber.com/email-marketing/email-marketing-best-practices.htm#h-5-have-a-call-to-action [accessed 15 February 2022];

8.     Enginemailer (2021) 11 Common Email Marketing Mistakes And How To Prevent Them [online]. Available at: https://www.enginemailer.com/blog/email-marketing-mistakes [accessed 15 February 2022]

The best practice examples of content marketing

  - Travel related websites research –

Content marketing is considered to be one of the most effective methods of growing audience engagement. Using a high quality, consistent content, a brand can built trust with their audience, connect with customers and generate leads. ( Rebecca Riserbato, n.d.).

To find the best practice examples of content marketing, I conducted an online research and analysed 5 travel related websites. These are:

 eSky.co.uk;

rome2rio.com;

responsibletravel.com;

travelrepublic.co.uk;

lastminute.com.

The first example of quality content I found is blogging. In my research I learnt that almost all the websites had a blog, but eSky’s blog was a great example to look at. First, it is helpful due to its tips offered to travellers. Titles such as How to find a hotel or Brexit: How to Travel to Great Britain? can be quite useful for users. Compared to other blogs, it has consistency, a well determined area and uses many key words.

Another good example I found in this website is content repurposing. eSky understands the importance of getting maximum benefit from the content they produce. They constantly change their written content into video.

Video is also a great practice example of content. Today video is becoming increasingly important as all the statistics proves. In my research I found excellent video examples. eSky’s videos are educative helping travellers with many tips; Responsible Travel instead has only one video on their website and it is a great brand video. Some of the other websites do not use video content at all and they could lose a lot because of it.

Pictures are important when it comes to creating good content. Choosing the right pictures can help organisations to connect and engage  with their audience and prospects.

All the analysed websites are using this format, but the difference between them is mostly related to their quality. For example, eSky and Last Minute websites present some of their offers through quality pictures integrated in galleries, while Rome2Rio website has some low quality unattractive pictures.   Poor quality pictures might reduce a brand’s image and users could assume that the brand is untrustworthy.

Podcasts are another great type of content which can bring many advantages if added to a content strategy. None of the websites I mentioned before created or used this type of content, but they should seriously consider it because it can bring many benefits. First, this type of content is now growing in popularity, it is a mobile friendly option and could be convenient to listeners.

All the above types of content can bring an organisation to the next level and help them bring more customers, but they definitely should be designed, combined and communicated into a well determined content strategy.

 

Reference List:

1. - Hubspot (n.d.), 10 Benefits of Consistent, High-Quality Content Marketing, [online] in https://blog.hubspot.com, Available at: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/benefits-high-quality-content-consistency-brand [Accessed 01.09.2021].

2.    -  https://www.eSky.co.uk

3.     -  https://www.rome2rio.com/blog/

4.      - https://www.responsibletravel.com

5.     - https://www.travelrepublic.co.uk

6.      - https://www.lastminute.com

SlideShare: https://www.slideshare.net/AlexandraIordachi1/travel-websites-content

YouTube: https://youtu.be/tYj8GNhk21c

How to use social media for personal branding

 

The importance of personal branding

A personal brand is a unique combination between your skills and experience, which expresses exactly who you are. In simpler words, it is how you present yourself to the world. (Caroline Castrillon, 2019)

According to PersonalBrand.com (n.d.), a personal brand is the objective, and the personal branding is the process to achieve this objective.

There are certain actions that must be taken in order to fulfil the process:  find your uniqueness, build a reputation on the things you want to be known for, and then allow yourself to be known for them. All these actions have a single goal, and this would be to create something that conveys a message and can be monetized. (Michael Stelzner, 2019)

How to use social media for personal branding  

When it comes to build a personal brand, fist thing to be done is to define the message you want to communicate. Then, you should define the media and modalities to deliver your personal brand. (Michael Stelzner, 2019)

There are many modalities to develop a strong personal brand on social media.

Keeping the image consistent is one of them. It is important to maintain a certain consistency across all your social profiles. This will help you to control audiences’ perception of your personal brand.

If you wish your personal brand to be successful, search for relevant articles or topics and engage with the community established already around your field. People will get to associate you with a certain topic once you start to post regularly about it. (Jenn Chen, 2017)

Another method is diversifying your content by including images, videos, articles and even questions. This will prevent you from sharing the same type of content, which might annoy your audience. (Sujan Patel, 2016) If you have a blog, it would also be a good idea to post links back to it, demonstrating your expertise in a certain industry. Asking question is a great way to improve your personal brand and increase the engagement on your posts.

Good examples of using social media for personal branding.

Lewis Howes managed to develop an outstanding personal brand after he quit football. He started a new career from scratch, becoming a bestseller author and running his own podcast. 

Neil Patel, a well-known digital marketing expert, built his great personal brand in time. He was co-founder for many companies, but since 2014 when he created his personal blog, his personal brand took off. In his blog posts, he gets more than 200 comments, and he replies to almost all of them. (Neil Patel, 2018)

Reference list

1.      Caroline Castrillon (2019) Why Personal Branding Is More Important Than Ever [online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2019/02/12/why-personal-branding-is-more-important-than-ever/?sh=76f5d6732408b[Accessed 20 April 2021)

2.      PersonalBrand.com (n.d.), Definition of a Personal Brand vs. Personal Branding [online]. Available at: https://personalbrand.com/definition/ [Accessed 20 April 2021];

3.      Michael Stelzner (2019), Personal Branding: How to Successfully Build Your Brand [online]. Available at: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/personal-branding-how-to-successfully-build-brand-rory-vaden/ [Accessed 21 April 2021];

4.      Jenn Chen (2017), The Ultimate Guide to Personal Branding [online]. Available at:

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/personal-branding/ [Accessed 21 April 2021];

5.      Sujan Patel (2016), 9 Ways to Use Social Media to Build Your Personal Brand [online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sujanpatel/2016/11/12/9-ways-to-use-social-media-to-build-your-personal-brand/?sh=424b98c03520 [Accessed 21 April 2021]

6.      (Neil Patel, 2018), I Wish I Never Built a Personal Brand [online]. Available at:  https://neilpatel.com/blog/build-personal-brand/ [Accessed 21 April 2021]

 

 

Inbound marketing review

 

   Paula’s Choice

   Charlotte Tilbury

                                                

Approach to inbound marketing

Charlotte Tilbury’s has an integrated approach to inbound marketing, which touches every stage of the buyer’s journey. The website is complex, with a glamorous look, offering a huge amount of information. It contains many pictures and short descriptions for each one. The site has also a dedicated ‘’HOW TO’’ section, where you can find free video tutorials.  Their tone of voice is a friendly one, addressing their customer with ‘’darlings’’ in many of their texts and posts. 

Paula’s Choice is a skincare expert company. Their approach to inbound marketing is simpler, but they still manage to touch each stage of the buyer’s journey. The website interface is user-friendly, there are pictures alongside short descriptions, but no videos available. To succeed with the lead generation, the company adapted call to action and landing pages to the website.

Both companies use email and marketing automation. They integrated to the website an e-mail popup. Visitors who decide to register, receive more benefits from both companies.

While Charlotte Tilbury has a dedicated ‘’How to’’ section where they share video tutorials about their products, Paula’s choice has an ‘’Expert advice’’ section where they share a variety of articles related to skin problems and skin care.

When it comes to SEO, both websites use keywords or combinations to make sure they can easily be found by buyers.

Strengths and weaknesses

Charlotte Tilbury has a powerful presence on social networks, being active on many social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and YouTube. This is proven also by the number of followers they attracted so far. They have 884K likes on Facebook, and 3.9M followers on Instagram. They regularly update their content, mostly with videos and pictures and they actively interact with their audience. Charlotte Tilbury offers free consultation related to their products, and they organize a lot of live beauty events host by specialists. The company constantly partners with influencers helping them to organically grow their reach. For some areas of the website, you need first to register to get access to more information. This might bring more leads to them, but it also might annoy new visitors.

Paula’s Choice has a simple, yet well-structured website, sharing useful information with its audience. Although it does not have a dedicated blog, it has an Expert Advice section covering many topics in the skincare area. The website does not integrate video content. Paula’s Choice is also being active on social media, but only on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. They also interact with the audience, but the content on their Facebook account is not regularly updated.

The best company at inbound marketing

While Charlotte Tilbury has a strong presence on social media, Paula’s Choice is active only on two networks. The amount of information is much bigger in Charlotte’s website, but Paula’s Choice has a better-structured website. However, the first company integrates more inbound marketing methods such as CTa’s, landing pages, or events. This approach allowed them to pursue more leads.

Improvements

It would be a good idea for both websites to integrate social media buttons on their pages. Charlotte Tilbury could simplify the content on their site and dedicate one page for a blog. Paula’s Choice could manage to organize more online events, work with influencers to organically grow their reach, and why not, extend on other social networks. They could also consider including videos on their website.

www.paulaschoice.co.uk

www.charlottetilbury.com/uk

The impact of technology on consumers lives

A brief introduction to the internet

Ø    It passed some decades already since the history of the internet began. Considering that only half of the world’s population was online in 2017, this might be only the beginning. Now the internet has become the main source of information for billions of people at home, at school, or at work.

Ø    The internet is continuously changing. The social web and the mobile technology marked its recent evolution. These two innovations have changed the way people use the internet today. (Internet World Stats, n.d.). Now people use the internet for so many purposes, and many of them wouldn’t imagine a world without internet.

Ø    Initially the Internet served to interconnect laboratories engaged in government research. ARPAnet was the first version of the internet in 1969, and it was intended to link computers at UCLA and Stanford. After World Wide Web was invented in 1989, the first web browser available to the public was launched in ‘93 (BroadbandSearch, n.d.). Since 1994 the internet has been expanded to serve millions of users and a multitude of purposes all over the world (InternetWorld Stats, n.d.).

Access to internet

Ø    At the end of 2020, there were almost 4.66 billion active internet users, which means 59.5 percent of the global population. 91% of all these users are mobile internet users, which proves that mobile became the first channel for internet access. (Statista, 2021).

Digital devices used by audiences

Ø    Not too long ago, desktop and stationary hardware ruled the world of internet. But with the latest evolution, the focus now shifted towards mobile. Some of the most common mobile devices include smartphones, tablets, laptop, smartwatches, digital cameras, or gaming consoles.

Ø    Today the majority of traffic internet comes from mobile sources, especially from smartphones. Statistics indicate that almost 60% of all internet traffic is attributed to mobile devices. (Telemedia, 2020).

How customers search for information

Ø    Today we have access to so much information available on billions of websites. The search engines are the tools to help us find exactly what we need. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing, allow users worldwide to enter keywords and sift through all the existing websites to find the information they search for. (Anmar Frangoul, 2018).

Ø     The evolution of mobile phones, voice assistants, video search engines, or the dynamic of search intent, have changed the ways in which people use search engines. (backlinko, n.d.).

Ø    The search intent is redefining the marketing funnel. People search for immediate answers on their devices, and every time they do it, it is a different way. There are four main types of search intent: Informational (Users searching information about a certain topic, but not intended to buy anything), Navigational (Users intending to visit a certain website), Transactional (Users are searching for information having the purpose to buy something), and Commercial (Users being close to make a purchase, or deciding between a few options) (backlinko, n.d.).

What consumers buy online

Ø    The latest statistics rank fashion as the most popular category of all internet purchases. For 2021, this category is expected to reach $759.5 billion of the total eCommerce expenditure online. The next category is Toys, Hobby, and DIY, followed by electronics and media products. (Oberlo, n.d.).

Ø    The current pandemic situation had a huge effect on the retail sector with many stores forced to close. If we take the example of the UK and compare the proportions of sales during one year of pandemic, we notice that the proportion of total sales in online has grown by over 10%. (Rhys Dalgleish, 2020).

Video consumption

Ø    In the past few years there have been fantastic changes in online video consumption of all types. We can see that from our daily life, but the statistics are making it clear.  Interesting to be mentioned would be that: YouTube has over a billion users, almost one-third of total internet users, More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day, 87% of online marketers use video content, Over 500 million people are watching video on Facebook every day (Mary Lister, 2020).

Ø    A recent statistic from Statista shows that 27% of online viewers spent more than 10 hours watching videos. (Statista, 2021).

Ø     To understand what users are watching online in 1 day and why they do it, Google conducted a survey and the results showed that people’s viewing habits are changing. For example, 70% of respondents said that their content choices are influenced by their mood. Another aspect to mention is that people are placing more value on content that relates to their personal passions (Google, n.d.).

Summary

Ø    Internet had quickly evolved, and for sure in the next years there will be further development

Ø    The rise of smartphones has completely changed the world, with a huge impact on mobile internet usage

Ø    The search engines have totally changed the way people search for information, and with the rise of smartphones, mobile search will continue to take over.

Ø    As internet access is quickly increasing worldwide, the number of digital buyers is continuously rising. In 2019, an estimated 1.92 billion people purchased goods or services online. (Statista, 2021).

Ø    The mobile evolution also changed the way users are watching videos. Nowadays video content is being watched more than ever before.

 

SlideShare link: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/mwBxNDCYFUEs7t

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/mhPXRkKN69g