For every business that aims for success, a well-established digital presence is one of the top marketing goals.
However, things are moving very fast in the world of digital marketing, and if you want to keep your business competitive in 2020, you need to keep up with the most recent trends and technologies.
Read on and learn more about the five top ways to push your digital marketing in 2020.
Polish Your SEO
To push your digital marketing in 2020, consider investing a part of your digital marketing budget in polishing your SEO efforts, improving your rankings, and making sure your content reaches the right audiences.
Search engine optimization is so much more than using relevant keywords and links in your content. Your goal should be reaching the top position in search results so that your potential customers can easily find you when they’re looking for a solution to their pain points.
But, users’ satisfaction while consuming your content affects your ranking too. If your website visitor doesn’t like what they find on your site or has trouble navigating it, they will probably bounce off in a matter of seconds. This makes a double loss – you’ll be left without a potential customer, and your rankings will be affected.
To avoid such an outcome, you need to ensure that your content is technically optimized too. Some of the basics you should cover in 2020 are:
- Optimizing your website for mobile devices, as that’s where half of your traffic is coming from
- Speeding up your website, as this factor directly influences the bounce rate – a 3-second delay has a bounce rate probability of only 32%, while each added second triples the odds of bouncing.
- Include keywords in your alt text, which you use to describe images.
- Include keywords in meta titles and meta descriptions.
- Use an SSL certificate for your website etc.
SEO may take some time to give results, but it does an excellent job for your brand visibility and awareness, attracting qualified traffic and a long-term ROI.
Use Chatbots for Customer Service
Due to its capability to collect massive amounts of data, analyze it, and spot patterns, artificial intelligence has improved many digital marketing processes, bringing some of them to a whole new level.
Its efficiency can best be seen in the use of conversational chatbots that act as virtual “concierges,” interacting with users and supporting them in achieving their goals. Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), these chatbots can now talk to customers in a natural, human-like way.
Chatbots can collect data about customers from each touchpoint and different sources so that communication only gets better over time. In other words, these intelligent algorithms offer content that is relevant and tailored to customers’ individual needs and interests.
Leveraging an AI-powered chatbot in your digital marketing strategy in 2020 means your business can be available 24/7, and provide instant responses to 80% of the customer queries without any human supervision. Long story short, you won’t be putting too much strain on your limited human resources.
Rethink Your Social Media Strategy
With 2.95 billion active social media users worldwide in 2019, social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, etc. can help you reach out to millions of eager customers worldwide.
However, you will only be successful if your social media presence is crafted to fit the needs of your target audience. In other words, they expect your business to be there when they need it. And for that, you should find out what their preferred channel of communication is.
Instead of basing your social media strategy on presumptions, use your own and the industry data to choose and focus your efforts on the channels that are favored by your audience.
For example, Instagram and Snapchat are extremely popular among GenZers in the U.S., so if you’re targeting that population with your campaigns, you’d better build your presence on those platforms.
Stories are all the rage now, on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, so this is a great opportunity for you to keep up with the trends and take advantage of FOMO, to which most people are susceptible.
To excel, take advantage of the tools that can help you create great social media content, and share it with your audience at the best hours.
Content Still Rules
You can’t step up your digital marketing game in 2020 unless your content is of superb quality, so make sure you create more in-depth, relevant, and entertaining content that both your customers and the search engines will love.
To make your content stellar, you should put more emphasis on tailoring it to the needs of your target audience. This means taking a deeper dive into understanding current and prospective customers, based on data you have available: their demographics, education, income level, relationship status, interests, habits, and buying motivation.
Your goal is to determine their needs and their pain points and provide great pieces of informational, educational, and entertaining content that will offer the right solution.
This kind of understanding is crucial for crafting engaging, customer-centric content. It’s important to add value to your prospective clients or create useful blog posts or videos that they can use to improve their life.
Also, think about “content experiences” in your strategy. This means rethinking your content based on the context in which it appears, and the experience it offers when combined with all the other contextual elements, such as environment, design, and placement.
You can provide some great experiences for the users by leveraging advanced technologies and making your content more interactive with the help of augmented reality and virtual reality, 360-degree videos, polls, interactive content, and quizzes.
As video continues to be one of the most effective elements, make sure you have more of it in your campaigns.
Personalize Your Email Campaigns
Email marketing continues to be a major part of business communication.
The days of generic emails are (thankfully) gone and will soon (hopefully) be forgotten and completely replaced by personalized email that not only addresses customers by their name but also delivers tailored offers.
Thanks to AI-powered automation tools, it’s now possible to segment your leads by any trait that you find relevant and deliver highly personalized campaigns, resulting in much higher open rates, CTRs, and conversions.
The tips above will help you to push your digital marketing strategy in the right direction and hit your sales numbers.
Michael has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael’s work at Qeedle.