Author: SmallBizViewpoints
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You want to start the new year with a solid digital marketing strategy to generate more leads, create engagements, sales, and make more returns on your investment. Despite the advancing business models and technology innovation, a recent study has shown that many small businesses struggle to keep up with the unprecedented changes in digital marketing. Here are some digital marketing upgrades you should consider to grow your business this year.
- Leverage online reviews to enhance your brand reputation
An online review is the result of your transaction with your client. It shows how effective your service and marketing campaign are. Online reviews also act as “posters” for your business as potential customers use this medium to learn more about your company. Therefore, it is vital to ensure your business only has good online reviews.
Online reviews aren’t limited to those that you put on your website. Various platforms such as Yelp allow customers to leave online reviews on various companies. Videos and social media posts about your business are also a form of online review.
Reviews can also offer a way to improve your products through customer feedback as your target audience expresses what they like, hate, or make recommendations. This can help you find and fix bugs, analyze sales patterns and offer what your customers want.
- Take advantage of voice search optimization
Voice search optimization is a growing digital marketing trend predicted by digital marketing agencies to be a suitable digital marketing upgrade to consider in 2022. Nobody would want to waste time typing out keywords or phrases when they can search via voice. It is no surprise that the trend is growing increasingly popular every day. Website owners must integrate voice search in their web content to attract more users. For successful implementation, add long-tail conversational keywords to your content. You can do this effectively by considering the mindset of your target audience that may use the voice search feature.
- Provide social proof
Providing social proof on your business website has been seen as an effective approach for gaining consumer trust. Using this strategy, you show your customers that they get the products or services they see! According to a marketing research article, approximately 97% of customers prefer to read reviews before purchasing a new product. You may want to take advantage of this by making it accessible for your customers to leave reviews on your products and services. Meanwhile, email optimization has proven an ideal strategy for urging customers to leave reviews.
- Take advantage of influencer marketing
According to a recent study, more than 50% of marketers in the US spent 20% of their marketing budget on influencer marketing. However, the numbers are significantly higher in some industries, such as jewelry and cosmetics. Next-generation influencer marketing uses AI to identify the right influencers for particular market segments. Since AI can monitor more profiles and videos of social influencers than the average human, its predictive analysis can make programs more effective and cost-friendly.
It is, therefore, best to use AI this year for your influencer marketing campaigns. Now seems like a good time to bring influencers on board if they aren’t part of your current digital marketing strategy.
- Prioritize personalization
A digital marketing survey showed that 80% of customers connect with personalized offers and content businesses. This means that personalization will be a big deal for your online business to succeed in 2022. You will have to create unique content for your categories or risk losing traffic and sales to your competitors. Meanwhile, understanding your target audience and their expectations of your business can help you develop a successful personalization strategy. This can make market persuasion easier since you know more about the people who visit your website.
- Choose real virtual assistance over chatbots
If you haven’t updated your chatbots in a while, you may consider doing so now. Find out what value your chatbots add to your customers or website users. Is it useful? Does it appear real or irritate them? Answers to these questions can help you understand the best way to deploy AI in your marketing strategy. AI is a key element in the present generation by adding personality brands. You can utilize AI to transform chatbots into shoppers or virtual assistants to provide useful information to your website users, enhance their experience and increase chances of making a sale. You want to upgrade if your chatbot interaction isn’t meaningful or enjoyable.
- Take your event planning to the next level.
Many people look forward to getting back to in-person events and gathering extended lockdown periods due to the COVID-19. However, virtual events have taught some lessons which cannot be overlooked even as you plan your in-person events. It is practical to add some virtual elements to make your planned in-person event more meaningful and multidimensional. Additionally, hybrid events can offer a way to appeal to speakers, panelists, and attendees who may not be able to travel or take some time off work to attend the event.
- Review your online marketing strategy
You have probably heard that “content is king.” It has remained so for many years and will continue in 2022. You may want to ask yourself when you last updated your digital marketing strategies. Now may be a good time to switch up and include some quality photos, videos, and infographics in your content. Likewise, ensure to provide more interactive experiences to show your brand uniqueness. Interestingly, pay-per-click (PPC) and content marketing may appear contrasting ideologies, although the two can work together. PPC can be a massive tool for supercharging your content and beating the competition.
- Consider privacy and advertising differences
Automatically customized data-driven digital ads dominated popular digital marketing methods in 2020 and 2021. However, data-driven marketing and target ads remain profitable marketing methods, albeit being subjected to privacy regulations. The elimination of cookies in the new technologies and smartphones restricts data usage by artificial intelligence. Therefore, it is vital to keep this in mind when developing your new digital marketing strategies.
- Optimize customer mobile experience
Since the smartphone revolution began, the “mobile first” mantra has dominated how people communicate, shop, and access information. Surprisingly, many businesses have grounds and gaps to fill in optimizing their mobile experience. With everything moving digital, customers are less willing to engage with businesses that offer a less smooth and seamless experience. Anything close to a subpar experience, and you’ll have your customers moving to your competitor. If you know how hard it is to win and keep them, you won’t want to risk losing them.
- Tell a story with a multichannel marketing strategy
Most marketing initiatives employ a variety of strategies to create leads and sales. These may include social media, Google Ads, blog posts, landing sites, chatbots, and experiences from a review generation service. Most organizations can get the individual parts of the journey right, but they rarely come together as a whole. For a successful marketing campaign, you want all the chapters to come together as a whole since any form of unexpected event or disconnection can give potential customers or clients a reason to leave—master storytelling by using available data and metrics to bridge gaps in your marketing storytelling experience.
Today, changes in the business world occur rapidly. From online banking to virtual medical appointments and sales, the digital transformation solutions in everyday activities are making life easier and helping businesses operate more efficiently and productively. Therefore, for your business to gain a competitive advantage, you’ll need to adjust quickly to keep your business in the game. The tips mentioned above should help upgrade your digital marketing strategies this year.