Beginning a new decade naturally inspires businesses that are planning for the future. But does part of your planning involve strengthening your current marketing strategies?
In a world of digital communication and online culture, marketing is the cornerstone of any successful business. It can greatly improve the projection of your mission to better attract customers, talent, and investors. Don’t know where to start, or struggling to pick up some traction in your current marketing strategies? Check out these top tips to help your business move forward:
Engaging Content
Becoming a force in the marketing world starts with building up content that is interesting to your consumers. The first step to this is figuring out your specific audience and what they enjoy seeing. Then, figure out what that particular audience most likely wants to see. The seven most common aspects of almost every viral post on the internet are emotion, visual appeal, reality, universal message, relevance, controversy, and surprise.
For instance, Wendy’s appeals mostly to the younger demographic ranging from teenagers to millennials. To accommodate this and attract more attention through social media, they have become known for creating humorous feuds between other fast-food giants on Twitter, as well as making memes about the establishment.
Once you know your audience, promote content that is engaging and interactive across all marketing streams. Use various content strategies to tell a story to your audience on what your company’s focus is. Video content has especially become a driving force among internet users. According to HubSpot, 68% of people prefer learning about new products and services through a short video, and live videos keep audiences watching 3x longer than pre-recorded videos.
There is no set way to do great content marketing. But by doing some research on what is trending, tweaking it to best represent your audiences and company, and experimenting with different ideas, your business can stand out among the rest.
Personalization with AI
This is an incredibly broad topic that has completely changed the way we think about marketing. In an Adweek survey of over 1,000 people, 90% projected more appeal towards personalization. Also, 80% said they would be more likely to engage with a company that offers a more personalized experience.
You can start doing this with your email blasts; segmented email lists with personalized email blasts have shown to perform better than generic emails sent to the entire contact list.
Personalization can also be implemented into aspects of currently active marketing campaigns with the help of artificial intelligence to do all the hard work for you. According to Forbes, 84% of respondents think AI will enable them to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage. A popular way to do this is with chatbots.
Talk to your webmaster or research into your website hosting company to see how you can implement chatbots into your website, or even your Facebook page. Today, consumers need information and questions answered instantly, so having that instant access can help boost continuous support. Plus, companies with limited resources and employee time can benefit greatly from this. By 2022, chatbots will help businesses save over $8 billion per annum according to Juniper Research.
Positive Customer Experience
Marketing has massively shifted from being about convincing people, to just being a real, honest company with great customer service. In fact, 73% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their purchasing decisions. But only 49% think that today’s companies actually provide good customer service. That is why it is important to grow an honest company and offer the best service to your clients and any members involved
Most individuals are not asking a friend or referring to their local yellow pages for referrals anymore. People are going out and doing their own research, so it is important to have a positive online presence, as well as be easily accessible (more on that later).
Encourage your network to leave reviews about your business on platforms such as Google, Yelp, and Facebook. Also, having up-to-date employee engagement and knowledge can make a huge difference; 46% of consumers will abandon a business or brand if its employees are not knowledgeable.
Balancing Visualization & Readability
Make sure that the content presented on your website and social media is growing in importance and relevance, especially these days with the explosion of smart speakers and voice search. Currently, 20% of searches are done by voice and that number is rising. Some major companies already utilize this tool to build up their brand; for instance, Patron who is known for having the voice command “ask Patron for a cocktail recipe.” So be ahead of the game and have content that is grammatically correct and easy to read.
Simultaneously, it is also valuable to have strong visualization because people now prefer visual content over plain text. Reading 200-250 words takes an average of 60 seconds, while our brain only needs 1/10 of a second to understand an image. That makes sense why the click-through-rate of a website is about 47% higher in sites containing images. So, keep these two factors in mind when building or revamping your website, as well as when posting on social media. There has to be a common ground between the two.
SERP Position Zero
The name may seem intimidating, but this is a growing trend in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing. Search Engine Results Page (SERP) position zero is a valuable piece of real estate on a search engine website, where an answer or related search content appears at the very top before all the search results and sponsored links. This is the most desired spot because most individuals who make searches tend to click on the results closest to the top. Not only does this position stand out when people search for your company, but it also comes up with certain keywords that people type in, such as “contractors near me” or “contractors on Long Island.”
What is also valuable about this position is people do not necessarily have to go through your website when they ask a specific question; the answer comes up in the search results that are linked from your website. This is great when people use voice searching, as mentioned in the previous bullet.
Over 60% of search results returned by Google are position zero results, so your company should consider working towards this popular position. It requires different SEO techniques than the original methods, but more and more SEO companies are going to be offering this service in the coming years. If you can be one of the first in your industry and area to get there, you will have a huge advantage.
It is understandable why marketing can be intimidating. It is a broad field that changes every day and may become time-consuming and costly. But with that in mind, consider focusing on these tips and developing a step-by-step marketing strategy that best fits your business.
This article was also featured in our newsletter Bottom Line Vol. 21