It’s being prophesied that the world will go artificial in the next 25 years. Cars will be automated, cities will become smarter and currencies will go corporate. Researches by futuristic organizations such as the UN and the World Economic Forum have predicted the vanquish of digitization over everyday living. So let’s ask the favourite question of every interviewer. Where do you see yourself in the next 25 years? Where will your business stand among humanized robots and chatbots?
A THOUSAND VR CANNOT REPLACE A MOVIE THEATRE EXPERIENCE
Similarly, small businesses can be improved by automation, but can never be replaced. Howbeit, to stay relevant and constantly assure your leads and customer of your credibility, you’ll have to keep up with digitization, or as a millennial would like to call, the Kardashians of marketing.
KEEPING UP WITH THE K’DASHIANS
- E-MAIL MARKETING: Since the past one year was primarily online, there was an 80% increase in e-mail engagement. Added to that, it’s predicted that global email users will grow to 4.48 billion by 2024. So, it’s highly likely, that many small businesses will invest in e-mail marketing. In a customer-centric market, areas of investment will be on personalization strategies that ups engagement with both new customers and existing customers and email marketing automation that makes personalized campaigns easier to implement and manage.
- CONTENT MARKETING: Content is the key to relevance. Whether through social media or advertisements, content is always created to fill the fine gaps between demand and supply. Your content can be personalized, empowering or simply educational, but it’s your content that will shape and narrate the story of your brand.
➔ Blog Content Marketing
➔ Infographic Content Marketing
➔ Podcast Content Marketing
➔ Video Content Marketing
➔ Social Media Content Marketing
- SEO: SEO will be one of the most important powerful strategy since everything on the world wide web is currently based on algorithms. The coming year will be no different, but the focus will shift from getting listings on the first page to SEO visibility in position zero. So what is Position Zero? Position Zero refers to Google’s featured snippet that’s separated with a small box at the top of the search results. Another key point is to keep in mind that your users may use virtual assistants to look-up businesses. Make sure your website is well-optimized with long-tail keywords and phrases to be listed on voice search. Don’t limit optimizing your website for text search. Make sure to explore voice search optimization for virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Cortana.
- LOCAL MARKETS: Since we live in a universe that is on cloud both celestially and digitally, the sky becomes the limit. We aim for the entire 7 billion people when we tap a target audience, online. Although at a level 2 this might be a good approach to enhance brand visibility and outreach, it is important to take care of the low hanging fruits first. It is important to carefully craft a niche for our business based on demography, needs and other factors to strengthen the core. Ergo, building the business at the local tire is a must, first and a constant.
- CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING: Conversational marketing is a fancy term to define marketing using real-time conversations to convert your leads into buyers. One of the economic ways of implementing conversational marketing is via chat widgets. Website users can connect directly with you over any queries or to book a consultation session. When using chat widgets or similar applications, the key is to have a definitive path to the conversation. Define in advance how would you like your users to use the chat option. Is it to answer product/service queries, book appointments, help users buy products online, etc.? The more defined you are with your approach, the better user experience you can provide.
Dr Dave Chaffey’s Digital Insights suggests that the goals of conversation marketing include
➔ Sell – Higher conversion rates through offline channels provided by human interaction or human-style interaction enabled by a chatbot
➔ Speak – Conversations enable queries to be resolved more rapidly than static web pages
➔ Serve – Customer satisfaction ratings improved by better customer service
➔ Save – Cost savings from when fewer support staff interactions are needed
➔ Sizzle – The personal touch gives a better brand experience
BEFORE JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS
Unlike Kangaroos who jump for travel purposes, humans jump to conclusions. So, before we let you conclude, online marketing will be an extremely powerful gadget in 2021, when it comes to lead generation and brand visibility, but it is not meant to replace the personalized warmth of offline marketing. Both need to go hand in hand.
After all, all the delicious and quirky e-mails by Dominos is one ingredient, but the delivery boy’s heart-warming “Here’s your pizza, ma’am, have a nice day!” completes the entire recipe!
