There have been more changes in marketing in the last five years than in the last 50. This rapid progress in the way that businesses reach customers isn’t likely to slow down in the coming year.
If your company is still relying on mailers and other traditional marketing methods to build its brand, it may be time to make some changes. As 2020 approaches, the digital marketing landscape is witnessing a dramatic shift.
Unfortunately, what worked for you last year may not work as well, or at all, going forward. Here are some of the ways that your business can master digital marketing in the coming year.
Not everything has to be novel and brand new to get the attention of your customers and the search engines. Some things, like the little black dress, just don’t go out of style.
When it comes to digital marketing, here are several things that your business should continue to make a priority.
Search engine optimization (SEO) should always be one of your businesses’ top priorities. You want your company's online properties to rank well in organic search, but there's more.
Gaining the top spot in Google is no longer enough. With the right SEO, there are other opportunities to show up in Position Zero through featured snippets.
Page speed has been important to digital marketing success for several years. Not only is it a Google ranking factor, but studies show that as many as a quarter of users will abandon a page if it doesn't load in four seconds or less.
No matter what your company does to woo new customers, content is still king. According to recent figures from the Content Marketing Institute, over 80 percent of both B2B and B2C content marketers agree that the right content creates credibility and builds loyalty with existing customers.
Both Google and your customers are continuing to look for regularly updated content that is insightful, engaging, and valuable. In addition to written content, videos, images, and infographics can help change things up and boost engagement.
According to a recent Pew research study, the percentage of U.S. adults that use social media has been relatively unchanged since 2016, but those figures are staggering. About 7 in 10 adults in this country use social media platforms, and about three-quarters of Facebook users visit the site daily.
What is changing is how you can reach and engage with customers on social media. For example, influencer marketing and user-generated content remain effective strategies. Social commerce, which involves shoppable posts on social media platforms, is something that is growing at a rapid rate.
If you want your digital marketing program to be as efficient as possible, it should be driven by data. It's not that the data isn't available; it's just that many businesses and marketers either don't know how to use it or choose not to do so.
According to research by McKinsey, businesses that intensively use customer analytics are 23 more times likely to outperform the competition in terms of customer acquisition. Amazon even uses predictive analytics, which involves data mining, to anticipate the future behavior of consumers and give them product recommendations on their individual pages.
The accessibility of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) tools has brought digital intelligence to an entirely new level in just the past few years. If your company is ready to master digital marketing in the coming year, here are some of the trends you should investigate.
Chatbots have been around for a few years, but their use for digital marketing has recently exploded. Advances in AI and machine learning have made these tools more sophisticated and capable of a variety of tasks.
A chatbot, or leadbot, has the ability to transform the customer experience as well as save your company money. Connection Model has partnered with one of the leading providers in the industry, called Drift, which is a tool that can personalize your customer’s experience.
Gartner has predicted that up to 70 percent of companies will experiment with immersive technologies by 2022, and 25 percent will be using them regularly. Examples are augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), with AR being the more popular choice.
When companies use AR for digital marketing, they can have customers use digital displays and apps to try out different products, styles, and colors before buying. Brands using these methods find that they increase sales and enhance customer experience.
Advances in technology are allowing digital marketers to take some of the guesswork out of paid online ads, making them more effective and increasing the return on investment. Programmatic advertising uses AI to automate your ad buying so that you can target the right audiences and get the best deal at the same time. eMarketer reports that these types of ads will account for more than 86 percent of digital display advertising in the U.S. by next year.
Even though privacy is an ongoing concern, consumers have taken a strong dislike to seeing generic ads or being seen as just another number. This type of advertising has become increasingly ineffective.
Instead, personalized advertising is more appealing to consumers and is more likely to achieve the desired results. In fact, personalized email campaigns perform three times better than generic ones.
“Alexa, buy a new coffee maker.”
Over a quarter of U.S. adults, or 66.4 million people, now own a smart speaker.
These devices, such as Google Home or Amazon Echo, enable consumers to search for information online using their voices and even conduct transactions. If you haven't paid attention to voice search before, now is the time to start. You'll need to optimize your content for this unique type of search so that you become visible to this growing market.
At Connection Model, we help organizations around the globe achieve their business goals through effective digital marketing programs fueled by our performance-based solutions and partnerships. Contact us now to learn more about our services.