A new infographic posted by Salesforce has highlighted the importance of investing in quality content marketing. Its own stats show that 70% of consumers now like to get to know a company via articles rather than ads, while 85% seek trusted content as part of the decision-making process.

Google is rolling out several changes to AdWords that promise to improve the workflow and make it easier to set up automated bidding. This means that marketers will not have to venture to the Shared Library and will be able to create and add items to automated, goal-driven bid strategies via the Campaigns Setting tab.

Facebook is releasing a new tool to make it much easier for marketers to add captions to video ads. The social media giant claims that captions are a great way to capture the attention of consumers, with its own internal tests showing that their use increases video view time by around 12 per cent.

Instagram is starting to rollout view counts for all of its videos in an attempt to draw more content creators away from rival social media sites. Over the next few weeks, Instagram will replace the “like” number located below a video with a number for the amount of views it has generated. As with Facebook, a view will be counted after three seconds.

Twitter is launching a First View feature that will allow marketers to place a video advert at the top of every user’s timeline for 24 hours. The new feature is part of a major overhaul for the social media site that will also see the introduction of prioritised tweets ahead of the current reverse chronological order.

Google has sounded the death knell for Flash-based ads after announcing that it will drop support for the multimedia and software platform in favour of HTML5 by 2nd January 2017. The 11-month transition period is aimed to give advertisers enough time to prepare for the switch.

Tech site BuzzFeed has set the Twittersphere alight with claims that the social media site is set to introduce a new Facebook-style algorithmic feed next week. The shift away from the current reverse chronological model will filter out what users will see when they log in, which is likely to impact how individuals connect with each other.

A recent survey of 3,000 financial institutions by IT company Wipro found that less than 15 per cent have a mature digital marketing strategy. Scores of businesses fail to recognise the importance of content to a successful digital content marketing strategy - quality copy, videos and blog posts can all attract the right kind of visitors to a website.

The volatile nature of SEO means that it is important to implement the current best practices while keeping an eye on future changes to ensure your web pages don’t get lost in the competitive search engine landscape. SEO will inevitably evolve this year, and tech news website SiteProNews has highlighted the four key trends to keep track of during 2016.

For many businesses, their online reputation has become a crucial way of finding sales and driving revenue upwards. Regardless of a company’s size, what is being said about it online has a big impact on credibility and trust. This, unsurprisingly, can also affect a company’s bottom line. With reviews and digital reputations shaping how a business is perceived by consumers, it is becoming increasingly important to train employees so that they understand how to best manage their online personas.