Digital Marketing Trends to Grow Your Business
Ademola Abimbola
Digital marketing strategist helping businesses grow through data-driven insights since 2004. Founder, Mauco Enterprises.
Your business has to look to meet the needs of a mobile, and social media addicted customer. Following these digital marketing trends will reveal why.
It’s my opinion that the businesses that will be the most successful post-COVID-19 are those who adapt their strategies to align with these online trends.
Adopting new online marketing techniques will also be paramount. It will give you a competitive edge and ensure a good ROI. To help point you in the right direction, I have identified trends likely to affect digital marketing ROI.
Email Marketing
Contrary to speculations, email is not dead. Despite external market conditions, as noted in this article, it has remained quite reliable.
Email marketing allows your business to nurture prospects through a long decision-making process without the same budgetary commitment of other channels, like paid social.
Where to direct your email marketing investments? The same article mentioned above says that according to Smart Insights, 45% of email marketers report that engagement is their #1 obstacle to successful email marketing campaigns. 65% of respondents think personalisation is the best way to improve email marketing effectiveness.
How can you leverage email marketing solutions already in your tech stack, or available from vendors, to generate emails that include personalised content and offers based on behavioural data you have about a person? Email marketing automation will expand and intensify. Personalising email marketing campaigns is fine, but it can be extremely labour-intensive prohibitively so for larger enterprises.
By linking your web analytics to email marketing platforms, you can trigger personalised email campaigns based on user behaviour.
Email marketing automation software, such as ActiveCampaign or HubSpot, can integrate with your website and trigger email campaigns based on specific website activity.
Traditionally, lead nurturing is limited to the email marketing world, but that is changing and changing fast.
With its low cost and targeted reach, it is the perfect base from which to build other online marketing initiatives.
Email is the most measurable marketing channel. It has a proven and reliable high ROI. When combined with other online marketing channels, it becomes even more powerful and effective.
For online retailers, email marketing is a great way to drive traffic to specific product pages. Another good thing about email marketing is that you can reach out to all customers during business or non-business hours.
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Online Marketing Analytics
The first step to improving any metric is to measure it. If your business has an online presence (not just a website), improved integration with online marketing analytic tools like Google Analytics is vital.
It will empower your business to extract detailed data. Your analytic report will highlight new opportunities for you to optimise your marketing campaigns, show results, and show market share.
Your analytics will help you answer lots of questions that can move your business forward. For instance, according to this article, if over 75% of your traffic comes from smartphones and mobile devices, or your analytics show a consistent rise in mobile traffic to your website, mobile-first design may be right for your business’s website. Google, through their mobile-first indexing, now encourages website owners to take a mobile-first approach to develop their websites.
Understanding your analytics, can help you leverage and increase your search engine results since it will enable you to see and track what’s working and what’s not so you can make tweaks and adjustments.
According to this article, new predictive analytics, powered by AI, it can help you make sure that your digital marketing campaigns are efficient, whether you’re advertising on Messenger, Playables, Carousels, or Stories, e.g. Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, etc.
By linking web analytics to email marketing platforms, your business can trigger personalised email campaigns based on user behaviour.
What it requires is an investment in email marketing software and web analytics that integrate directly with your customer relationship management (CRM) solution.
Therefore, your business must prepare to explore new opportunities.
Blending Email Marketing with Social Networking
Social networking is now the number one activity on the Web. It plays an integral role in the vast majority of customer buying decisions.
According to this article, each month, there are 1.3 billion active users on Facebook Messenger, and between people and businesses via this messaging app.
As we enter a new decade and Martech continues to change at a rapid pace, here are the digital marketing trends we're looking forward to seeing in 2021.
The same article mentioned above notes that as a business owner, you don’t have time to email every new subscriber, chase down every abandoned cart and block out time to post about sales and promotions on social media and through email.
But when you blend email marketing with social networking, it becomes more efficient. It can extend reach, enhance engagement, grow customer opt-in lists and build customers’ trust and loyalty to your brand.
Mobile Marketing
According to this article, with the decline of desktop usage and the prevalence of smartphones for most of our internet browsing, we create more websites with a mobile-first design.
This means that when designing your website, ensure you deliver the best experience to mobile users while including features designed to improve desktop and mobile use.
Why choose a mobile-first web design? With a mobile-first design, you can integrate mobile features like voice detection and camera use into your website. It will also help mobile users to navigate your website with greater ease and increases conversions.
The article cited above notes that as 80% of smartphone users use their phone to play mobile games, it’s easy to see how gaming can be a draw in e-commerce, too.
The existence of different telecom operators has opened up various avenues for mobile marketing.
Mobile marketing reaches your targeted audiences and drives the urgency of your message in real-time while extending marketing reach. Building customer retention and loyalty and building a robust, interested and opted-in customer base.
Mobile’s low execution cost means maximised campaign effectiveness.
What this all means is that lots of people will interact with your digital channels on their mobile devices, so ensure that you optimise all your digital channels to provide the best mobile experience possible to lead to conversion.
Messaging Platforms
We will see increasing use in platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp by brands. Customers want fast replies to their questions and queries. This demand for instant responses has put a lot of pressure on brands to use messaging platforms as customer service and support tools to meet the needs of their customers.
As the year progresses, we will see how wise brands make use of these platforms. Read this article on how to use these platforms for marketing.
Micro-Influencers
Increasingly, brands are ignoring the Kylie Jenners and Kardashians of the world. Instead, they’re seeking “micro-influencers”, i.e. individuals on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat and TikTok who have relatively small, specific but highly engaged followers. Using these microinfluencers offers one of the highest conversion rates of any form of marketing.
What resulted from that ‘social media influencer’ you hired to mention your brand on their social media? Were you impressed or disappointed? Read this article for tips on how to avoid scams by so-called social media influencers.
Brand Fatigue
There is an increase in advertising by brands who want to engage with their target audience on social. With this continued reliance on advertising to reach their audience, there is also an increase in brand fatigue by the average Internet user.
This deluge of adverts frustrates many followers. These frustrated followers now experience what we call brand fatigue. So your brand needs to find creative means to avoid brand fatigue.
These are exciting times for marketers. Advertise, but you need to make sure your adverts don’t suck, or your fans will tune out.
Live Streaming
Does the thought of live streaming scare you? There is a growing emphasis for brands to shift from using blog posts to using live streaming to engage with their existing and potential customers.
These days, customers want to see and experience your brand in real-time via their different devices. Is your brand prepared to deliver?
Transparency on Social
For some time now, there’s been a growing demand for transparency on social media. Consumers want to engage further with brands that are genuine about their activities on social.
Trust between brands and their consumers has been on the decline for some time now. Brands that are genuine on social will earn the trust of their target audience.
According to Smart Insights, 45% of email marketers report that engagement is their #1 obstacle to successful Email marketing campaigns.
Re-establishing consumer trust through greater transparency on social is vital to the survival of your brand.
Voice and Visual Search to Influence SEO
Voice-activated digital assistants like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and so on all rely on voice search. Voice search will continue to influence search engine optimisation. According to this article, these assistants are at the centre of the broader shift to semantic search.
Brands need to keep this in mind and focus on tweaking their SEO campaign to cater to consumers using voice search. The article mentioned above says they design these voice assistants to interpret and respond to searches spoken in natural language. This focus on interpreting the search intent is an evolution of the search engine experience to accommodate the growing popularity of voice assistants and voice search.
If you have been relying on ancient myths about SEO, now is the time to stop. Read this article on myths about SEO that you should stop believing.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in Marketing Applications
There is increasing use of AI and ML in marketing applications, content marketing and SEO. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning will influence the following areas.
Email Marketing: With the use of AI and ML, marketers will be capable of deciding the email subject headlines, message copy, and Calls To Action (CTA) to send to the proper persons at the right time.
Website Personalisation: Brands will use AI and ML to study the activities of visitors on their website to offer visitors with relevant content at every step of the customer journey.
Social Media Tools: We are also going to see higher adoption of AI and ML in social media tools to enable a brand to find influencers, trending topics, and hashtags on social media.
Images And Video
It is possible to submit images for search or take photos and search for context. So by using images and video brands can build and engage their target audience in interesting ways.
According to this article, having an image and video sitemap will increase the likelihood of your images and videos being discovered by search engines. To benefit from this, you need to use descriptive filenames for your images and videos before uploading them to your website or other platforms.
Integrated, Online Marketing
As we enter a new decade and Martech continues to change at a rapid pace, here are the digital marketing trends we’re looking forward to seeing in 2021.
Your business now has the opportunity and the ability to create integrated online marketing programs quickly.
Joining email, voice and visual search, social, mobile and other online marketing channels – and most important measure and optimise those programs with built-in metrics.
Email marketing is the anchor for online marketing. And significant opportunities exist for your business to take advantage of synergies between online marketing channels.
According to Smart Insights, we now talk about ‘lifecycle email marketing’ and sales cadences within B2B nurturing. These highlight the trend of increased integration between channels. Using email marketing for prospects and customers is now treated as a channel that is better integrated with web, social, display ads and personal ads.
Mobile marketing reaches your targeted audiences and drives the urgency of your message in real-time while extending marketing reach.
Now regarding search, going into 2021, the end-goal is continuing to shift to more SEO visibility in “Position zero.” Position zero refers to no-click searches, also known as Google’s “Featured snippet”, and 2021 SEO marketing trends are prioritising it above all else. Featured snippets are mostly for long-tail keyword phrases like questions, and that is sometimes read aloud with Google Assistant voice searches.
Featured snippets are becoming more common on mobile. And according to this article, it says that mobile and desktop featured snippets have grown 11% and 9.5% over the past two years, respectively. The article also notes that 62% of mobile users never click on search results and having a featured snippet reduces CTR by 5.3%
You need to understand that Google is doing all it can to keep search traffic and consumers on its own entities, i.e. Google Search, Google My Business and YouTube. So it would help if you considered this when planning your marketing strategy.
Another interesting thing to note is that according to this article, a survey conducted by Social Publi, 93% of marketers already use influencer marketing. That’s to a large extent because influencer marketing can often bring in a higher ROI than search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising with Google Ads.
According to this article, user experience is not just a buzzword. It’s now becoming a central ranking factor for search algorithms. The article notes that according to a May 2020 Google Webmaster Central Blog post, Google Search now factors so-called “UX signals” into its rankings.
Conclusion
These are some significant trends to watch. There are lots more, but for the sake of time, we cannot cover all the patterns now. So which of these digital marketing trends are you interested in?
Mauco Enterprises is ready to assist you with your digital marketing efforts. We have made it our goal to help genuine businesses grow online. Contact us now if you need help in developing an effective online marketing strategy.
Originally published at mauconline.net
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