Creative ways to market your business can be a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. Marketing is the most important part of your business. If you don’t have any new customers, then you don’t have a business. It’s as simple as that. The great thing about small business marketing is that you don’t need a big budget to make the right moves. But how do you know which moves are right?
To help you out, we have compiled this intricate list of effective marketing ideas that will assist you to improve your SEO as well as social media marketing strategies. All these ideas have one thing in common – they do much more than just marketing the brand!
Neuromarketing
This is one of the most inspiring marketing trends of 2020. While it might sound like a science fiction film factor, the fact is that this technology is moving fast and will soon become a viable tool for marketers. For the uninitiated, neuromarketing is a technique that analyses a person’s brainwave activity and nervous system to assess the kind of content they find interesting.
Privacy marketing
It becomes apparent that the world’s citizens (but not companies take privacy seriously, and advertisers – depending upon them – have no choice but to abide by the new laws or miss out. One new rule is that marketing professionals and brands must “earn” the contact information o people instead of engaging in mass marketing.
Introduction of 5G
In a world that has been crazy with smartphones, the dawn of the 5G technology or fifth generation of mobile technology is potentially one of the most important digital marketing developments in 2020. This update marks the beginning of a whole new age and ideas for digital communication and marketing in almost all industries.
Advanced analytics
Modern marketing and metrics work together but you’d fail to get the results you’d like to see if you’re not investing in better analytics. The role of analytics monitoring is rapidly becoming a major challenge, due to many platforms to manage and a multitude of ways to market your goods and services. Thus, you should go way beyond Google Analytics to collect data and come up with new marketing ideas for 2021.
Focus on branding
In order to gain the trust of people, you need to establish yourself as a solid brand, having enough expertise in your industry. Branding is crucial because of Google’s E.A.T. factor, which stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. In particular, Google needs to do more than rank good content; it caters to user experience by seeking the most reliable, up-to-date, well-researched (i.e. authoritative content on any given subject, preferably produced by true professionals in the industry.
SERP Position zero
This is the holy grail of modern SEO, known as rank zero snippet or position zero, since it responds to user-search queries directly without the user having to click on the link. One of the great marketing ideas is to optimize your website pages for voice search and invest resources in On-SERP SEO in order to have a competitive advantage over others.
Paid social media ads
With intensive competition in social media, the organic scope is rapidly declining and paid ads have become a more reliable force in 2020. Thus, while carrying out Facebook marketing or Instagram marketing, you need to consider paid ads as a vital part of your strategy. In the same way, Twitter marketing can also be done to take advantage of the ongoing trending topics.
Google ads smart bidding
Google explains on smart bidding that:
“Machine learning algorithms practice on vast-scale data to help you make more accurate forecasts across your profile about how specific bid amounts could affect conversions or conversion values.”
In other words, marketers may hand over the power of their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to the Google AI scheme, which will then optimize their budget to maximize their ROI.
Automation in social media
This is one of the best and time-saving ideas for social media marketing. With so many social platforms to manage, it becomes very troublesome to post individually and regularly on all of them. However, the use of social media scheduling tools like RecurPost can help you in automating your social media accounts to a large extent.
It provides Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, GMB, and Facebook post scheduler, using which you can schedule your posts ahead of time. It also gives an option to auto-schedule for the best time to post on social media accounts. You can make content libraries, create recurring schedules, view analytics, download reports, and a lot more with this tool. Its blog section also serves as an in-depth social media guide!
Artificial intelligence
Almost 30% of online businesses have incorporated the use of AI in 2020. Looking at the benefits that it offers for sales and marketing, this percentage is going to increase tremendously in the coming years.
As Neil Patel says,
“Marketing will soon become a more fair playing field and you’ll have no choice but to use AI.”
Thus, without any doubt, you should include implementing AI in your list of marketing ideas.
Deep data learning
Forbes estimates that 78% of companies either now have or are creating a customer data platform to better monitor, analyze, and leverage their data. It does not come as a surprise that data experts are at the top of the priority list for many businesses, with 41 percent of business owners reporting that they already have the most needed skills to recruit.
With the advantages of big data, there is a need for organizations to make greater use of this data to “significantly simplify tasks that historically could only be carried out by data scientists.”
Omnichannel marketing
Omnichannel marketing is a multi-platform marketing mechanism (such as social media, applications, email, and blog). It helps you to communicate with your target audience on more touchpoints. When you’re doing omnichannel marketing right, you can deliver an improved user experience and a clear brand message that moves people to take action.
“In order to stay ahead, brands must present a cohesive, clear voice and message through all available platforms, including physical stores, social media platforms, online, catalogs, and everywhere else you can envision.”
Shoppable posts on Instagram
With both e-commerce and social media rising at unprecedented rates, it is no wonder that brands are using both together to optimize sales opportunities. In March 2019, Instagram launched Instagram Checkout, which enables users to complete a purchase directly from Instagram.
Instagram claims that the app has 1 billion users, and 90% of them already follow popular shopping accounts, many of whom visit these accounts on a regular basis. So what better way to leverage this massive potential than by using shoppable posts?
A/B testing
Today, Marketing ideas are all about testing and analyzing results. By carrying out A/B split-testing, you can extract the variables in your campaign. And quickly recognize which variants drive the results you require. This form of testing provides marketers with an analytical approach to making effective adjustments to their content.
Content marketing
Google released several big changes to the search algorithm in November 2019. The updates included the latest BERT framework is designed to help Google understand the natural language used by people while searching. Google’s John Mueller advises,
“It is rather necessary to ensure that your site has rapid speeds, useful links, and well-written content rather than chasing the latest SEO trends.”
Push notifications
The number of online shops using Push notifications had increased to 85% in 2019. At least twice as many people sign up for web push notifications compared to a newsletter. As the recipient sees the push notifications almost immediately, it is a great thing to be included in the list of your top marketing ideas for 2021. They can even include images and call to action to maximize the conversion rates.
Social media stories
After Snapchat introduced the concept of stories, Instagram and Facebook followed the same path. And finally, YouTube also unveiled its story feature. These kinds of stories vanish after a certain period of time. Thus, this is a perfect opportunity for advertisers to make good use of FOMO (fear of missing out). It will result in increased brand awareness and constant engagement with followers.
Being human on social media
In 2020, we’ve seen brands tap deeper into the impact of video and interactive content, but they need to follow it by being real on their social networks, and by working hard to cultivate a group of dedicated, loyal followers.
“If your business wants to survive on social media in 2020, don’t act like a brand – act like a human that runs a brand!”
Voice marketing funnels
Voice-enabled devices and voice search will have a substantial impact on your marketing funnel. In the modern voice marketing funnel, leads will reach the funnel at various stages of the consumer journey, as many customers are now doing a lot of their own online research. This updated model requires that each customer should be viewed as an entity rather than as a generalized prospect.
Alternate search engines
StatCounter’s analysis shows that more than 92 percent of all search engine traffic is from Google, surpassing its main rivals, Yahoo and Bing. However, interestingly, DuckDuckGo has seen massive growth as it hit 1 billion searches in the month of January 2019. Therefore, advertisers should understand their audience and think about where their brand material is going to be viewed, and optimize the content for more than one search engine.
Structured data SEO
Structured information is any data organized in a way that makes crawling and categorizing easier for search engines. Content developers can do this in their backend code or in tables with labeled columns/rows by grouping information in a tidy way. When done correctly, structured data provides a huge SEO boost in one form or another, and you can rank in that desirable position zero.
Semantic keywords
While creating content, write for people – not just for Google. In order to see results, you need to keep user intent in mind. Also defined as search intent or keyword intent, this is the main purpose that a person has when entering or talking about a search query.
It may be to search a commodity, a piece of information, or a store location. The search engine does not just analyze keywords in the search box; it evaluates the contents of the query and drills down to assess the intention of the user search.
Long-form content
Short pieces of content are no longer cool and will take you nowhere. Long-form content enables content curators to define themselves as experts in the field and offers them more space for targeting keywords. A research analysis by the Search Engine Journal shows that long-form content earns 77% more backlinks than short posts, which are crucial to increase organic traffic.
Internet of things
Not only our mobile devices and laptops – but also from smart cars to household gadgets to wearable technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming more and more integrated.
“Nowadays it is expected that smart devices and technology can unrestrictedly, and often sneakily, gather data on our vital functions, what we do, where we go, what we share, what we think, what we purchase, who we know, how we travel, and even what we eat.”
As a brand, it’s one of the great ideas to use all the data available in order to do smart marketing of your products and services to the target audience.
Security of website
It is less of the marketing ideas and more of a necessity. Since August 2014, Google declared that HTTPS is a ranking factor. It flags all sites as unsafe unless they have HTTPS (‘S’ stands for ‘safe’) certification. In addition, proudly showing the security stamp of trust or badge on your website will ensure the website visitors that you consider their protection seriously.
Blockchain technology
However, the use of blockchain is much more far-reaching than just the financial industry; and this technology is already gaining traction in the digital marketing world. Blockchain removes digital marketing intermediaries, creates trust through transparency, drives public accountability, and provides branding benefits.
In upcoming years, the trends that will be seen in blockchain and that could be used as marketing ideas are: Tracking media buys, handling social impressions, Verifying online identities, protecting private information, and pinpoint targeting.
User-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is one of the best social media promotion ideas for brands that want to expand into the Millennial and Gen Z markets. You may inspire your customers to share exclusive content/feedback by giving them rewards, such as discounts, or even by collaborating with them for a good cause.
This simple UGC technique will rapidly increase brand loyalty and boost conversion rates as more customers find your brand, and its goods and services.
Progressive web apps
Progressive Web Apps are simply web pages that function like smartphone apps. They provide the features of a native mobile app—fast load times, push notifications, offline activity, hardware device utilization, and more; without being limited to a particular platform like android or iOS.
This enables development teams to build web applications for any platform that functions just like a smartphone app. With overall mobile page views rising by nearly 50 percent every year worldwide, mobile is more important than ever to the digital strategy.
Predictive analysis
Predictive analysis is the process of using data mining, predictive modeling, and data science to find trends and try to foresee the future. In terms of digital marketing ideas, we can see even more of this, as it is used in advanced lead generation, as well as in segmentation and individual customization. It helps marketers decrease costs and increase consumer loyalty.
Augmented reality
Virtual reality (VR) makes a lot of noise and makes people excited about fantastic science-fiction concepts. However, AR is far more marketable. Brands are constantly using this technology to boost customer satisfaction and increase revenue. By the end of 2022, it is predicted that 70% of enterprises will be experimenting with the use of AR as a part of their marketing ideas.
Conclusion
As we are approach the end of this year, it seems a great idea to look upon all the trends that prevailed in marketing, and be prepared with some power-packed marketing ideas for the upcoming year.
Doesn’t matter whether you have been running a business for the past 1 year or 10 years, it’s always a good idea to think about ways to creatively modify your digital marketing strategy to expand your business. Creativeness will help your company attract new clients through your marketing campaigns.