How will digital marketing help your business grow in 2019 and beyond? Digital marketing isn’t going away anytime soon, but platforms used to advertise your business change from time to time. It’s important to keep up with those changes to ensure your business stays relevant and in front of your core audience.
I want to tell you all about what’s working right now for your business and how to get more customers (not just more customers, but the rightones) so you can build the business and life that you want.
First, I’m going to start with something controversial. Digital Marketing Agencies, such as my own agency, use platforms like Facebook to advertise for our clients. But we are realizing that Facebook ads are on the decline, while YouTube advertising is on the rise.
Now, Facebook ads aren’t going away anytime soon. They’re just getting more expensive to run for a variety of reasons which I won’t get into here, but that’s just the way it’s going. Facebook advertising is still cheap and a viable option, but it’s good to keep an eye out where it’s going.
YouTube advertising is on the rise. It’s a great opportunity because it gives small businesses a better chance for their ad to be both seen and heard because with Facebook, the ads start with the sound turned off (and most people won’t turn the sound on). But within YouTube, if your video ad gets people to pay attention within the first 5 seconds without skipping, they’re much more likely to watch much more of your ad than they would on Facebook.
If you think about it, people are on YouTube to watch videos already, whereas people on Facebook are just scrolling through feeds not necessarily intending to watch videos.
YouTube ads come with a great targeting feature; Since Google owns YouTube, you can target people who have been actively researching for things related to what you offer. So the ad is a lot more targeted and relevant to your business, which gets you higher quality leads at a lower cost.
Search Engine Optimization for 2019
Google has been moving more and more towards rewarding sites that cover a particular topic the best. So for your business, you should create a cluster of pages within your site that talk about different things that have to do with your niche and link them all to each other.
What is the overall topic your brand/business is about? You should have a ‘pillar’ or foundational page or article that has to do with your niche. It could be a blog post or content on the home page that talk about it in depth. Now, if you don’t already have this, you need to create multiple cluster pages that go into detail about different aspects of your main topic. So instead of breaking things down on the main page, break them down on different pages that link to the first page, and the first page links to those pages.
For example if you’re a construction company, maybe you have an article about bathroom remodeling, and one about kitchen remodeling, and another on the aesthetics of remodeling and what’s in style. You would link all theses articles back to the pillar page. This way, when on page performs well the entire cluster system gets a boost as well in Google so that more people find your website when they type in a keyphrase that has to do with your business.
Topic clusters signal to Google that you’re a true expert
Message Simplification
When you are marketing your website or are managing an online presence for your company, are these three things immediately clear when people encounter your website?
- What you offer
- How it helps your customers
- And what they have to do to take the next step forward
Having a simple message has always worked best, and it’s becoming a much more emerging trend because customers are becoming much more savvy to that fact. If your website is a confusing warehouse of information and it too detailed about things that aren’t that relevant, you need to change up your content by focusing on what’s relevant to your customers.
Once customers start reading things on your website that don’t help them with their problem, you’ve already lost them.
Live Chat and Chatbots
This has been on the rise for the past few years. You’ve probably seen these when visiting large company websites- you see a chat box on the bottom that pops up with a picture of a person asking if you need help with anything.
Though it’s been on the rise and chatbots have been around for a few years, small businesses are just now starting to take advantage of this feature.
Chatbots can serve many functions including answering FAQs, scheduling an appointment, making recommendations, etc. But for most businesses the best use for a chatbot is to simply greet website visitors and ask them how you can help. You can build in pre-programmed responses to FAQs or you can direct people to different places on the site depending on what they ask, or you can have a real person behind the chat to chat with them.
Having this feature alone greatly increases the chances of visitors engaging with you more which also increases the chance that they will become a paying customer, especially in those early research stages where they are browsing your site to look for solutions for their problems.
Voice Search
20 Percent of all mobile searches are voice searches! As more people are getting used to this technology and with the increase of voice systems like Alexa and Google Home, that number is only rising every year.
2019 is a great year to get ahead of your competition by dominating voice searches.
Some ways you can optimize your website for voice search;
- Word things out as questions that people might ask in a FAQ sections for instance
- Make sure your Google My Business profile is filled out and completed so Google knows where you are so you will be the one that shows up or pops up in smart speakers when they search for answers
- Tailoring your website and content to be as relevant to the topic as possible
These are just a few of the trends that are happening now and that will grow in 2019. It’s more important than ever to implement as much of these things as soon as possible since it’s becoming easier for businesses to get lost in the shuffle since there is so much content and technology available to people now.
