With yet another year approaching its end, the digital marketing community is looking at what has been achieved over the past 12 months, as well as to the future.

As it is becoming increasingly clear that how a company uses social media is in the spotlight, one huge lesson learned is  that the customer really is right the majority of the time.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and digital marketing firms have certainly recognised this, with the major finding being that people do not want to be led.

As good as it is to monitor buying habits and trends, spoon feeding is really not an option. It is for this reason that SEO is more important than it ever has been. People know where they want to go, in general, certainly for established brands.

The landscape to that end has changed, however. For example, content, and how it is delivered, needs to be varied. Not only must it interest the reader, but it should engage too.

There also needs to be an ever constant supply, which helps to explain why clear and concise sentences are important.

This does leave the door nicely ajar for new arrivals and smaller firms. For them, learning from how the big guns are doing well, or their mistakes, and doing it better, or right, is the key. It is also one area where bold SEO firms can really transform fortunes.

This transformation is very often relying on an old way of marketing, which is all about handing that control back to the all-important customer. They want to make the decisions when it comes to interacting online, which is an approach that can truly benefit firms that get web marketing right.

We are all customers after all, so we just need to know that the content is out there for us to find.

Richard Bell

Richard has a First in English Literature and Creative Writing, and has experience writing fiction and short stories (which he has published both online and in magazines).