In today’s digital landscape, the nature of marketing is constantly evolving and the success of your business depends on how you stay ahead of that digital marketing curve and engage prospective customers. The online world provides a lot of opportunities for different marketing strategies and ways to reach out to different groups of people. Here are five tips for updating your digital marketing strategy.
1. Don’t Underestimate The Importance of Voice Search
Digital assistants and voice search tools are having their moment and people are making the most of asking their phones questions, of any kind, without having to lift a finger or type anything. In fact, it’s predicted that by 2020 50% of all searches will be voice searches. For some users, using voice search is simply more practical especially if they’re doing a hands-on task like making dinner, or rushing between meetings. One of the reasons that it’s far more convenient for people to use the voice search function is because as humans we speak a lot faster than we type (about 150 words per minute compared to 40 words per minute typed). This makes a big difference to the nature of the search market because it affects the way people phrase their searches. When rethinking your digital marketing strategy, optimising for voice search should be kept in mind. When it comes to SEO, consider including long-tail search keywords and a more natural sentence structure. Your aim should be to answer questions by thinking about how people ask questions. For example, when using voice search people might say ‘how old is Obama?’ rather than searching ‘Obama age’.
2. Think About Featured Snippets
The popularity of voice searches means that today nearly 30% of all search queries on Google have instant answers in the results in the form of featured snippets. Featured snippets or ‘answer boxes’ are a summarised answer to a user’s question that appears at the top of the Google search results and includes a link to the source of the answer. They can be in the form of text paragraphs, lists or tables. Updating your digital marketing strategy should take featured snippets into account because being featured can make a significant difference to your website traffic. Firstly, if you focus on ensuring your site ranks well for traffic organically this will increase your chance of getting a featured snippet and the added bonus of being read out as a voice result. However, one of the important factors for ranking for a featured snippet is to have high quality, clearly formatted content. This means considering how you structure content on your site so that Google would be able to use relevant information in a featured snippet. One way to do this is to have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page on your site that answers the main queries customers may have about your product or service. To optimise your content, do some googling yourself and find out what kind of questions your audience might be searching.
3. List Your Business
By registering your small businesses on different online directories and Google Places, you will be more ‘’searchable’ online. Signing up for these different listings is usually free and means for small business owners that you connect with local audiences. It is also great for SEO purposes.
With voice searches and featured snippets, having a Google My Business page that is verified can help users who are asking questions about your business, making their search process more efficient. Make sure to keep all information, like opening hours and contact details, as up-to-date as possible.
4. Integrate Different Multimedia Into Your Website
Using different forms of multimedia on your website and social media platforms can add to your online business and should be considered when updating your digital marketing strategy. Videos, in particular, are a great way to attract new audiences and share content online. Making a video for online purposes can be fairly easy and affordable but give you great results. This is because, in this day and age, where people have short attention spans, people are more likely to watch a two-minute video than reading pages and pages of content. Consider how you could rework some of your content ideas into a video. Another option for your website is to interview repeat clients or customers about their experience using your product or service to create a video of testimonials.
5. Host Webinars
In the last few years, webinars have become increasingly popular and they have become a great marketing platform for many business owners. The focus of a webinar should be to educate, with the aim of pitching your product or service at the end. Webinar marketing is a useful tool because it helps to build trust with your audience and show off your expertise as a business owner. This lets you strengthen your relationship with your current customers but by sharing invitations to your webinars around different platforms, you can promote your brand and reach new audiences.
About the Author
Jade Anderson is an experienced In-house Editor at Upskilled. With a background in online marketing, Jade has always had a love for the written word. She enjoys being able to combine these skills with her passion for the education industry.
Voice search is genuinely taking off Jade. I do quite a bit of searching via voice on my phone. I am even thinking about doing more blog commenting via voice to save my fingers. All good points here.
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