It's that time of the week where us sharks get together and discuss all of the hottest trends in digital marketing. This week we bring you voice search trends, Instagram Story highlights, as well as digital marketing and it's long-term effect on site traffic! So without further ado, let's dive into the good stuff.

Voice Recognition Exploding Into the Marketing World

When Apple released the iPhone 4s back in 2011, the world was introduced to Siri...and she changed everything. After Siri was released soon to follow were Google Voice, Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Echo Alexis. Voice search is only continuing to get more popular, with 55% of teenagers and 41% of adults using it multiple times a day. All businesses can reap the benefits of how the rise in voice search will shake up the current SEO, content marketing and social media marketing strategies.

The biggest change is in keyword searching. Many sites optimizing keywords will see a decrease in web traffic. Voice search will sift through keywords/phrases to find what you’re looking for using natural language to ask questions. People are now able stop searching with long search phrases and are able to use their voice to ask a full sentence question.

Voice search uses natural language, so the use of searches starting with “who”, “what”, “where” and “how” has actually increased by 61%. This means that users are asking questions to the internet, as if they were speaking to an actual person. Voice search has increased significantly over the past year, and will only continue to grow. Follow the steps below to take advantage of this growing trend:

• Research the most common questions based on your target audience

• Search these common questions using voice search and see how the current answers are written

• Create website and social media content that directly answers those questions in simple clear sentences
• Consider local voice search

Learning how to work the insides and outsides of using voice search and natural language it will help you learn to think more like a consumer and not so much like a marketer. This enhanced comprehension of what your clients are looking for could likewise prompt new item and administration thoughts to enhance your business advertising. We are still learning this quickly growing trend. This makes it even more important to start changing and adjusting your strategies now, so you can benefit more in the future.

Instagram’s Latest Roll Out: Story Highlights and Story Archives

Yesterday, Instagram announced a new way to share stories with your followers. They are calling this new concept, Story Highlights! Stories Highlights is another piece of your profile where you can express a greater amount of your identity through stories you've shared. Your stories will now naturally save into a private Stories Archive so you can view them and add them to the new highlight function whenever you would like.

Stories Highlights

Over the previous year, Instagram Stories has turned into a key piece of how you communicate — however there hasn't been a simple way to keep your stories around for over 24 hours.

Stories Highlights show up in another segment on your profile beneath your profile name and bio. To make a new highlight, tap the "New" button at the far left. From that point, you can pick any stories from your highlights, select a cover image and give it a name. Once you're done, your new story highlight will show up  on your profile. Highlights remain on your profile until the point when you choose to delete them, and you can have any number of highlights you would like. To alter or expel a feature, simply tap and hold that feature on your profile.

Story Highlights gives you a chance to demonstrate every part of your brand identity! From the best snapshots of your progressing holiday season to every one of the stories you catch of your team, the snaps that mean the most to you and your business, now have a home on your profile.

Stories Archive

Another new feature launched this week by Instagram, is the Stories Archive. Pushing ahead, your stories will naturally save to your story archive after their 24 hour expiration. This makes it simple for you to return to your most loved images and videos after they have disappeared from the public eye.

To get to the stories in your archive, tap the Archive symbol on your profile. From that point, you can switch between your Posts Archive and your new Stories Archive. In your Stories Archive, your stories will show up in a grid format with the latest stories at the bottom.

Tap on any story in your archive to watch it. From that point, you can add it to your story, share it as a post or include it to a highlight story on your profile.

The cool thing about the stories archive, similar to Snapchat’s memory function is that only you can see what is saved there. Meaning, you can choose when to post these stories or not.

Both of these features have begun rolling out and you should see them appear on your profile soon.

Catching a Ride with Digital Video

Have you noticed the recent change in traffic patterns? No, I'm not talking the new detour you have to take on your way to work, or the copious amounts of traffic you seem to find yourself in when running the simplest of errands. The change in traffic I'm referring to is the change in internet traffic! If you are a daily user, especially one who uses social platforms, I'm sure by now you've noticed the massive increase in video content.

Digital video is on the fast track to make up almost 80 percent of all internet traffic within the next year. Marketers are well aware of it, and so are the big-dog search engines.

With Google recently adding a new filter to their trend data, it's now possible for users to see search results beyond web search. This a window into the world to see what people are searching for, and with adding YouTube to the mix, the window just got that much more substantial.  This metric will help show with more detail what people are searching for and what is trending. You can use these trends to help decide on what content to create to help make your business relevant and increase visibility to your customers. This new access to data from YouTube further solidifies the importance of utilizing digital video.

So go ahead! Hop on that video train (or bus!) Don't miss out on the ever-growing opportunities that digital video continues to provide.

Well, there ya have it, here's the week of digital marketing! As we continue to head further into the future, we hope that you can trust us here at Red Shark Digital to keep you up to date on the newest trends to ensure that we keep you ahead of all of your competitors. Contact us today!