The internet’s evolution has revolutionized how we promote our businesses, constantly setting the bar higher. The number of your competitors selling products similar to yours, targeting the same group of customers, and promoting their businesses through the same channels is rising on a daily basis.
Given these facts, it’s obvious that investing in your online presence is not enough anymore. After all, statistics say that 70% of small businesses are planning to increase their digital marketing budgets.
To hook the attention of today’s tech-savvy and demanding customers, you need to stay up to date on the major digital marketing trends. Most importantly, you need to go the extra mile in offering something authentic and providing them with an exceptional user experience.
Here are a few awesome yet simple digital marketing tricks that will blow your mind.
Table of Contents
1. Make your Website Responsive
It’s not a secret that Google is getting smarter day by day. Its algorithms are constantly being changed in order to provide its users with the ultimate experience. And one of the greatest changes they’ve been working on lately is their mobile-first index, which is expected to take place later this year.
In layman’s terms, this means that Google won’t index and rank sites from a desktop browser view anymore. On the contrary, they will start crawling the sites’ mobile versions to inspire more sites to pay attention to their mobile visitors. This enormous change will completely alter how sites are ranked and optimized for search engines.
You need to have a responsive website design to boost your rankings in the SERPs and sustain them in such a mobile-first ecosystem. Unlike mobile-friendly sites that work in the same way across all screens, responsive web design is highly fluid and adaptable, changing in accordance with the size of the screen. This approach will facilitate your site’s cross-channel navigation, reduce the bounce rate, boost conversions and, in this way, help you rank higher.
1. Have expandable content instead of forcing your visitors to scroll endlessly.
2. Instead of one large image and a few thumbnails that will compromise your pages’ speed, you should present images in scrollable slideshow formats.
3. Highlight social proof by adding your visitors’ reviews and ratings to the center of your site.
4. Have a large CTA button so that your customers won’t have to zoom, pinch or squeeze it.
5. Make your forms mobile-friendly by making them easy to fill in, using vertical-align labels, and removing all unnecessary information.
2. Optimize your Site for Voice Searchers
This one is directly related to the rise of mobile searches. Over the past few years, we’ve been reading a lot about voice searches and their influence on the digital marketing landscape. Namely, in 2014, Google reported that 55% of teens and 40% of adults used this feature on a daily basis. Moreover, 20% of all searches on mobile were voice searches back then. Ever since then, this figure has constantly been rising and to optimize your site for it, you need to:
1. Get your pages featured in a Featured Snippet for better transparency.
2. Target and optimize for conversational keywords, as voice searches imitate everyday conversations.
3. Create an FAQ section and use the tried and tested “I’ll answer that for you” SEO strategy. The majority of voice searches are question-based and Google chooses sites that give direct answers to those questions.
3. Deliver Quality Content
A few days ago, I stumbled upon one of those “Boost your Rankings without Writing Content” articles, and I must admit, I was shocked. There are still people that believe that SEO and content are two completely different notions. Well, that’s not true. The thing is, if it weren’t for SEO, there would be no need for targeted content. At the same time, by adding links to your articles, you’re optimizing your content for search engines. This phenomenon was beautifully explained in a recent article by an SEO company from Hong Kong, emphasizing that content marketing and SEO are inseparable digital marketing fields that constantly overlap.
Now, we all know that Google penalizes sites with a bunch of stuffed keywords and poor links that are lowering the quality of its content. Not only that, but your users will also ditch your site it’s overly promotional and doesn’t provide them with the desired information. This is exactly why your content needs to be relevant, authoritative, and high-quality.
To achieve this, you must create data-driven content that covers trending topics, answers popular questions, and offers different insights. Most importantly, you need to make it easily digestible. Use white spaces, separate your paragraphs into logical sections, make numbered lists, etc. Don’t rely on articles solely. Interactive content, such as infographics, videos, images, gifs, and memes is rated as the most prominent form of content by more than 37% of marketers.
4. Use Social Networks Smarter
Today, businesses of all sizes invest in social media marketing, both organic and paid. That’s a logical move, given the fact that, with 2.206 billion active users, social media give them an amazing opportunity to reach out to a wider group of people. These astonishing figures tell us that building a social media marketing strategy is obligatory for you to stay competitive, but it’s not enough. To make sure it kicks ass, you need to build it wisely, step by step.
1. Focus on 1 or 2 channels. Different social networks require different types of content, which means more work for you.
2. Build buyer personas to tailor your social marketing efforts to your visitors’ preferences.
3. Are you planning to raise your brand awareness through social media? Maybe you would like to boost your conversions? To succeed in this technique, you need to know your goals first.
4. It doesn’t matter if it’s a photo or Facebook status update, custom-tailor your content for every platform you use.
5. Use ephemeral content to evoke your customers’ FOMO (the fear of missing out).
6. Use hashtags to help people discover you and share your content.
7. Take advantage of social media ads, as boosting your relevance organically gets more difficult each day. This is why the social media ad spends is on the way up. Statistics show that advertising budgets for social media doubled from 2014 to 2016.
Overview
No matter how important your ranking is, you should never forget that your main goal is to build strong relationships with your customers and deliver value to them. I hope these brief tips will give you an insight into how to build a digital marketing campaign, drive more leads, and improve your conversion rate.
