5 Digital Marketing Trends To Dial Up In Uncertain Times

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It’s always essential to get the basics right. Looking at this year’s digital marketing trends can help your business get in on the ground floor of tomorrow’s leading-edge strategies.

Let’s take a close look at the most critical aspects of the digital marketing trends you can’t ignore in 2020.

Although voice searches have been around for what seems like years now, they look to come into their own as a major player in 2020. Today’s shoppers have grown impatient and we demand swift, seamless experiences across digital platforms.

In other words, it’s all about the now. No need to pull over and search when a craving for fish tacos hits. Simply shout, “Hey, Siri!” and you’ll find the little out-of-the-way joint in mere seconds.

The one that best optimized its website for voice, that is.

There’s another reason, though, that voice searches will dominate 2020’s digital marketing trends: Position Zero. The coveted position atop the results page can only have your business’s name on it only if you’ve optimized your website for voice queries.

It’s all about natural language and questions. When you make your top keywords the questions people will ask when they ask Siri, you have a better shot at attaining position zero.

When you’re on position zero, your business not only is the first one Siri finds, but is also the first one desktop searches find as well.

Which is great – because that craving for fish tacos can happen at work as well as on the road.

Which makes for a smooth segue into the next trend: customer experience. Not only are this year’s customers impatient, but they also want those fish tacos delivered on a silver platter.

Not literally, but they do expect a seamless experience from the first spark of interest to customer service after the sale. From personalized messaging that helps them solve problems to make a buying decision to a customer-focused culture throughout their customer journey, an experience that delivers quality across all channels is more likely to earn their business.

In addition to personalized marketing messages, find ways to listen and respond to their questions. Coordinate your digital marketing team with your sales and customer service teams to deliver quality throughout their experience.

Building the kinds of relationships with customers that drive loyalty is worth every penny you spend. As the management experts at Bain and Company point out, a mere 5 percent boost in customer retention increases profit by 25 percent.

Can you imagine how your profits would soar if you went the extra mile to deliver the kinds of experiences that build not only loyalty, but qualified referrals as well? When you coordinate your digital marketing strategy with all your teams to deliver those kinds of experiences, you’ll grow your bottom line well beyond even your highest expectations.

That one giant leap for (hu)mankind – walking on the moon – is a piece of cake compared to convincing some companies to treat their employees like valuable colleagues instead of glorified house servants. Taking the next step – employee activation – requires you to treat your employees as your most treasured customers.

Employee engagement requires you to make your workplace such an attractive place to work that your employees’ happiness will spill on over onto the customers. Indeed, a smile and an extra effort to please that comes from the heart is one of the most effective forms of marketing out there. In fact, companies that engage their employees outperform their peers by a factor of two.

When you activate your employees, though, it’s marketing magic. Activation includes a wealth of tools to empower your employees to become walking billboards for your company, including:

Once your employees start sharing the love your company has shared with them, it will pay off. Not only will it pay off in good vibes, but it will also likely make a huge impact on your bottom line.

In fact, leads that your employees generate through social media marketing posts are seven times more likely to convert than leads you generate through other channels, according to Sociabble. In addition, content that they share will enjoy eight times more engagement than content that you share on your official brand channels.

When a customer has two relatively equal products in front of her, and she needs to decide which one she’ll buy, my money’s on the brand that won her heart. One of the ways to engage your customers’ hearts as well as their heads is to personalize marketing to meet their needs.

For years, psychologists have taught us that people love to hear their name and see it in print. But today’s technology allows digital marketing teams to dig deep into the data to identify the things that keep customers up at night – and identify what messages will solve those problems and give them a good night’s sleep.

Go way beyond the “Hi [Customer Name]” emails to find what makes your customers tick. Then, give them content that will win their hearts.

Again, a little effort will yield amazing results. In fact, 80 percent of customers surveyed by Epsilon indicated that they’d be more likely to buy from a company that gave them a personalized experience.

Although corporations aren’t people, their C-suites certainly are staffed by them. Specifically, by people with widely divergent interests.

And so on.

Account-based marketing personalizes messaging to businesses, targeting each decision-maker with the information they need to solve specific departmental problems. Like personalized messaging directly to customers, account-based marketing yields a higher ROI than other types of marketing. If you sell to other businesses, particularly large corporations, account-based marketing is one of the 2020 digital marketing trends you need to embrace during the coming years.

When you embrace these five 2020 marketing trends, you’ll take the lead in getting your message out to the right people at the right time. When you do that, you’ll take the lead in your industry in both reputation and bottom-line rewards.

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