Digital marketing practices – there’s so much on the web about this (an approximate 446 million results), and it’s increasing every year. It’s because now and then, there comes a new digital marketing practice that’s not only reliable but also helps businesses drive significant results.
Also, the increasingly competitive digital marketing landscape has made it difficult for businesses to grow their business, which is why they have to constantly adapt to the best digital marketing strategies to thrive consistently!
And this read is exactly about the same – the best digital marketing practices you should follow in 2020 to help grow your business and drive favorable results!
Best Digital Marketing Practices of 2020
1. Content Marketing
It doesn’t matter whether it’s 2020 or the years to come. Content marketing will always remain an evergreen digital marketing practice. More than half of the online businesses/websites today spend time and money on content marketing because of its ability to grow their business extensively.
Speaking of growing businesses, here are some of the benefits your business could get when they practice content marketing.
- Helps increase the visibility of your brand.
- Generates web traffic and paves the path for lead generation.
- The only digital marketing practice that comes with no strings attached – you provide value without expectations.
- Helps build authority and credibility among website visitors and customers.
- Makes you an industry expert in the long run, provided you practice content marketing effectively.
Now that we’ve seen the benefits of Content marketing, let’s see some of the best content marketing practices that are going to help you do this great!
- Write Blogs Consistently: When it comes to content marketing, make sure you deliver content to your audience consistently. It not only helps your audience stay engaged but also helps boost your SEO rankings. Delivering fresh content at frequent intervals helps Google recognize that you are putting in effort and rewards you with a good ranking position in the long run.
- Deliver great value: It’s no use updating fresh content if there’s no value in it. It is why you’ve to make sure that all your contents are fresh, evergreen, and provides great value to your audience.
- Promote it in the right places: This is an essential part. When you write content, you should also simultaneously promote it in the right places. Start promoting your content in the right places – social media, content promotion platforms like Quuu, Medium, and more. It helps drive traffic to your website and eventually leads to conversions.
And that’s pretty much you need to know about content marketing! Let’s move on to the next best digital marketing practice of 2020.
2. Social Media Marketing
Since we were speaking about social media above, I thought it would be best to discuss the same next.
This digital age has made social media platforms widely popular and is being used by almost half of the population, making social media marketing inevitable.
A recent survey revealed that almost 3/4th of adults in the United States use at least one social media platform. And there are more statistics we could come up with but, let’s skip to the obvious part – the best practices of using social media marketing to grow your business.
Find the Best Platforms: Identify which social platform has more targeted audiences for your business. You can do this by conducting surveys on your website or by taking a sneak peek at your competitors’ social platforms.
Find the Best Engagement Times: Not all social media platforms have the same excellent engagement time. You’ve got to identify the best engagement time for each social platform because there’s no point in trying to engage customers persistently when they’re offline or away.
For example, if you’ve identified Instagram as your go-to social media marketing platform, here are the best engagement time and days.
Image Source: Sprout SocialSo what could be inferred from the above image is that,
- The best time for engagement on Instagram is Wednesday at 11:am and Friday between 10:00, and 11:00 am.
- Also, the worst engagement rate is on Sunday.
The above is the engagement metrics for Instagram’s global engagement. Similarly, you can find the best engagement times and days for other Social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in this read.
Focus on Posts & Content: Even though you’ve managed to do the above steps right and grabbed the audience’s attention, the value your post decides whether there’s going to be interaction or not! So, make sure your posts are interesting and value-driven. It could be the blogs you write or informational infographics – it’s totally up to you!
Remember, it’s not that you should stick to one social platform. Having an online presence on multiple social platforms not only helps grow visibility but also drives traffic from different sources!
To sum up social media marketing,
- Identify the platform you must be ideally using by finding where your target audiences are.
- Find the best time to give content to your audience.
- Give your audience engaging and informational content.
Now to the next best digital marketing practice!
3. Influencer Marketing
We all very well know how Robert Downey (aka Tony Stark) signed up with OnePlus in helping them grow their brand (though Downey is a brand ambassador, it’s very much relevant here)! There were videos and images featuring Robert Downey using OnePlus handsets. It did work out well for them!
And there are a couple of other examples like Daniel Wellington collaborating with Insta account holders of two canines, eCommerce mattress store Casper collaborating with canine lovers to launch a product, and more. But, not let’s get to the bottom of it at the cost of missing what’s important and obvious – how you can make influencer marketing work!
Let’s work this out with an example,
Find the Right Influencer: Assume you run an eCommerce store for mattresses. And you’re planning to launch an exclusive mattress for canines. So, all you need to do is find a celebrity/account which grows or takes care of canines and has a considerable amount of followers.
Come Up With a Solid Strategy: When you’ve got your influencer, come up with a solid strategy. From the example above, you’re planning to launch a new product and stopping with once influencer won’t work! Connect with maybe 20 influencers and maybe try to reach out to 3.5 million followers.
Conduct Offline Events: And when you’ve got the engagement & reach you’ve got, try coming up with an offline event – send a formal invitation to all the audience via influencers and BOOM! You’ll see excellent traction and sales numbers for your new product launch – Canine Mattress!
That’s a super cool influencer marketing example! Okay, don’t give me the credits. It was Casper’s Influencer marketing Campaign, where they reached out to 20 followers targeting 3.5 million followers and conducted a launch party in Manhattan!
Image Source: Travel MindsetAbove mentioned is just one example of how influencer marketing can be carried out. You can tweak further, add new strategies according to your business!
4. Email Marketing
It shouldn’t be coming to you as a surprise. Email marketing is another evergreen digital marketing practice that’ll forever be practiced irrespective of the year.
One main reason why email marketing is so popular and the go-to digital marketing practice is because of its high ROI and proven conversion rates.
With Email Marketing, you get $44 for every $1 you spend which is an ROI rate of 4400%.
Also, it is estimated that by the year 2023, almost half the population in the world (4.3 billion) will be using emails.
All these only mean that Email marketing isn’t going to die any time soon (probably never)! So, let’s look at how you can excel in this particular practice!
Clear Content Copies: Make sure your content copies are clean and readable. It’s suggested that you stick to one point, and your email copy should be within 5 lines. You have no idea how long your recipient has. You should stay on point and convey what you wanted to in the first place.
Make it Personalized: Keep your emails personalized to the maximum extent. One best thing you can do is address your visitors using their first name. Hi Sam, Hi John, likewise. Because even though you send bulk emails, adding the personalization factor can help with the click-through and conversion rates.
Find Out the Best Days to Send Emails: Like always, you’ve to find the best days to send emails to your subscribers. Only then, you’ll be able to see results and pat yourself on the back later.
Email marketing plays a huge role in almost every instance. Right from welcome emails to upselling to customers, you can send emails almost at every instance. All you need to have is an email marketing platform on-board, and you can start sending emails within a couple of minutes.
P.S. If your email list is low on numbers and if you are looking forward to growing your email list, a popup plugin should help you get started with!
5. Responsive Web Design
Responsiveness is another essential factor you should take into consideration when you’re looking forward to growing your business this 2020. It’s because times are changing and the world is surfing information more and more via mobiles!
A recent study by Cisco revealed that more than 70% of the world’s population will have mobile connectivity by the year 2023, which is why you should make sure that your website is mobile responsive!
Also, another important factor why this is being constantly insisted is because Google penalizes websites that aren’t mobile responsive. It could even cause a dip in your ranking as your website visitors won’t be pleased scrolling all day long!
On the other hand, if your website is mobile responsive, the chances are that your website is going to rank quite well (provided you follow the other mentioned methods simultaneously).
6. Voice Search
If you’re quite not familiar with voice search, it’s nothing but the usage of smart devices like Alexa, Siri, and more to find information from the web. Since this tech is getting advanced every day, you must optimize your content to meet your consumer’s voice search.
Moving forward, it is strongly believed that voice search will have a deep impact on your SEO rankings (it definitely will).
It is estimated that by the year 2022, almost 55% of U.S. households will have a smart speaker!
Some time back, Google gave great importance to mobile-first indexing. And the same will be done to voice-first indexing a few days from now!
So, here are a few tips that can help you optimize your content for voice search,
Create Content Like You Speak – Think! You don’t communicate the same way you think. Assume you wanted to search for digital marketing practices, your search term would probably be “best digital marketing practices.” But when you ask your smart device, it’s going to be “What are the best digital marketing practices?“. So, make sure your content has more of this!
Target Question Keywords – You should have known this by now. There’s going to be a lot of search queries with questions in it – What, How, Where, When. So, make sure you include these kinds of questions to get easily ranked!
Focus on Long-Tail Keywords – Since it’s voice search, people are probably going to use longer phrases (look at the “digital marketing practices” example above). It’s mandatory that you identify long-tail keywords and include them in your article. Writing long-form content can help you include all related long-tail keywords in your content!
Doing the above right will promote your content to get displayed in the featured snippet as well! You can know more about optimizing your content for voice search in this read!
That’s it for voice search! Let’s move on to the next one!
7. Remarketing
Remarketing, also known as behavioral targeting, is when you target visitors based on their interactions with your website/social pages. And no doubt, it is one of the best digital marketing practices in the year 2020.
Stat Time: An approximate 161% conversion rates come from Google marketing campaigns.
Also, most of the eCommerce visitors don’t complete their purchase during their first-time visit. It’s the remarketing tactic that helps the visit get converted into sales.
Here’s a remarketing example from Spotify that helped increase their subscriber base.
Spotify displayed the above banner ad to its users who haven’t subscribed to Spotify’s premium version. The banner was displayed to approximately 1000 contacts. Since Spotify already offers its users a free trial version, the upgrading process should happen in minutes!
Similarly, you can use other remarketing techniques such as reaching out via emails, displaying website popups, and more!
Remarketing works best when you identify your user’s specific pain points and display an ad with a relevant solution. Pretty sure that a chunk of your users might face the same issue.
So, it’s going to be easy for you to group them and target them accordingly. Bingo! Some plugins can identify your visitors’ behaviors, which makes the overall remarketing process quite easy!
8. Video Marketing
You might be wondering why this hasn’t come up yet! Well, we wanted to save the best for the last! Video marketing is also one of the best digital marketing practices that have gained high traction and popularity this year!
It’s because your audience has very little attention span, and they’d feel better if they can get the value within the first few seconds! And videos not only help grab your attention, but they are the perfect marketing material!
You should have noticed Grammarly come up with marketing ads on Youtube recently – perfect example.
Also, marketers who used videos for marketing were able to grow their revenue 49% faster than those who did not! Also, here are a few other video marketing statistics you should be finding useful,
- Approximately 81% of Twitter users watch videos on the respective platform.
- A huge 87% of online marketers have accepted that they use videos for marketing and found it to be effective.
- 92% of people who watch videos on mobiles make sure they share it with others.
- 500 million-plus people watch videos on Facebook every day!
Enough with the statistics! So, that’s how powerful video marketing can be. All you have to do is create engaging short videos that portray your message in a creative, powerful way!
There is a lot of free software like Camtasia, with which you can create videos in a couple of minutes!
And here’s a brilliant example of a product video – Grammarly’s Product Video. It’s short, crisp, and lets you know everything you need within 60 seconds!
Below are two things you should never fail to do!
9. Don’t Miss Out Basic SEO
Everything that has been mentioned above is examples of growing your business, but what we are looking at now is practices that are going to help keep your online business alive!
Making sure your basic SEO is intact not only helps your business thrive but also lays a strong foundation that’s going to help you in the long run. So, here are a few best SEO practices you should be doing
- Always make sure your titles, description, and contents are unique and not plagiarised. Right from title tags, meta description tags, and landing pages, make sure everything is unique.
- Optimize your site’s loading speed by compressing images, using lightweight themes, and lazy loading.
- Optimize your images for SEO by renaming them properly. Also, make sure you include ALT texts for your images.
- Make sure you interlink your articles. Doing it this way can help increase traffic to your blogs, reduce bounce rate, and increase average session duration.
- Most importantly. Write excellent quality content consistently – we’ve already seen how important and beneficial this could be for your website.
And to the final part of the read!
10. Stay Updated – Track Metrics & Google Changes
It’s great that you’ve come this far! And you might have even decided to carry out a couple of marketing practices the moment you complete this read.
But, here is the super important part! It doesn’t matter which/what digital marketing strategy you’re about to use. What matters is whether you measure the results at regular intervals to make sure that all your effort doesn’t go in vain!
Keep an eye on the numbers to make sure your marketing campaign is yielding good results and is on the right path! Connect with Google Analytics to check your website’s status and other relevant tools that help understand your campaign’s performance.
Also, you must adapt your website according to Google updates that happen now and then! Trust me; you do not want to be penalized – you’ll have to build back everything that’s lost!
And finally, yes! We’ve come through some of the best digital marketing practices you should be following in 2020. It doesn’t mean that you’ve to exactly stick to what is being said! Step out a little, try creating a new strategy – maybe combine a couple of ideas from the above and try out something new!
Digital marketing is all about trying, failing, trying again, and finally succeeding at one point! So, don’t be afraid to try new things! Also, make sure you take only calculated risks!
With everything said above, you should be able to grow your business without a doubt!
Good Luck!
Author Bio
Akshy is a Content & Growth Marketer who loves to peddle dreams across the globe. And he specializes in the eCommerce Sector. His blogs are mainly focused on the E-commerce sector, Content Marketing, Growth Marketing, and Growth Hacking Techniques. When not glued to his notebook, Akshy loves to watch movies, cook, read, and explore the wilderness all by himself!
Keep reading the article at WP Pluginsify. The article was originally written by Editorial Staff on 2020-08-31 14:13:05.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.