Naman Kapur — March 15, 2018 — March 15, 2018
Digital Marketing has always been the game of delivering the right information to the right people at the right time and since it revolves around online metrics and technology, one should be ready to improve, adapt and ace the game before competition does. It’s been a few weeks since 2018 started and a lot of digital marketers I am in touch with have been reading about the trends that will or are dominating the digital marketing landscape but are a bit confused about what to do exactly to squeeze the maximum out of their efforts.
I’m listing down several methods of digital marketing in 2018 that, in my opinion, should help in streamlining digital marketing strategies for the rest of the year:
Generate good content: Let’s face it, we always blame external factors such as lack of social media followers, bad luck, bad timing, or lack of promotional strategy when a piece of content does not fetch the kind of results it is supposed to. While these reasons could play a big role but look at it this way—a good content always finds a way to reach certain people and social sharing takes it to the next level. But we got to ask ourselves, are we generating unique and good quality content? A good content requires knowledge, experience, research, hard work and command over expression. Content doesn’t necessarily be an article or a blog post, a well thought and created infographic is quite succinct and aesthetically pleasant to the trick. Adding to the list, if you’re offering a service or selling a product, a case study always vouches for your promises that you have done it before for somebody else and there is a high chance you can do it again. There will always be a substitute for the medium to promote your content but there will never be a substitute for good content.
SEO over Social Media: Take a moment to think about this, you may be active on one social media today, get bored tomorrow & move on to next, and get bored of it too the next day and move on to the other one—but will you ever stop doing a basic search about anything on your preferred engine? Probably not. Social media scenario keeps fluctuating, as seen with other technologies they evolve too and for better or worse our behavior there does too. Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, recently came up with the stats that social media is dying, and organic reach is going down everywhere significantly barring one or two platforms that are witnessing the rise this year. SEO was, is, and will remain the most powerful and important tactic in the digital marketing arsenal. Sure, it isn’t easy and like social media it evolves too and if you’re a digital marketer then you would know that it evolves for the greater good and it keeps us on our toes and makes us think & strategize better to gain more visibility and organic traffic. Never too late to pick up where you left off and see the metrics gradually rising few weeks down the line.
Intelligent Advertising: Okay, there is where it could get complicated. What does the word “intelligent” mean here? Should the marketer use intelligence on target audience to launch smart campaigns or should the advertisement be optimized intelligently for maximum output? Well, I maybe going overboard by saying if you use intelligence in your ad targeting, you probably won’t have to use intelligence in optimizing it. Let’s take a deep dive, our digital world is bombarded with advertisements everywhere in most of the websites we visit and most of the apps we use but still we don’t remember almost any of them—why—because either they weren’t meant for us, or they weren’t designed or written in a way to hold our attention or simply they overdid it. In our chaotic lives, we aren’t looking for people or tools to sell us more stuff, rather we want our problems to be solved and we want these solutions at the right place at the right time. Simply put, people still want advertisements and you cannot compete with those with big pockets who show all their ads to all the people in the world hoping a chunk of that audience would eventually become their customer. Develop personas, collect information, slice & dice data on user behavior and create a contextually personalized ad that offers solutions for that targeted persona for your next campaign.
Get Influencers on board: It does work, absolutely, it does. Works best if you’re pally with someone with a decent social media following—if they were to talk about your service or product occasionally—it does the trick. Even if you don’t, expenditure on a influencer posting about you, if their audience matches your target audience that is, as compared to the expenditure on an advertisement. In my opinion, this is the best way to “hack” social media, getting an influencer to talk about you directly or indirectly. It works because someone else of influence talks about you, for a change to their followers. No matter what platform, influencers are everywhere, you just need to pick those whose followers have similar attributes as your target audience.
Adopt AI before it goes mainstream: I know it still sounds fancy and even though there are so many people talking about it, there still are some apprehensions and hesitation in using it. When it comes to large scale advertising campaigns, AI can help marketers find innovative ways to optimize ad layout, content, placement, targeting and bids. This will not only result in more effective campaigns but also will reach out to people like the segment created. According to this report by Everage, 63% of marketers who participated in the survey mentioned increased conversion rates and 61% noted improved customer experiences. According to eMarketer, more than 60% marketers would like to leverage AI in content marketing. The usage includes predicting what consumers would like to read next, creating more accurate buyer personas, content creation and optimization according to customer preference. By 2018, Gartner predicts, 20% of all business content will be authored by machines. An easy way to get started would be using AI tools that can optimize your campaigns for lowest possible cost and maximum possible results. When it comes to AI, the sooner the better.
Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.
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