Google released quite a few updates and features in the year 2020 for over 1 billion users. Most of these updates are directed toward improving the user experience, security and privacy. In case you missed out on some of Google’s key announcements, here’s a quick summary for you.
Key highlights from Google in 2022
Android 13
Google wants to take the OEM customisation experience to the next level in Android 13. The users will be able to customise the looks of the UI with ready-made colour variants that can be applied throughout the OS and reflected in wallpapers and themes.
As for multilingual users, the Android 13 will give a variety of options to select different languages for different apps through phone settings.
Security and privacy update
With the transformation to remote work and using devices outside of security, office networks have become more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. To enable users to navigate online in a more secure manner Google is launching Account Safety Status for apps.
If an account is not fully secure, a yellow alert icon will appear on the profile pic and recommend actions that the users can take to secure the app.
Latest pixel devices
As many of us expected, Google has announced a new mid-range smartphone Pixel 6A. It will be using Google’s Tensor chip and have a 6.1-inch OLED screen with a blazing 60Hz refresh rate.
It also supports 5G and is equipped with dual cameras. Not only Google has also given a sneak into the design of Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro smartphones.
Expanding search experience
Google has announced that it is growing the scope of what users can do with the latest multi-search feature launched to help users search with images. Users can now search by taking a picture or screenshot of local businesses, retailers, and other goods and adding “near me” while exploring.
Google is also putting together another feature called “scene exploration,” which will allow users to pan the camera in multi-search so that they can get more information on multiple objects in a scene.
We hope you found our summation of Google’s latest updates helpful and in case you have any questions, simply drop us a line and we’d love to help you out.
Given the recent technological innovations and technology, the marketing world is drastically changing, especially the digital one. While we can’t control what the future might bring, we can be prepared for it.
Small to medium businesses must be highly adaptive to the changing marketing trends to stay competitive in the digital marketplace. To do that they must implement the latest digital marketing services to attract, engage and delight your audience.
In case you’re looking for more info regarding digital marketing services that your brand can execute in 2022 then keep reading as we are going to do just that.
So let’s get cracking!
1) Social media marketing
Social Media Marketing is consistently evolving, becoming a powerful online marketing resource for companies and brands. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram can immensely increase exposure and interest in your business.
Search engines have already started integrating updates, Tweets, profiles, and comments into their results pages, recognising the importance of social interaction. As the internet community grows and changes, social media campaigns, as well as their tactics, have to stay one step ahead.
2) Pay-Per-Click Marketing
Competing online is quite difficult than ever. Targeted traffic attracts actual customers at any stage of the buyer’s lifecycle. Imagine reaching your customers after they have gone through your flagship product. Imagine delighting your customers with a well-structured message, engaging them to visit your website wherever they’re just a few clicks away to find out, adding to your bottom line.
That’s Pay per click advertising (PPC). Delivering a targeted ad to your potential customers at the precise moment they’re looking out. Generating qualified leads goes a lot deeper than making a number of ads and choosing some of the keywords. It involves in-depth analysis, testing, adaption, refinement, and scaling.
3) Creating Conversion Funnel
A conversion funnel basically contains all the steps through which your likely prospects engage with your brand till they have successfully turned into customers. Needless to say that creating a conversion funnel is the base for applying successful digital marketing strategies.
Your business needs to ensure that your funnel needs to be as streamlined and user-friendly as possible. Otherwise, users who engage with your brands would most likely get confused and take their precious business somewhere else.
Its highly advised that you consider consulting a professional digital marketer to help you develop a professional, memorable & engaging brand identity with an effective conversion funnel.
4) Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO (Search engine optimisation) is an essential component of digital marketing, it uses a combination of on-site and off-site strategies that are focussed on bringing relevant traffic to your business website.
Google serves an uncountable number of searches each day, and the majority of searchers never look beyond the first page. Do you know where your company ranks? If it isn’t at the top, it might as well be invisible. Implementing the right SEO strategies can transform your business website above your competition.
Lastly,
Let’s face it, today’s online market is highly competitive And to stand tall within this competition, you need to understand your customer’s journey from awareness to consideration to purchase.
Being a full-service digital marketing company, we can help your brand become known as “the best answer” wherever prospects and customers may be looking and that will drive value to your business. All your need to do is connect with us for a 30 minutes free consultation and we would be delighted to you out in any way we can.
Here’s QL Tech’s comprehensive guide to digital marketing, irrespective of your size or budget.
Whether you own and run a business, or work in the marketing department, you can’t escape digital marketing. It is the buzzword and covers a vast set of opportunities – as well as its own, unique terminology.
In this article, we’ll cover all digital marketing comprehensively, with detailed explanations. After reading through, you’ll know what your options are, and how best to leverage them effectively.
What is Digital Marketing
Digital marketing covers all the activities that involve reaching out to people via the internet. Its foundation is content (information), which is used to attract people to get acquainted with, and buy your products or services.
Speaking of content, remember, that even a well written (and free!) Google My Business listing counts. However, as you get savvier, you’ll want to ramp it up to increase eyeballs and revenue.
There are multiple methods and channels you can use to put your message across. Some are free. Others cost money.
But, the internet is vast and diverse. It accommodates everyone, offering several smart ways to do it, irrespective of your size, or budget.
Why Digital Marketing is Hot (And Will Continue to Be)
Advertising online is the in thing. Any other reasons to join the bandwagon?
Yes, lots!
Reason #1: Digital Marketing Works, Because it’s Targeted and Relevant
Let’s explain that further. Targeted means you can show your message specifically to the people you choose to. Relevant, as you can show different messages to different audiences.
Billboards and TV ads are displayed to everyone watching it. Some may like it. Others might not even relate to it.
Reason #2: When You Market on the Internet, Costs are Way Lower
A billboard costs between $2,300 to $100,000 per month. A sought-after TV spot during the grand finals will cost even more. And that’s not counting the production costs.
On the other hand, you can advertise (with plain text) on Google search pages with a budget of a hundred.
You can also pass on your message for free, with a good content marketing strategy – we’ll be expanding on this later.
Reason #3: With Online Marketing, You Only Pay for What You Get
While there are multiple billing methods on the internet, nearly all involve paying only when a user takes an action. It might be a view or a click – you choose.
Reason #4: The Internet Opens Up a Larger Audience
89% of Australians are on the internet. You have more chance of connecting with them on the internet, than anywhere else.
Reason #5: You Can Change Your Marketing Strategy by the Minute
Once you’ve made an offline marketing campaign, you’re more or less stuck with it, irrespective of the performance. With digital marketing, you can alter your strategy in seconds. You can change your audience, messaging and even the amount you’re willing to pay.
Reason #6: Your ROI is Measurable
It’s really hard to measure how much of your sales were due to a TV, print, or billboard ad. With digital marketing, you know which ad or piece of content resulted in a conversion. This allows you to fine-tune your messaging to a T.
Reason #7 You Can Beat Rivals With Deeper Pockets
The Internet makes the David vs Goliath story an everyday reality. You don’t need to shell out big bucks to fight for limited space on a newspaper. If you play it smart, betting on the right keywords and messaging, you can beat the competition at their game.
How Digital Marketing Works
Effective internet marketing is built on 3 key foundations (ranked in the order of importance):
Audience
While content is king, your audience is your God. They decide what will work, and what won’t.
That’s why it’s critical to understand who your prospects are, their likes and dislikes. You need to know where they hang out on the net. Their lingo. And their online habits.
Content
Once you get to know your audience, you can then create content tailored to them. You speak their language. You address their pain points. You like the things they like. And your pet peeves are the same.
Understanding the Buyer’s Journey
In broad terms, there are 3 stages of the buyer’s journey online.
First comes the awareness stage, when your audience becomes aware that they have a problem, and wonder what the solution could be. You know the answer – you! But, don’t shout it out just yet. Address their problem, and let them in on all the possible solutions, including any you don’t own.
Second, comes the consideration stage, when your prospects are weighing the solutions very seriously. This is the time to give your products or services centerstage, expressing why you’re the best option.
Finally, there’s the decision stage. Your prospects have made up their minds. All they require is a nudge into your shopping cart. Time for a discount maybe?
What are the Elements of Digital Marketing?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Content Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Social Media Marketing
Email Marketing
Retargeting & Remarketing
Pay Per Click (PPC) & its Variations
Affiliate Marketing
Marketing Automation
Sponsored Content & Native Advertising
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimising your website and content towards search engine queries.
Unless you’re a well-known brand or name, a search engine is the most likely place to be discovered. After all, nearly half of product searches start on Google.
Optimizing your content for search engines is important because users may use different terms to the ones you think they do.
Lets’s say you own a shoe store. You’re wondering which of your products should take centre stage and build your content around. Should you focus on sneakers, trainers, runners or running shoes?
You think about it a lot, and decide that you’ll focus on the word ‘sports shoes’. After all, more people will search for a generic term, right? If you look up the Google search data, here are the results.
As you can see, the word ‘sports shoes’ is not so popular among Australians on Google.
Here’s another insight you can get from search data.
If a person searched for just runners, they might be referring to carpets! So it’s a term you must use carefully.
The key to SEO is to do keyword analysis on Google Adwords, and find the terms related to your product that people search for. You can then build your site content around these terms.
While at it, also create content related to your main keywords. When you’ve covered the topic completely, Google will consider you to be an expert in that realm, and direct more traffic your way.
SEO falls into 3 categories:
On-page SEO
It refers to all the content optimization efforts done on your site, like in the example above. It includes keyword research, and then adding keywords in your content (not stuffing them), especially in the headlines and subheads.
You must also add keywords in your metatags and meta descriptions – they let the search engine bots know what your site is about. Meta descriptions also appear on the search results page, just under your page’s title. Do note though, Google might decide to take other content from the page if it feels that’s more relevant to the search query.
Off-page SEO
There’s another factor besides the quality and authoritativeness of the content on your site, that Google uses to rank you for a certain keyword. It’s the number of backlinks you have.
Backlinks are the links pointing to your site from an external source. And it’s very important to have as many of them as possible.
Consider it to be like a good reputation. You wouldn’t give too much importance to a person himself claiming to be very good. On the other hand, if many other people told you he was really very good, you’d definitely take notice.
At the same time, if a lot of shady characters recommended the guy, you’d be downright sceptical. Therefore, your backlinks must be from good sources.
2 factors determine the quality of your backlinks.
Relevant Anchor Text
Anchor text is the words within which your link is embedded. So, if you want to rank high on Google search results for shoes, it helps if the links to your site come attached to the word shoes or related terms.
It also helps if the links are from pages with relevant content. Plus, links pointing to your homepage are not as beneficial as those pointing to a page hosting the content you’re optimizing for.
Domain Authority
DA is a term that gives you an idea about the quality of a website. It ranges from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the more of a ranking boost you’ll get.
A DA score above 70 is very good, but it’s not easy to get a link from such sites.
DA between 70 to 20 is good, and that’s where you should aim to get links from.
A score below 20 is like a shady reputation. Give it a miss.
Remember, that you can’t trick Google with shortcuts like placing links in comments, or using sites that are built solely for generating backlinks. Tactics you can use are guest blogging, republishing (modified) content, and creating classy infographics.
The bottom line is to simply create awesome and original content that others will want to link back to.
Technical SEO
SEO also has a more technical aspect related to your website, and how it is structured. You need to ensure that all of your pages are accessible to Google’s search engine bot, as it crawls the internet looking to find new pages and categorise them. A good web designer will help with this.
2. Content Marketing
Content is the #1 way to stand out from the competition on the net.
But, creating good content is not enough. You also have to put it out there, calling attention to it.
Content marketing is the process of generating quality content and distributing it across multiple channels across the net.
As you can see, there are two steps to it. First, create useful information that your audience is searching for. Next, share it across multiple channels and fora to bring visitors to your site.
Both the traffic generated, as well as the engagement that your content earns (such as likes and shares will make Google sit up and take notice.
You can only put so much content on your main pages. So to achieve the critical mass required for success, you need to diversify into multiple content types. Some of them are:
Blogs
Having a blog, and posting articles regularly is key. The first step is to figure out the broad topics that you want to cover and write a bunch of articles around each. Answer the questions your audience have on their mind. Address their pain points. Offer solutions and advice. But, don’t hard sell all the time.
Whitepapers, Guides & Ebooks
Such long forms of content serve multiple aims.
They establish you as an expert. They also give your audience something to take home and keep with them.
And the best part is, that you’re giving all this helpful advice for free. Well, kind of! Before giving away your pdfs, you can ask for their email in return. That way, you can build a database of customers – a very important part of digital marketing.
The data you collect can be loaded onto a customer data platform or CRM, and you can send across emails, newsletters, exclusive offers, and more.
The one drawback of giving access to your best information only after filling a form is that Google can’t crawl it. It means that the content in your pdf won’t help your search engine results page (SERP) rankings as Google doesn’t know you have it.
Therefore, put most of that information on the page, with a button that leads to the form.
Videos
Everyone loves visual content. You’re probably watching more videos than you’re reading articles. Videos are a good way to provide value for your audience’s time.
Did you know that Youtube is the most visited site after Google? On average, an Australian user spends 18 minutes on it, visiting 10 pages every day. That’s even more time than spent on the search engine.
Besides, 82% of all consumer traffic on the net will be directed towards videos by 2022. And here’s the best stat – your video has a 50 times higher chance of appearing on the 1st page of Google, as compared to text content on the same topic.
3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
While SEO and content marketing are free, SEM is when you pay to be placed on the first pages of Google. Your ad appears when a user types in your keyword in the search box – this is called paid search. The ad also appears above the usual search results – also known as organic search.
This is especially useful when you’re starting, or you need a quick burst of sales volumes.
What you need to do, is first identify the keywords that you think will drive traffic and/or sales. Google Adwords indicates the volume and competitiveness of each keyword. The ideal one to pick has high search volumes and low competition.
That way, you can get your message across to a large number of people, without paying as much.
Once you’ve picked your keyword, you’ve got to place a bid for it. That’s what you’ll pay if a user clicks on your ad. There are 2 ways to bid:
Manual Bidding
You manually set how much you’re willing to bid for each keyword.
Automated bidding
You set an average daily budget per click. Google then automatically places a bid, to maximize your clicks within your budget over a month.
So, do you have to outbid everyone else for your ad to be seen? No. Google decides which ad appears based on this formula:
Ad Rank = CPC Bid x Quality Score
What is the Quality Score in Google Ads?
Google measures your quality score based on 3 factors:
Expected Click Through Rate (CTR)
How likely is it that your ad will be clicked on for a certain query?
Ad Relevance
Does your ad content match the user’s intent?
Landing Page
Are the landing pages (where the click takes users) relevant and useful to those who’ve clicked?
The gist of it is, that your ad content and landing pages must closely match the user’s keywords and intent. How your ad performs over time ultimately determines the quality score.
By fine-tuning your content, you can get your ad to appear higher, despite bidding lower than your competition.
Another big advantage of SEM is that you can show your ad to very specific audiences. You can define who sees your ads based on demographics and current location. You can also create different content to be shown to different audiences, even if they type in the same thing.
You can also be picky about the keyword variations your ads appear for. You can choose:
Broad Match
Your ad appears if your keyword matches with the intent of the query
Phrase Match
Your ad is displayed if the keyword phrase is included in the query.
Exact Match
Your shows up only if the exact keyword or a close variation is typed in.
Negative Keywords
You can also choose to not show your ads if a certain word appears along with the query. For example, if you’re targeting the word ‘runners’ for your shoe store. You can ensure your ad does not appear if the word ‘carpet’ and related terms appear.
The wider your net, the more impressions your ad will receive, but it will also increase your costs.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing is simply promoting your content on social media. There are 2 ways to do it.
One is to create highly engaging as well as share-worthy content and promote it among your social communities. This is absolutely free. You can also take part in social discussions, and converse with influencers to spread your message.
Besides, networks like Instagram allow users to follow the hashtags of their choice. When they do, they are shown posts containing the hashtag, even from people they don’t follow.
So, add relevant hashtags that your audience is likely to be interested in.`
The other way to market on social media is to pay for your ad or content to be shown. This is great to connect with new audiences.
Here’s proof. 60% of Instagram users in a survey have followed a new brand after seeing an ad.
Social media is also a great place to sell. More than 33% of the respondents in the same survey have made a purchase after seeing an ad on Instagram.
Some of the top social sites are:
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
Pinterest
The most common mistake marketers make when on social media, is taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Each channel is different, and the same audience does things differently on each. You should do the same too.
Tailor your messaging to mimic your audience’s actions. Use the appropriate content format. And focus on building a community of believers.
Paid social media marketing works very similarly to PPC. Each channel has its version of the quality score. And all allow you to target specific audiences.
But, there’s one additional variable when it comes to user targeting on social media – audience behaviour.
You can, for example, show your sports shoe ads to people who follow a certain athlete, are part of a fitness community, or, liked/shared a post related to sports in the recent past.
This allows you to show your ad to more precise buyer personas, allowing for more clicks and conversions.
Email Marketing
An email is perhaps the one means of communication that you’re sure will reach your prospect. But the drawback is that every other marketer knows this, and inboxes are flooded with emails – most of them unwelcome.
So how do you stand out among the clutter?
Here’s the step by step way to being welcome in your audience’s inbox.
Create a Database of Customers
Offer every visitor to your site something in return for their email id. It could be an eBook download. A discount code. Or a newsletter they’d love to read.
You can do the same across social media channels too.
Segment Your Database
Segment your users according to their personas, tastes, and stage in the buyer’s journey.
Send Personalised Emails
Send emails that are in tune with each user segment’s needs. Also, refer to each person by name. If your database is huge, an email or marketing automation tool can help you achieve this without a sweat.
Avoid Spammy Content
There are certain words email service providers use to classify mail as unwanted and send them to the spam folder. Words like FREE, offer and discount are red flags.
Allow Easy Unsubscribing
Make it easy for a user to stop receiving emails. Otherwise, you might end up in the spam folder, and that’s always a black mark against your email id.
Display Advertising
Display ads are visual ads that appear on websites. To put up a display ad, you can get in touch with a site popular among your audience directly, or link up with a display ad network.
The top display ad networks are:
Google Display Network (Adsense)
Facebook Audience Network Ads
Yahoo! Network
Apple Advertising
Taboola
Airpush
Each of these networks has its own advantages, and it’s up to you to pick the right one. Facebook Audience Network Ads, for example, uses the humungous user data the social network has, as well as its other in-house channels like Instagram and Whatsapp.
Apple Advertising gives access to the apps in the Apple app store. Taboola lets you display ads on its vast network of affiliate sites.
There are hundreds of display networks. Many focus on niche categories and geographical locations. So, find the sites your audience frequent, and create the appropriate messaging for each site you’re advertising on.
In addition to PPC, there are 2 more ways to decide the terms on which you’ll pay.
Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
You pay every time 1,000 users view your ad.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
You pay only when a predetermined conversion occurs.
7. Retargeting & Remarketing
Retargeting is simply sending a relevant message to users who’ve already interacted with your site before.
They may have visited a few pages without taking any real action. They may have loaded an item onto a shopping cart, but haven’t returned since. Or, they could have visited a CTA page, without filling in the form and pressing the button.
In the first case, wouldn’t it be great if you could offer a guide related to the pages the prospect was browsing? For the second, a discount on that very product might turn the tide in your favour. And in the last case, offering that CTA page goodie without having to fill the entire form (only keying the email id) – might be a nice display of empathy.
All of the above actions are possible, and it’s put into action by the humble cookie.
When a visitor visits your site, you can allow the browser to place a cookie on his or her computer. When another site is visited by the same user, you can display the appropriate ad. For this to happen, you’d have to tap into a display network, and give them a collection of display ads. The network will then display the ad.
This form of retargeting is also known as offsite retargeting.
With the help of the cookie, you can also perform actions on your site. Like an on-page popup displaying a discount, or maybe offering to take the visitor back to the page they were last on. This is an example of onsite retargeting.
Remarketing is essentially the same thing, except that you use cookie information to send highly contextual emails.
In addition, display networks also allow you to use a visitor’s email id to identify and send them the right ad. In this case, the line between retargeting and remarketing blur, to mean the same thing.
8. Marketing Automation
As you’re probably wondering, how is it possible to retarget visitors? After all, everything occurs in milliseconds.
The visitor visits your site. Then leaves to visit another site. Between the time your prospect clicks on that site, and the page loads, the decision on which ad to display is made. And when the page content appears, your message is there too.
All of this is possible with marketing automation. It connects all the key players in your online marketing efforts – website, customer database, email engine and marketing systems – as well as your sales and marketing teams.
The perfect marketing automation system helps you identify and segment your audience, create the right content, and automatically perform the appropriate actions based on what your audience is doing – in real-time
Here are some examples.
Email Automation
You can retarget site visitors, send thank you emails on a purchase, and send the appropriate newsletter to the right audience segment. All, without moving a muscle.
Nurturing Leads into Customers
You can send the apt information at the appropriate time to your prospects, to nudge them along in the buyer’s journey. The information can be sent via multiple channels – free as well as paid – and coordinated across your marketing, sales and service teams.
Programmatic Advertising
Targeting the right audience at the right time with the right messaging – automatically, is called programmatic advertising. All of this happens in real-time.
Measuring ROI
There are multiple ways to measure ROI. You might want to calculate your returns based on conversions, sales, or simply brand engagement. With an automated system in place, you can check all of these factors on the go. With such information at your fingertips, you can focus on your marketing strategy, recalibrating it by the minute.
Attribution Modelling
When it comes to online marketing, conversion usually happens over multiple touchpoints. A customer may have read a blog, then viewed a video, and finally clicked on a display ad with a discount before buying.
So, which of these touchpoints do you give credit to?
There are various attribution models. Some give credit to the first touchpoint(s), and others to the last (few). There are also attribution models that distribute the credit to different touchpoints in a weighted manner.
An automated digital marketing system can automatically attribute your successes to the touchpoints you choose. Over time, you can decipher which of your assets are giving you the most returns.
Marketing automation allows you to let the system handle all the mundane, repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on the strategic decisions that’ll grow your business.
9. Affiliate Advertising
You can display ads from other brands on your site, to earn additional revenue. To do so, you’ll have to join an affiliate network. After you join, you can open up spaces on your webpage for advertisers on the network.
There are many compensation methods, including:
Revenue sharing/commissions/pay per sale (PPS)
Cost per action/acquisition (CPA)
Cost per click (CPC)
Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
Getting a commission on a sale is the most popular way to get paid as a member of an affiliate network. So, ensure that your audience, the content of the display page, and the ad messaging are aligned, for best results.
10. Sponsored Content & Native Advertising
As you know, ads are sales-y and viewers know you’re making a pitch. To overcome this hitch, there are forms of advertising that are not so obvious.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content may be in the form of an advertorial, where a website or online publication publishes an article that conveys information about your brand and/or products. Influencer marketing is also a form of sponsored content, where you pay social media stars in cash or kind to promote your products.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is creating promotional content for a site in a format and tone that looks exactly like the other material on the site. A good example is this article on the dreariness of filing tax returns on The Onion by H&R Block, a tax payment firm.
Three Ways to Minimize Costs With Digital Marketing
The key to minimizing your online advertising costs is to target your ads to as specific an audience as possible. That way, you display your ad to the people most likely to take the desired action, driving down advertising costs, and pushing up conversion rates and ROI.
Besides the targeting techniques mentioned in the article so far, here are 3 more:
Ad Scheduling
You specify the time periods when your ads are displayed, picking the times your audience is most likely to be online.
Device Targeting
You choose the device on which your ad is displayed, like picking mobiles for queries with ‘near me’ in it. That’s when your prospect is most likely to buy.
Geotargeting
You aim at users within a target radius, ideally when they’re close to your store.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is the holy grail of marketing today, and leveraging it effectively is critical to win customers and make friends in the digital age. The advantage of internet marketing is that small players can punch above their weight, and quick, agile marketers can outfox the heavyweights.
As you transform your business into an online marketing machine, remember to keep your audience at the centre of all your efforts. Focus primarily on your customers, not the competition. Create content that they’ll love. And spread it across the channels they frequent, in their everyday language.
Remember, as the world moves online, a well-thought digital marketing strategy will give your business the immunity to survive the pandemic and its crippling effects.
At QL Tech, we’ve been aiding businesses in their digital transformation efforts with market analysis, process & marketing automation, customer database platforms, and digital marketing. Get in touch, and we’ll help you get ahead too.
Branding is a concept that is adopted by most of the businesses today to increase sales. Wherever we go, we come across different brands. It represents what the company is all about. So, to get people to notice your brand, planning a good branding strategy is vital.
Initially, when we talk about branding, it used to be all about the visual differentiation. But these days, with intense competition, branding has changed significantly. Branding in 2020 is no cakewalk. It takes time and struggles to adopt different techniques to sustain.
Here are the nine most important trends to keep in mind while planning your branding strategy this year.
1. Brand story
Telling a story about how the brand came so far from scratch can build human connections. People love listening to great stories and news. The emotional information, when told in the form of a story, will have a higher brand recall.
Customers relate to these personalized stories which are connected to people. A great story can make your customers feel you are genuine and also increase the reach of your brand easily. Another way of storytelling is by sharing employee stories on the brand’s social media!
2. Chatbots and other technologies
Technologies like chatbots help companies to interact with their customers instantly. The tool has proved to be of great use to many brands. It helps brands to interact with their customers quickly and to engage them on the website. It also helps in guiding the users in their customer journey.
Getting humans to perform every function will require a big team that would cost a lot. So, you can assign your chatbots to make the interactions with your brand and to get relevant messages in their inboxes.
3. Observe and serve online communities
These days branded communities are a growing trend to keep a watch. These forums provide users with a platform to share topics and experiences which are brand-related. It helps brands to talk about the products and get a rough understanding of the customers’ requirements without trying to sell.
Many brands are trying to make use of their communities for insights on the launch of the latest products and services.
4. Increase brand loyalty with creative customer experience
Make use of creative ways to keep your customers in a loop all the time. They should be able to contact your brand anytime they feel like and track their orders online and more. An integrated messaging system for them to upload instructions and post information is essential for boosting customer experience.
For creating customer loyalty, you must be able to provide an excellent customer experience in the first place. More than just giving away promotional gifts, brands must focus more on how well they can differentiate themselves from their competitors.
5. Optimize for mobiles
People are using their mobiles for almost everything today. Mobile users’ interactions are rising significantly. Those who don’t intend on including this will go down the competition. So, make sure your brand is well optimized for mobile users. Having an optimum sized CTA button and short subject lines with small paragraphs is recommended to make your brand look neat on mobile screens.
Email marketing is going to take over on mobiles by becoming more targeted and providing curated content to the prospects, rather than lengthy content!
Display adverts are not enough in 2020. The average adverts CTR is pretty low. Having a well-targeted promotional content to match the real-time queries will make sure the readers are getting more advertising content.
Native adverts are based on the content, and so they can make up a large percentage of the total display ad revenue in the coming days. Natives can Blend with the surrounding content efficiently.
This trend is nothing new to us, but in 2020 this trend has great importance. If we look at any renowned brand, they make use of influencers to promote their brand in some way. Many people look forward to recommendations made by influencers while they purchase. Companies, on the other hand, depend on these influencers to market their products.
So, if you can find an influencer who can well relate to your brand, then nothing like it! Make sure the partnership is transparent to the customers.
8. Always have a social conscience
A few branding trends fade away as fast as they appear. Ever wondered why? Having self-conscience of the things happening around us is crucial. Consumers are looking for companies to whom they can relate their views on social things happening around them.
Modern brands ought to demonstrate their concern towards the environment and the people. Many believe multinationals can ease social problems and wants them to do more!
9. Broad Marketing Strategy
A good strategy requires combined planning. You got to understand where to do what! A representative from each department should all sit together to plan and scheme a strategy. Every idea and suggestions got to be considered while coming up with an excellent strategy!
Producing this kind of content can be pretty tough if you are not much familiar with the digital marketing opportunities available out there. It is always advisable to hire digital marketing experts to get the process done!
10. Produce quality content
A customer associating with your brand will want to explore things before they even think of buying anything. So, if you can provide them with educational and interesting content, they can stick around your site for a while and subsequently purchase your products or services.
It is better if you can create valuable content less often rather than producing poor content frequently. People appreciate the comprehensive analysis of topics that are interesting and informative.
To wrap it up!
Digital branding is changing consistently with time. Branding is getting more characterized by these trends. Brands are trying to be more straightforward, transparent and genuine with a motive to provide a human experience. Brands nowadays are striving to become more real, conscious, and responsive!
Brand positioning will need to select a different method from traditional methods. Relating to the customers as varying levels of their journey is essential. Whether it is about developing a brand from scratch or looking to improve the aesthetic you already possess, it is vital to pay close attention to your brand presence!
Author Bio
Faiz Varghese is a social media marketer at TechWyse, an SEO agency in Canada. He is a knowledge craving techy. He loves to write quality content on the internet and has a passion for his job. While he is off work, you will find him playing football or watching his favorite shows!
At present, digital marketing services algorithms are difficult to understand. When algorithms become familiar, implementation seems like a breeze. But actually, the marketing algorithms are awesome. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is not bounded by just a few techniques. Digital marketing services include SEO that makes every online business stronger.
There are SEO practices in digital marketing that come handy for business websites. These services help to increase their readability, accessibility and revenue-generating paths. At the same time, these services can even drift your business into trouble. If you don’t apply the right one at the right time.
Now, let’s say you know all the digital marketing tactics. Also, you apply them to make your online business successful. But still, does it makes you a good entrepreneur? In SEO, there are many strategies but you can’t implement them all at the same time. To make your online business perform well on a bigger platform, you will have to follow only a few SEO marketing tactics. That will make your work impressive and will make you a better entrepreneur.
Let’s begin with those four digital marketing services that will allow you to become a better business person.
1) Mind-Boggling Content
While surfing on the internet, you will find similar information on different blog pages. The content can be in many storylines but the climax is the same. At present, the audience does not consider going through the same information again. They are always in a need of fresh and informative data.
So, consider gaining more knowledge before publishing your content live. All you have to do is spend more and more time on the internet searching for useful content for your audience. Being a digital marketing person, you should know the taste of your audience. The content on your website should be unique and simple enough to understand.
2) Google Search Isn’t Enough
Is your online business site ranking first on Google? It can be yes but not 24/7. Even if your online business website has all the products that customers want. Still, it will not be retaining its position. The reason will be your competitors using the latest SEO practices.
Google search is not enough to maintain your brand name as a vast part of the audience are mobile users. It’s a modern era and mobile applications are trending like hotcakes. No one considers opening up a browser to search for any item. People consider using apps to find better results.
At present, there are many services apps available in the market that provide amazing customer services. For example food ordering apps, taxi booking apps, medicine delivery apps and many more. People can get whatever they want with the help of these service apps. Now, this is why Google Search isn’t enough for every user.
Also, we should not forget that except Google, there are other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com. You will have to focus on such SEO practices that will allow your website to rank of various search engines.
3) Add Technical SEO
This year many new technologies came up to make our lives better. In the same manner, SEO has also brought many new innovations. Out of these innovations, Speed, Progressive Web Apps, and JavaScript are still the most focused parts of SEO. You may be countering many issues with these three terms while optimizing your website.
Website loading speed should be quick. But, due to heavy JavaScript, the website speed decreases. Consider avoiding bulky JavaScripts to run your online business website smoothly.
Progressive Web Apps are the future of digital marketing. Basically, Progressive Web App is one of the subcategories of mobile apps that are developed using ordinary computer languages like CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. It’s an amazing alternate of service websites that can drive huge traffic on your website. But still, many digital marketers are still not aware of its benefits.
SEO services have no bars, it includes practices that are responsible for optimising website visibility on search engines. SEO services are composed of practices like On-Page and Off-Page activities.
1) On-Page Activity:
On-page activity refers to all those SEO practices that are directly implemented on a web page to improve its ranking. Here are some key On-page activities:
Maintaining content structure
Content quality
Optimising HTML codes
Internal Linking
2) Off-Page Activity:
Off-page activity refers to those SEO practices that are implemented outside the website page to increase its ranking. Some of the key Off-page activities are:
Backlinking
Link Relevancy
Document sharing
Directory submission
But make sure both the page activities are implemented parallelly or else your efforts will go in vain. This is an advantage for you to make your business website reachable to your audience. Not only reachable but you can build brand trust, increase traffic and can improve ROI for your brand.
4) Voice Search Optimisation
According to recent studies, 90% of the world’s population are mobile users. In that 90 %, three-fourths of the people are surfing the internet throughout the day. Do you think people are searching for their information through typing? Of course not, almost 80% of the people are using voice search option to get the desired information.
Voice search is an important feature for every person’s day to day life. People are quite busy in their professional lives and do not get time to even get their fingers on their phones. Here’s why the voice search feature is beneficial as it allows people to get search results in a better form. So, it’s better to add a voice search option in your online business website.
Well, these are the four SEO marketing strategies. These can make your digital marketing services better. It’s uncertain that only these methods will improve your digital marketing skills. But, these can make you a better entrepreneur.
Every company needs a digital plan, but some sectors are more suited than others for digital marketing. Lanre Onibalusi
You’d be surprised to know that these industries are nailing themselves when it comes to digital marketing.
Legal (law firms)
Healthcare
Automotive
Entertainment
Food and beverages
Let us specifically talk about digital marketing in the healthcare industry.
Most of us have grown up seeing offline healthcare marketing through the means of banners in public places, radio ads and testimonials in newspapers, promotion of medical camps on television, and organised special health camp by hospitals and clinics.
However, the era has changed. There is a major revolution in terms of online presence and digital marketing in the healthcare industry.
Why digital marketing in the healthcare industry?
“Searching for health information is the 3rd most popular online activity”
All those info that is searched online is possible to market online. Nowadays, people surf the internet not only to find businesses or service providers but also to look for solutions to their problems online. Digital marketing includes mobile marketing, content marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, and more.
Since digital marketing is inexpensive as well as an effective way of marketing when compared to traditional methods, the healthcare industry cannot miss out on digital marketing.
Digital marketing trends in the healthcare industry
Both ‘who’ and ‘how’ of marketing strategies in the healthcare sector are getting affected. Hence, there has been a revolution in the role of physicians and practitioners as decision-makers.
These are the top-most digital marketing trends for the year 2018. Every healthcare marketer should evaluate these trends while determining the digital marketing strategy.
1) Transforming roles of self-employed doctors as paid employees
Decades back, certified healthcare professionals were proud to hang their signboard outside their newly opened clinic. However, over a period of time, this profession has also seen chunks of progression. Now, doctors are becoming employees. Many physicians and practitioners prefer to work as an employed doctor at corporate hospitals. They get handsome salaries rather than risking their own finance by opening own small private clinic. The number of physician practices owned by hospitals and health systems jumped 86% from 2012 to 2015, according to a survey conducted by Avalere Health for the Physicians Advocacy Institute (PAI).
On the other hand, it is also a win-win situation for corporate hospitals who have invested a huge amount of finance in infrastructure. When hospitals successfully gather the right mix of salaried front-line doctors and specialists under one roof, they can offer cost-efficient and coordinated patient care.
When doctors become employees, they lose their decision-making ability to selling medical services and products. Hence, such corporate hospitals need to look for ways to market their services online. In addition, these hospitals race to employ good physicians. This is also one of the most important factors affecting the need for online presence.
2) Consumers (here, patients) are now ardent researchers
How many of you have researched online the drug content prescribed by your physician? Almost all of us do this. And, it’s nothing wrong in it.
84% of patients use both offline and online sources for hospital research and 44% of patients book an appointment who research hospitals site on a mobile device.
It is not that patients don’t trust the doctors. But, they do not blindly start undergoing medication until they get convinced. They prefer doing their own homework on the research of their symptoms, prescribed medication, available treatments, available hospitals, and the tentative tenure of getting cured of it.
Consumers’ awareness towards the healthcare sector also boosts the digital marketing needs for service providers like clinics and hospitals.
3) Targeted marketing of healthcare industry
As said above, it is all about ‘who’ and ‘how’; whom to market and how to market rather than what to market. There are various audiences for the entire healthcare industry. Target market could be segmented as patients, practitioners, clinics, hospitals and similar others. Once the ‘who’ is identified, it comes ‘how’ to do digital marketing. Numerous Healthcare consumers now rely on the internet for health-related information. Similarly, many physicians research on smartphones for medical studies and the latest updates on the technologies.
4) The growing importance of digital channels over traditional marketing
Almost each and every industry sector has joined hands with digital marketing to top on SERPs. Healthcare industry is also not an exception here. According to MM&M study, the greatest growth for the biotech, medical, diagnostics, and pharmaceutical device marketing budgets is taking place in digital sales material, mobile apps, and social media.
Consumer marketing tactics are greatly transforming to digital ads, mobile apps, and social media. Hence, this shift towards digital marketing in the healthcare industry is no wonder.
At last!!!
The global healthcare industry is growing at a promising growth rate where digital content plays a significant role. Healthcare industry is rapidly adopting digital marketing strategies to exercise various tools and make a huge impact, both globally and locally. A well-organized, better targeted, and effective strategy of digital marketing in the healthcare industry can easily drive lots of organic traffic. Keep reading blogs; soon we are going to publish a digital marketing checklist for dentists. This checklist will help dental digital marketers to audit their current internet marketing efforts and explore new avenues of their online marketing strategy.
