February 20, 2020

How Marketing Will Change in 2020!

Digital marketing is always evolving, but 2020 marks a particularly special year. As we enter a new decade, several new technologies have been planned to make the internet more powerful and engaging. From AI to 5G to emerging online marketing strategies, the 2020s internet will make the last decade's internet just as ancient as the nineties. Here are the key new digital marketing changes for you to explore in 2020. 1. Response to Google's BERT Update Algorithm updates by Google, the gatekeeper of the internet for which sites get high ratings, are important for website owners and managers to follow. It can mean the difference between higher or lower search rankings. Google's November 2019 update is based on innovative coding called BERT, which stands for bidirectional encoder representations from transformers. It's expected to affect as many as 10% of all websites. The reason BERT is important is that it will refine and improve Google searches to be based more on full sentences rather than just keywords. 2. Voice Dominates Search One thing websites cannot ignore to maintain or improve search rankings is to be optimized for voice search. A recent BrightLocal survey found that 58% of U.S. consumers conduct local business searches by voice on their smartphones. Nearly two-thirds of this group say they conduct at least one voice search per week to find a local business. These figures are expected to keep climbing in 2020. Google Assistant and Apple Siri are by far the leading voice assistants, so it's a good idea to make sure your site works well with those searches. About the same amount use smart speakers for these searches. Other surveys show that consumers enjoy high levels of satisfaction with the help of virtual assistants. According to ComScore, half of all searches today are through voice search. Top Voice Assistants by Market Share Google Assistant  36% Apple Siri  36% Amazon Alexa  25% Microsoft Cortana  19% Other  1% source: Search Engine Land / Microsoft, 2019 3. Structured Markup Facilitates Voice Search The key to getting the attention of Google for voice search is to use its Structured Data Markup Helper, an easy-to-use developer tool. Visit this tool on Google and click the data type, enter your URL then click the "start tagging" button. Data types include articles, events, movies, software applications, and more. The tool generates HTML for your web pages to help Google understand them better. 4. Live Videos Help Drive Engagement Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat are havens for visual presentations, which is why engagement for live videos on these platforms is increasing. Although reach is decreasing for videos due to rising competition, the key is to create a multicast, which is video used for multiple purposes. You can increase engagement on various platforms by repurposing the same video or different clips from the same video. Live videos create shared experiences in real-time, which is why they attract better engagement than static content. 5. Spread of Bite-Sized Educational and Interactive Content For awhile, infographics were the rage for shared online content, due to compressing vast amounts of knowledge in images with easy-to-read data points. Then infographics got too complex with bigger images, full of comprehensive data, making them slower to load and scroll through. After a while, these versions became too cumbersome and easy to ignore. The new trend is toward bite-sized informative images that contain one or a few bits of useful knowledge. The more educational and interactive this content is, the better, but keep each info-bite concise. Keep the informative content down to a one-sentence overview. These images work best when presented in a series on a web page and should be mobile-friendly. Smaller infographics will outperform the larger ones in social engagement. 6. More Buying Directly on Google It's now possible to sell items from your site directly on Google, which competes with Amazon. Google's "buy now" button through its Purchases on Google program lets your customers purchase your items directly without visiting your site. Expect the search giant to find new ways to facilitate its marketplace in the future as more and more shopping is done online. You may have read in news reports that over 9,300 brick-and-mortar stores announced closures in 2019, which was a significant increase from the prior year. One of the big reasons for this mass exodus was due to the rising popularity of shopping on smartphones. It's simply easier, more convenient, and more economical to buy items from a mobile device than to waste gas driving around town looking for deals that might not exist. 7. Better Deals on Influencer Marketing Due to the internet being crowded with over a billion blogs, the reach for influencers has declined. Even social media engagement has peaked for thought leaders because of over-saturation. Analytics firm Influencer.db reported in July 2019 that overall engagement on Instagram had fallen to an all-time low. While this news may not be great for the top bloggers, its an opportunity for lesser-known bloggers to pay lower advertising rates to influencers. In 2020, a winning strategy for digital marketers will be to increase advertising on a higher quantity of established influencer sites. 8. Shared Virtual Reality Experiences Virtual reality (VR) has proven to be more than a trend and is undoubtedly here to stay. In 2020, you will see much more emphasis placed on shared VR experiences among digital marketers. The real estate industry has helped usher in this next frontier with 360-degree views of homes for potential buyers. Virtual tours are excellent for promoting theme parks and other unique places of interest for travelers. 9. Omnichannel Marketing Rises You may already know about omnichannel marketing, which is using multiple channels to sell products. But some people are using the term interchangeably with multi-channel experiences even though there's a subtle difference. Multichannel is simply using different marketing channels, such as your website, email, and social media. It's not considered omnichannel until all of these channels merge into an integrated, seamless experience. Messages must be consistent across all channels. Furthermore, all your marketing channels must converge with sales and customer service. The best way to accomplish this experience is to design a user-friendly app that works as a hub for all your channels. Look for the omnichannel experience to be more visible across several industries. 10. Customization Options Will Expand One of the most important reasons to outsource to a digital design agency that handles all aspects of web development is for customization of specific web features. Template-driven sites don't attract as many eyeballs as unique sites with impressive designs and original, in-depth content. Conclusion Your website can be much more competitive by investigating these emerging marketing trends for the next frontier. Reach out to us at Simplemachine to learn more about how we can improve your website design, content, and traffic.

January 27, 2020

20 Tips for Your 2020 Marketing Strategy | Simplemachine

As a business owner, there are several steps that you can use to ramp up your business’ marketing strategies and tactics. The process itself is relatively simple, provided you know what the steps to take and when to take them. Deciding which marketing strategy to use and which ones to omit can be an overwhelming task, especially with how these strategies keep changing. What may work for your business today may become obsolete in the coming months. Thus, forcing you to seek other working alternatives. Here are 20 marketing strategies that will drive your sales off the roof. 1. Lead Generation Work out how best you can boost lead generation for your business this year more than ever. Generally, not everyone within the same demographic as you are willing to pull the trigger to purchase a product or sign up for a service. Ideally, businesses wait to see the trends that work before capitalizing on the same. However, if you are smart in your dealings, and show the appropriate signs of interest in your customers, there is every chance that you can turn these customers into leads. 2. Establish a Clear Identity Here’s where branding comes into play. This is another vital marketing strategy that, if used appropriately, can win you many customers and boost your sales significantly. You need to be able to communicate with your visitors. Your customers must be able to know what your business does, what it stands for, and how they can benefit from using its products or services. Put your brand on everything; advertising, envelopes, business cards, and even email signatures. Ultimately, this helps to build brand awareness and make your business more visible to potential customers. 3. Utilize Social Media Ads Make social media your friend this year. Facebook Ads, Instagram, Twitter should be your playground this year. You can use social media to target a specific group of potential customers that you can convert. Ideally, your advertising should focus on factors like: Age Sex Location Online habits Interests Provided you know how to use the system or hire an expert for this piece of work, social media advertising can be a great way of reaching your targeted number of potential customers. Its upside is that it is also relatively inexpensive, which works more in your favor too. 4. Understand the Power of SEO Every prolific marketer would always stress the importance of utilizing search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO. This is one of the best ways of directing massive web traffic to your website. Take advantage of Google search algorithms. Remember always to keep your page keyword optimized with the keywords evenly distributed throughout your content. This is perhaps the oldest trick in the book and an excellent way to keep your site highly ranked on searches. So, do everything you can to ensure that that’s where your website is. 5. Use Free Samples and Demos to Promote Product Awareness Another excellent marketing strategy to consider is providing free samples and demos to potential customers. A great way of building awareness of your product or service is by letting people try it. Say, for instance, you are introducing a new application to the market. The best way of promoting its awareness is by giving your audience the trial option that they can use to test-run the application. It is only common sense not to expect someone to spend their money on a product that they haven’t ever heard of or used before. Here’s where the free trial or demos come into play. This strategy always pays off, especially if your product or service is worth the money that you expect to charge for it. 6. Use Google AdWords Since Google AdWords may be more expensive compared to other marketing options available, it is still worth considering. When used appropriately, it is a potent marketing tool. AdWords dramatically increases the chance of your target audience finding you whenever they search on Google. Remember, your primary objective for marketing your product or service is so that your customers can find you and use what you’re selling. AdWords also increases the chance of people seeing your name on their searches. 7. Know Your Business, Know Your Customers By now, you can probably tell that there is no one-size-fits-all marketing strategy to follow and expect positive results. Different businesses respond to different marketing strategies differently. Therefore, it is not just a matter of getting online and picking a marketing strategy that works for other businesses. Think carefully about what your business entails and your target customers, too, before choosing which elements that would properly integrate into your marketing strategy. Consider the demographics, your target customers’ age, where they live, how they will look for your product, and the online services that they will use. 8. Comb Your Website If there is one thing that will drive people off engaging with your business, it’s having a website that’s poorly designed. Think about it, you have already done the hard part and gotten that click, and brought a customer to your site. Then the customer finds the site to be hard to navigate, not logically laid out, and everything user-unfriendly. You can count on losing potential leads this way if you do not make the necessary improvements on your website. Do not make this basic mistake and end up paying for it later. 9. Don’t Forget Email Emails are easy to do, allows instantaneous communication, cost very little, easy to automate, and can reach potential customers instantaneously too. Emails also have very high open rates, especially if you know how to segment your customer list. After adding a customer’s address to your mailing list, your job should be simple. Provide interesting, relevant, and valuable content that your customer will likely open, read, and enjoy rather than delete immediately or send to the spam box. Remember, the main reason for sending emails in the first place is so your customers can come back to your website and engage with your products or services. 10. Work the Referrals Another smart marketing strategy to adopt this year is using your existing customers to invite more business. Then incentivize referrals and encourage them to bring even more customers to your team. Again, this depends on the type of business that you run and whether you can implement certain incentives for referrals. However, if your business allows you to offer incentives like free products, discounts, gifts, or something similar, your already existing customers will be more than happy to refer more leads your way. As such, referral leads offer an even higher conversion rate than most of the other channels. 11. Prioritize Customer Data Privacy Many businesses have really suffered trust issues in the last few years. This has majorly been as a result of data privacy and disinformation. It is, therefore, vital that you establish and implement a marketing strategy that tackles this issue. Center on building brand trust with your customers. There is a line that separates data privacy and hyper-personalization. How thick or thin you make it is up to you and your business. Either way, tread carefully, especially with the data of other people in your hands. 12. Boost User Experience Using AR and VR As a business, you always strive to be relevant and up-to-par with the current generation and what is going on in the world. Thus, the reason you must always be on top of current issues, both online and offline. Both reality and augmented reality will take 2020 by storm. And you want to be there to have a slice of all the fun. AR, for one, is a technology that every business should consider investing in and use in a way that is relevant to both the brand and the industry. VR will be crucial for boosting the AR experience online and boost brand engagement as well if used appropriately. 13. Embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) AI is slowly taking over and running most businesses. Understandably, people are worried that machines are replacing them at their workplaces. However, this challenge also presents an opportunity, especially for marketers. Start embracing AI and integrate it into your marketing strategy to help free up more of your time. The time that you can then use on other tasks. Having a deep understanding of how AI can benefit your marketing efforts is essential for this process to work since automation is the future that we all face and must embrace. 14. Reality Altering Content Everyone always wants content that they can easily relate to and quickly use to find what they are looking for. If your business allows you to create avatars as a marketing strategy that customers can interact with, the better. Marketing has become more complex and competitive now, and businesses must put in more effort to attract more leads. Thus, the need to produce more reality-altering content that stands out from the competition. 15. Share Freely If you are using social media, SEO, or any other strategy, then use it and commit to supporting it responsively. Let your absence in any of these strategies speak volumes and commit to every strategy you decide to use. Remember, you must commit to what you can deliver consistently, and soon, you will start reaping referrals. It is all about relationships and how you build them. So, be free and enjoy what you do. 16. Understand That Your Audience Changes The marketing strategy that worked last year may not necessarily work this year too. Expect changes in the market and the technical landscape of how things run in your industry. You should also expect that your audiences will change in reaction to these changes, which is why you must be ready to do away with what stops working and embrace what does. 17. Use Video and Live-Streaming Videos and live-streams provide a more hands-on user-experience compared to written content. Customers also tend to prefer audio/visual content compared to blogs and social posts. You can even develop an ‘ask me anything’ live-stream format where your audiences engage with you more directly. 18. Use Messaging Apps With almost everyone owning a smartphone, people use messaging apps to communicate with each other all day. Messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Messenger by Google, Skype, Telegram, and so on are the best platforms to use to make your marketing content viral. Your only catch it to ensure that you craft engaging content that is tailored for mobile app users, and you’re good to go. 19. Document Your Content Marketing Strategies A good strategy is critical for any marketing campaign. A well-thought-out marketing strategy enables you to list out different tasks, identify key stakeholders for each task’s completion, and track the progress of your marketing efforts. A properly documented strategy also enables the business to measure the performance of every channel more accurately. 20. Repurpose Old Content Remember, some content that you put up earlier might become obsolete with time. However, instead of deleting this old content, you can repurpose it using new content and make it relevant and informative again. Content may sometimes still be informative but have an incorrect format. You only need to make a few tweaks, and your low-performing blog post becomes engaging once more. Bottom Line When looking for a good marketing strategy, focus on what works for your business and favors you too. There are many different marketing channels that you can pursue to increase your online visibility. You only need to take that leap and try even new strategies if you believe that they will work for you. Contact us at Simplemachine for more insight on how to boost your marketing strategy!