Since the previous years, many Digital businesses have been faced with declining sales amidst other localized challenges. This is either because of increasing competition or low exposure and reach to target customers.
This decline in sales is putting huge pressure on businesses, sale’s teams, and marketers who are looking for better ways to deliver. A smart and proven way to reach out to more prospects and increase sales and revenue is to adopt a digital marketing strategy.
If you’re a business owner seeking to improve your sales and revenue this year, here are 10 hot digital marketing trends to keep your eyes on. They are specially written just for you.
#1: Get a Responsive and Mobile-Friendly Website
The advancement in technology has drastically changed the way shopping is conducted. Nowadays, a business website is a primary target for all prospects. Prospective customers start their search for an appropriate product or service online and not having a business website means you’re already missing out.
When building a business website, ensure that the website is mobile-friendly. You can also revamp your existing website to make it mobile-friendly. Currently, Mobile device users accounted for about half of all webpage views worldwide and not having a mobile-friendly and responsive website should never be an option in 2022.
#2: SEO for Website’s Search Rankings
Having a mobile-friendly and responsive website is not enough but increasing the searchability (search rankings) of your website on SERPs to increase organic traffic is the key. This means implementing some SEO strategies for high search rankings for your website.
Here are some common SEO strategies that business websites can adopt this year:
- Post high-quality and engaging content
- Strategically integrate top-rated and relevant target keywords into your web content
- Use enticing Meta descriptions.
#3: Market on Social Media
For effective marketing, businesses need to leverage social media platforms for sales and promotions. Currently, there are over 4 billion social media users, and the number is increasing. This presents a very good opportunity for businesses that leverage social media platforms.
You can start with social media optimization (SMO) and then move on to paid ads (social media marketing – SMM). Here are a few strategies you can adopt to maximize your social media efforts:
- Use Dedicated Hashtags
- Create Facebook pages or groups
- Build a social media directory
- Feature/Showcase your products and services on your social media platform
#4: Using Chatbots for Marketing (where necessary)
More than 60% of prospective buyers expect to get a response from sellers within a few minutes or at most a few hours after contact or filling out a form. So, ensure to quickly respond to prospective buyers to win them over. You can achieve this by having a real representative stand by for live chat or always calls.
However, if you or your business representative won’t be online always, adopt chatbots to automate your responses to prospects. Make sure to use advanced chatbots that would respond to prospects’ inquiries promptly before transferring the conversation to a real representative if necessary.
#5: Video Ads and Live Streaming
Business marketers can make use of Facebook Live, Video Chat for Snapchat, Periscope for Twitter, YouTube videos, and WhatsApp and Instagram Stories to market their Businesses.
Live-streaming has been seen to be more effective among millennials and can be an effective way to develop strong relationships with prospects. More so, video ads are much more effective than text ads because the human brain processes videos about 60,000 times faster than text.
#6: Email Marketing
Some business marketers have neglected email marketing, claiming that it is obsolete. But this is far from the truth. Email marketing is still very useful when used rightly.
So how can businesses ensure that their emails won’t go to spam?
- By sending personalizing content
- Optimizing their email program with AI that identifies the best time to send email to anyone they have emailed in the past.
- Sending emails with personalized delivery times. This can increase prospects’ engagement by between 15 to 30%.
You can also nurture your leads with email marketing to turn them into clients. For every $1 spent on email marketing done rightly, you’ll earn $44 on average – isn’t this a nice pay-out?
You can send a monthly newsletter roundup of your blog content to your leads, reach out to them when new products and services are available, include images and videos if possible, and don’t forget to include a powerful and clear CTA.
#7: Create Banner Advertisements
Banner ads are a great means of advertisement, which can help businesses reach an exceptionally large number of prospects.
These ads can be placed on high-traffic third-party websites or used as target ads on Facebook ads and Google Ads – displaying the banner ads to prospects based on their persona and demographics.
They do not only contain compelling text, but they also include videos, GIFs, and photographs that are likely to attract prospects. Reports show that banner advertisements are about 35% more effective than billboards.
#8: Creating Engaging Blog Posts
Creating blog posts is also a powerful tool for marketing. You can post blogs on your business website or third-party blog sites. Some blog sites receive a large amount of traffic daily, and placing blog posts on these blog sites can be a very powerful advertising tool for your business.
Here are some viable ways by which business marketing can be done with blog posts:
- Submitting guest posts
- Link building to the business webpage
- Posting promotional articles
#9: Create a Google My Business Page
Creating a Google My Business (GMB) page is a great marketing idea. The process is as simple and easy as creating a Gmail account. After setting up your GMB page, optimize it by filling out the necessary sections to start attracting more customers immediately:
- Your product or service categories
- Your phone number
- Your practice’s description
- Your hours of operation
- Your address or location
- Your review section.
Information from your GMB page is pulled up immediately into Google’s Local Pack during a search. According to Moz, Google’s Local Pack alone accounts for about 44% of clicks by Google users.
#10: Track the right KPI’s
It’s not enough to implement the digital marketing trends above without measuring their performance. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Measure the performance of each trend to know which trend generated the best results and which trend needs adjustments.
You can measure the performance of an effective digital marketing trend through any or all of the following KPIs (Key Performance Indicators):
- Social media engagement
- Traffic sources (organic search, paid search, social traffic, or email marketing)
- CTAs conversion rates
Conclusion
Businesses and marketers are always faced with lots of challenges, especially how to increase customer base, sales, and revenue.
However, leveraging the trends explained above properly will differentiate you from other businesses, help you to get more prospects and customers, and build stronger relationships with both current and new prospects.
This will ultimately lead to more sales and revenue for your business.