January 16, 2020
7 marketing hacks to increase brand awareness and boost profitability in 2020
If scaling your business is one of your 2020 resolutions, then you should be thinking local SEO, personalized messaging, and improved customer service. Audiences are becoming increasingly impatient and ‘very very specific’. Businesses that clearly understand customers’ evolving needs and position themselves as reliable partners will get the most bang for their marketing bucks.
Based on digital marketing trends over the last few years, the changing technology landscape, and expert opinion, here are the 7 best marketing strategies to increase your bottom-line this year.
1. Use Social Media
Social Media is an excellent way to put your products and services in front of customers – especially in 2020. Platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are great venues for solidifying branding, creating qualify leads, and driving sales. But to make the most out of this marketing strategy, businesses need to identify their goals, master their target audience, and pitch tent on the right social media networks. A personnel recruitment firm may be better off investing time and effort on LinkedIn than on Facebook. Figure out what platforms your audience are using, and create great content in order to attract a following. By measuring results, marketers can easily fine-tune their social campaigns to focus on what actually works.
2. Set up automated email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is a powerful and effective marketing strategy for both small and large businesses. A recent study by Street Fight Insights ranked email marketing as the third best performing channel after Social Media and Mobile Marketing. Mobile phone trends have made email inboxes portable and contributed to the resurgence of this marketing tactic. Email is also a great channel to build multi-channel campaigns, develop relations, and personalize your messaging to suit individual customer needs. Because email service providers such as MailChimp, and MailerLite are cheap and cost only around $10 per month, both small and large businesses have no excuse not to leverage this option.
According to Statista, spam messages accounted for 54.68 percent of email traffic as of late 2019. Businesses must create appealing and informative campaigns in order to truly connect with their audience. Other tips to help you make the best out of this marketing method in 2020 include customizing your blasts, grabbing your audience’s attention with great email copy, and stating a clear call to action.
3. Prioritize Content Marketing and SEO
Content marketing demonstrates expertise and authority, all while helping reach customers at various stages of the funnel. To get the most out of your efforts, make sure that you are offering high value, actionable content to your audience. Focusing on the right keywords is also important to reap the most SEO benefits from your content marketing.
In 2020, voice search will become increasingly popular. Because users type search queries the same way they speak, businesses should take long-tail, specific keywords into consideration. Bullet points also increase your chances of getting better rankings from voice queries. Featured snippets will also continue to dominate search results this year. You can leverage this trend by aiming for question based search queries and keywords. Other SEO trends to inform your strategy in 2020 include video (the new king of content), and content length. Although there’s a lot of argument about the ideal length of a blog post, research most posts ranking in the top 10 results are at least 2,000 words long.
4. Personalize your messages
In 2020, digital marketers should personalized each message by digging into analytics, studying demographics, and understanding affinity categories. The idea is to dig into your prospect’s mind, discover what they fear, wish, or want, then create a highly individualized marketing message. All your contents should be direct and easily understandable to make sure that your audience receives maximum value at each interaction point.
Effective personalization depends on behavioral segmentation, or isolating audiences into groups depending on actions (e.g. abandoned cart, first time purchases, repeat purchases, and page views without conversion).
An example of this is Hybrid LTC ,a company which offers Hybrid Long-term care plans to its consumers, recently invested in the rebranding of their logo so that it would appeal more efficiently to their target market of individuals aged 40 & up. Understanding their target market and what is most visually appealing to that segmentation is the key here.
5. Incentivize your community to create content
Building an engaged online community is a challenging but crucial step to help improve your sales. Because 90% of purchase decisions are led by user-generated content, brands need to leverage their hard work by encouraging their communities to create content. The average consumer is more likely to trust a regular person than they can relate to the brand itself.
Consider ways to incentivize users to create content. This may include offering product discounts, prizes, exclusive event invitations, or just fostering a sense of community. Once users create the content, then you can share it to further enhance online engagement.
6. Use more video
Video remained a major marketing tactic in 2019. There’s no indication that is likely to change in 2020. As a visual medium, video helps foster stronger bonds with customers, helping increase the likelihood that they will purchase from your brand. Brands can focus on producing tutorials or testimonials to increase engagement and awareness.
Another option that has become mainstream for marketing purposes is an explainer video, which makes complex concepts incredibly easier to understand for customers. Because Google places a higher premium for websites that have video content, it goes without saying that this will also help your SEO efforts.
7. Update your old content
There is no underestimating the power of great content attracting and acquiring a clearly defined audience. But many businesses make the mistake of forgetting to update the content they have already published.
Google has a freshness ranking factor that it uses to detect content decay. This is the main reason why many articles that have ranked well in the past tend to be on a downward spiral. Making simple updates and tweaks, as well as changing the date of articles to show the newest version can help improve rankings.
Conclusion
We believe that effective marketers are proactive rather than reactive. They take initiative to take their website or brand to the next level. Are you using the strategies above in 2020? Let us know what has worked for your business, and what other marketing hacks you are implementing.
