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By Mike Khorev
Special to the Financial Independence Hub
It’s no secret that the world of digital marketing is continually changing, and every individual marketing channel in it is also rapidly changing all the time. Meaning, if you want to utilize digital marketing to grow your business effectively, you’ll need to stay up-to-date with the current trends.
Although some digital marketing parts stay relatively the same, like how search engine optimization works and the importance of email marketing, there are also significant changes and even brand new channels that can significantly change the game.
In creating any digital marketing strategy, however, it is essential to focus on creating a strong fundamental that you can easily expand to other digital marketing tactics; these fundamental tactics can act as a vital building block for your business, so even when you’d need to adopt a new trend, you can easily integrate it with this existing fundamental.
That said, here are the fundamental digital marketing practices in 2020 and onwards:
1.) Content Marketing and SEO
In this age of social media, content is king.
Whether you can be successful in your digital marketing or not would ultimately depend on whether you can attract and engage enough audience through your content:
- You generate leads by attracting prospects with valuable content.
- You nurture leads by using content to educate your prospects about your product/service and establish your credibility via consistent content quality.
- You convert leads into customers by using content to convince people to buy
So, content should be the backbone of your overall digital marketing strategy, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) would be the primary way for people to find your B2B brand.
However, since more businesses are now focusing on content marketing, the competition in attracting the audience’s attention with content is now much tighter. Simple and informative, educational content that worked in 2017 simply won’t cut it anymore these days, as readers now expect the highest quality of information and authoritative data.
Also, consumers now expect various forms of content in textual blog posts and white papers and videos, podcasts, infographics, and other mediums. Diversifying your content is very important and offers more personalized and interactive content for each audience, which will bring us to the next point below.
2.) Conversational and Personalized Marketing
The rise of various AI and machine learning technologies has provided us with more ways to implement highly-customized and conversational marketing tailored for each prospect.
One of such technologies is the chatbot, which has been popular among many businesses in recent years. A 2017 survey by Gartner has predicted that 47% of organizations will implement chatbots for customer service in the years to come.
Chatbots can allow businesses to implement personalized marketing with different implementations. For example, in a sales inquiry conversation, the chatbot can ask for preliminary questions about the prospect’s preferences, available budget, and so on, so when the chatbot finally passes this prospect to a human sales rep, the process would be much more seamless for both the sales rep and the prospect.
According to Fractional CMO Mark Evans, conversational and personalized marketing channels can help marketers create highly-targeted marketing campaigns and gather more information about your prospects and customers.
3.) Video Marketing
Video is technically a part of content marketing, which we have discussed above. Still, in the past half-decade, video marketing has grown to be a powerful digital marketing channel that deserves its attention.
Video has also proven itself a high-converting channel, with 84% of surveyed consumers admitting that they were convinced to purchase a product or service by watching the respective brand’s video.
However, similar to content marketing in general, the competition in video marketing to attract the audience’s attention is also very tight. This is why it’s crucial actually to have a working video marketing strategy.
Make sure you understand your target audience and your competitor’s approach to video marketing and craft the right video to capture your target audience’s attention.
4.) Local SEO and Google Maps Marketing
This one is for brick-and-mortar businesses or any businesses that are targeting a local audience.
Nowadays, people mainly learn about new local businesses in two ways:
- Recommendations from their social media feed (i.e., an influencer reviewing a local business)
- Via Google search, where Google will display results from Google Maps
The thing is, Google only displays the top 3 (top 4 on mobile devices) places in its featured Google Maps results before users need to click “More Places” or “View All,” so getting ranked on these top spots is very important if you want to generate more local leads.
5.) Email Marketing
Even amidst all the newer technologies and platforms available today, email marketing remains one of the most potent marketing channels with very high ROI.
However, although email marketing is here to stay, it doesn’t mean it hasn’t evolved throughout the years, and nowadays, it’s all about automation and personalization.
Using various email marketing automation tools to create an automated and highly-targeted email marketing campaign can significantly improve your open-rate and click-through rate, and automated emails also allow better customization for each user segmentation.
6.) Social Media Marketing
This one is relatively obvious: social media is where our target audience is nowadays, and so marketing on social media is a no-brainer. However, how should we market on social media?
It’s important to understand that social media marketing is differentiated into three different sub-channels:
- Organic: that is, building your followers and distributing your messages to these followers.
- Paid: using various paid advertising options provided by the social media networks to spread your message to the massive user base of these networks
- Influencer: working with influencers so they can help promote your brand/product/service on social media
It’s essential to find the right balance on all three, so you can maximize your reach with the available budget.
End Words
The six fundamental digital marketing practices we have shared are not the only digital marketing channels available. However, as the fundamental strategy, they can act as a building block as you expand your digital marketing strategy with other channels and tactics.
Mike Khorev is a marketing consultant who helps SaaS, software, IT, technology, B2B and startup companies generate more sales and grow revenue online. He offers expert advice on marketing your company the right way through performance-based SEO, inbound marketing, conversion rate optimization, search engine marketing and many other online practices.
