To survive as an online business these days, you need to have a solid digital marketing strategy. But where do you start and how do you know which digital marketing best practices are going to result in success for your business?
In this article, we’ll go over the digital marketing tips you need for 2020 and beyond so you can get ahead of the game.
Digital Marketing Best Practices
1. Use Videos to Increase Visitor Engagement
In recent years, video marketing has seen a massive spike in popularity. That’s because we’re more geared towards learning visually now than ever before.
Did you know 72% of consumers would rather learn about a product or service by watching a video? Every year, mobile video consumption rises by 100%. The growth isn’t going anywhere either. By 2022, video consumption will take up 82% of internet traffic.
All smart marketers know that using videos is one of the best digital marketing best practices. In 2019, 87% of marketers are using videos in their digital marketing plan, and it’s working for them. 83% of marketers say videos give them a good ROI.
It’s obvious that including videos in your digital marketing practices is excellent for your business. But we understand if you have your doubts.
Finding good ideas for videos, having the right gear, and potentially outsourcing someone to film if you’ve got shaky hands can be challenging and a lot to think about.
So, is video marketing worth it? By what the stats show, yes. Not just because everyone else is doing it, but because video marketing is one of the most versatile marketing forms out there.
Here are some benefits video marketing will have on your business.
- Boosts conversions and sales
- Helps with SEO
- Builds trust with your audience
- Shows great ROI
- Explains with more detail
- Increases user engagement
- Brings you more mobile users
You don’t need to spend a ton of money on the best cameras and microphones to get started with video marketing. Most smartphones have mics and cameras that let you capture high-quality videos. Editing tools don’t have to cost a lot, either. Software like Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro will work great.
Also, don’t forget to include videos on your social media platforms or your blog. There are plenty of fun Instagram video editing tools you can use to create videos on the go that your users will love.
2. Create Content That Will Attract Visitors Organically
Have you ever heard the phrase “content is king?” Well, it’s true.
Content marketing is a necessary step in digital marketing best practices to set yourself apart from others. The goal is to use publication and promotion of content to increase lead generation and drive more organic traffic.
Instead of just trying to rank for bottom of the funnel keywords (like “buy dog food”) you’re attracting people to your brand at the top of the funnel through educational and exciting content (like “12 awesome tricks to teach your dog”)
A great example of this is barkbox.com. They’ve built out a full-blown blog separate from their main eCommerce website, barkpost.com.
On , they funnel all their users into barkbox.com.
By building out barkpost.com, they’re essentially getting free traffic and free advertising to their main product, barkbox.com.
Based on Ahref’s calculations, they’re driving 240,000 visitors per month from search, and that traffic is valued at over $150,000 if they were to purchase them in paid ads.
As much as content marketing is about ranking for certain keywords, it’s also about researching keywords that work. Some questions to consider when doing keyword research would be:
Where are my competitors lacking? Which keywords have the highest traffic? Do I stand a chance at ranking for these keywords?
On top of getting more organic traffic, there are some other ways content marketing can help your business:
- Builds brand awareness
- Educates your audience
- Strengthens bonds with your customers
- Helps with lead generation
- Differentiates yourself from other blogs
3. Build an Effective Content Publishing Strategy
Having an effective content publishing strategy is the next step after content marketing.
Once you’ve got all your blog post ideas in order, you’ll want to decide how many blog posts to write and publish per week. Many larger businesses even run by a publishing calendar where they schedule posts months in advance.
Here’s a screenshot from OptinMonster’s content calendar. As you can see, the different scheduled posts are color-coded, the article title is on the tag, and the author assigned to write is added to the task.
So you might be thinking: “How often should I be publishing?”
The answer is as much as you can while keeping blog posts high quality.
You could pump out and publish 15 posts per week, which you might think would get you lots of buzz and traffic. It might at first, but as Google algorithms realize your content quality is low, your rankings will be hurt over time.
You could publish once per month if the article is outstanding. In this case, the article should be long and packed with valuable information. However, you won’t get lots of traffic quickly by publishing so infrequently.
Generally, if you’re a solopreneur, you should be able to write and publish 2 good blog posts per week. This will give you steady traffic flow, and you’ll be able to balance your other business duties while keeping your blog posts high quality.
Something else to think about in your content strategy is when the internet has the most user activity. According to Noah Kagan and BuzzSumo, the best days with the highest engagement are on Mondays and Tuesdays.
And according to Shareaholic, the best time to publish for maximum page views is 9 am.
Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing tactic. It’s an excellent way for brands to reach out and connect with consumers, and you can use it for all types of reasons.
When you send emails about cart abandonment, more than 40% get opened. When you send a follow-up email, the reply rate is usually 13%. Email marketing can feed into many other things, like getting customer feedback and converting more leads.
On top of this, with email marketing, you can:
- Create personal and customizable messages for your audience
- Show a clear CTA to convert more users
- Measure analytics with email software
- Reach more mobile customers
The best part about email marketing is that it won’t break the bank. It can even be free if you don’t outsource anyone or pay for automation tools.
Remarketing is a way to reconnect with people who’ve previously interacted with your business. You can strategically place ads in front of your targeted customers, which will follow them around on the internet (it sounds creepy, we know).
You may have been retargeted before. Think about a time where you’ve searched something, and suddenly, you see it on your Facebook, Instagram, and all over Google. You might think, “weird, how did they know I was looking at that?”
That’s retargeting. It works by tracking your cookies, then creating new ads on related sites.
Here are some tips to get the most effective remarketing campaigns:
- Different products have different time windows, depending on the industry. For example, if you’re selling travel, you’ll need to retarget right away. However, you can retarget people shopping for luxury handbags later.
Although remarketing can be seen as a little creepy, we included it in this list of best marketing strategies because it works. Only 2% of customers convert when first visiting an online store. Using retargeting in your online marketing strategies brings back the other 98%.
6. Use SEO to Improve Your Ranking
In today’s competitive market, SEO (search engine optimization) is more important than ever. Search engines like Google are serving millions of users per day to answer questions and give information.
Most users will go straight ahead and click on the first results. If you’re at the very top, you can catch 30% of all the traffic.
To get to the top of the search results, you must improve your SEO. Although SEO generally takes a long time, here are 7 tips that will improve your SEO fairly quickly:
- Publish relevant content
- Update your content regularly
- Use alt-tags
- Reach out for backlinks
- Create useful content to make your site link-worthy
- Pay attention to your metadata
- Improve your website’s usability
Did you know that the amount of time users spend on your site also influences how your website ranks? Make sure your content is engaging to keep visitors scrolling longer!
7. Improve User Experience for Happier Customers
User experience (UX) touches different aspects of your business, from SEO to customer service. UX is so important for converting more users into sales, but somehow it’s one of the most overlooked digital marketing best practices.
You can improve user experience by making sure the design of your website looks appealing, the navigation is easy, and the checkout process is smooth. Ultimately, you want the user to get from point A to point B without any issues.
Since 49% of shoppers come from mobile devices, don’t forget to optimize your mobile site for user experience as well! Ensure the drop-down menu is easy to read and click on, the payment information fields are easy to type in, and your popups are big enough to see, but not so big they cover the important parts of the screen.
Speaking of popups, showing targeted popups is also a great way to improve user experience since shoppers want to see offers and information that’s relevant to them.
With OptinMontser, you can craft popups to show users deals related to what they were shopping for just as they’re about to leave your site. You can also do A/B testing, which isn’t only useful for remarketing, but for UX too.
Here’s an example of a kind of popup you can make with OptinMonster. You can customize the colors, text, images, and placement to match your site’s style.
8. Rock Your Web Design
First impressions matter. It only takes a person 1/10th of a second to form an opinion about a website. That may be why the average bounce rate is as high as 49%. Optimizing your website to have a beautiful design is an important digital marketing best practice for 2020.
We pulled this website from a list of the worst designed websites of 2019 to show you an example of a poorly designed website.
Take the time to make your website look pretty to minimize your bounce rates. If you use WordPress, there are many WordPress themes you can use. Here’s an example of the Novel Blue theme (free).
Your design should include a clean, uncluttered layout with beautiful visuals, including pictures and colors. The CTA should be put in contrast with the background to make it more visible, and the different pages should be linked in a navigation menu at the top of the page, where it’s easy to spot.
9. Use Social Media to Reach Your Target Audience
Social media marketing is the best digital marketing technique to reach lots of people, including your target audience.
On platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and sometimes SnapChat, you can promote your products and services. Social media marketing is cost-effective and time-efficient.
With platforms like Instagram, you can use highly targeted hashtags to drive your social media marketing campaigns organically.
Social media is also a great place to build engagement and trust with your users. You can host user-generated content contests, giveaways, and answer users’ questions through messages. You can have a little fun with it by uploading videos and sharing creative stories.
In addition to more organic traffic, social media will help you in the following ways:
- Increase sales
- Improve brand image
- Manage reputation
- Get more loyal customers
- Build relationships
You can also get an influencer to promote your products. Influencer marketing is huge right now and will continue to be in 2020 and onwards. It can be cheaper than paid advertising and more effective since you’re tapping into the influencer’s huge (and loyal) follower base.
Influencer marketing is so effective that 17% of companies spend over half their budget on it. 89% of companies are saying ROI from influencer marketing is higher than any other marketing channel.
Here’s an example of how an influencer can promote your brand on Instagram.
Influencers will use hashtags specific to your company, create a fantastic picture of themselves with your brand’s product, and get user engagement through the roof!
10. Create a Lead Magnet to Grow Your Email List
People don’t always give their emails without hesitation. That’s why having a lead magnet can help you convert more.
A lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential customers in exchange for their email address or other contact information. Most times, lead magnets are digital, downloadable copies of eBooks, PDFs, reports, videos, etc.
Your lead magnet should be relevant to what your website is about and be valuable to your visitors. As an example, after the visitor finishes reading a blog post about the best SEO practices, you could offer an SEO checklist as your lead magnet.
And if you’re using OptinMonster, you can include your lead magnet on your campaign to make even more conversions.
That’s it. Now it’s your turn. What will you do to have a successful 2020 and beyond? Your goals are not impossible if you follow the practices above. So get out there and start planning now!
We’ve talked about SEO a fair bit in this article. Are you curious to know more? Here is an SEO guide that will teach you everything you need to explode your traffic.
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