3 Ways To Leverage the Trends and Changes to Digital Marketing

Everyone nowadays believes digital marketing is the Holy Grail of marketing and just because you are implementing digital marketing strategies in your business that it’s going to work for you. Small Business Stacey spells out several digital marketing trends that may help increase your marketing ROI, so you have a greater chance of success using digital marketing for your business.  #ASmallBizLife #WhereMarketingMeetTechnology

Episode Transcript

Let me answer a question that I’m getting a lot today. I’m going to talk about the topic everyone seems to be enamored with, digital marketing.

What should you be focusing on in 2020 to build out your digital marketing plan? I’m going to share three important trends you need to be aware of so that you can be ahead of the curve and get them into action, pun intended.

Trend number one – Search marketing is changing

Remember the good old days when you typed something into Google? Well, that’s actually becoming a thing of the past already. Isn’t that crazy? Nowadays, people just ask Google. They just ask Alexa or Google Home. They just ask what the answer is, and this has totally changed SEO because voice search is very different from online search. Think about it. If you’re looking for ways, let’s say to use social media in your market, you may type into Google social media marketing ideas or social media hacks or just social media. But when you use voice search, you’re usually asking a full question and many times it starts with, “Hey Google”.

Those words are part of the search results showing that people are using for voice search. And what’s important to know about this is that those people are not going to your website, Google home, or Alexa, they’re just answering out what’s called a rich snippet of information to answer your question, and that rich snippet of information comes from a term called rank zero. Rank zero is what Google and Alexa use when they answer your question. So if you go online and you search for something on Google and you see that area at the top of the search results right below the ads. That contains some content that you can read through, not the general listings that you’re using this thing, right? A little box on the top of the search results. That’s what’s known as rank zero. For example, if I type in “marketing for small business”, there’s a box of information RevLocal that provides helpful tips and this is what Google home or Alexa will reveal to you if you ask a voice search question.

What it also means is that people are not going to click through to your website because they’re searching with voice, so you need to find more ways to get people to you. How can you do that?

Trend number two – video

Video is just going to continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. LinkedIn, I don’t know if you knew this. LinkedIn now has live, Instagram has live, Facebook has live, YouTube has live. Live is everywhere, right? And I just don’t see that changing. The technology’s getting better, the bandwidth is getting better also. You have got to incorporate video into your marketing strategy. What makes it so powerful is the ability to repurpose it. I have my clients create one video which can then be repurposed into a podcast, a blog post, social media posts, and sent out via email from just one piece of content.

So just put on a lavalier mic, turn on your camera and share your brilliance with the world. No one cares if they have a bad hair day. No one cares. You don’t have to have a beautiful backdrop. You’re doing a dis-service to those that you can truly serve by not showcasing your brilliance via video.

Trend number three – live events (online)

Oh, doing live meetings, I already know what you’re thinking. I don’t want to do stuff live. I just want to sit behind my computer and watch the money pour in. Well, stick with me. You heard me preach it before and I’ll say it again now. All business is H to H, Human to human. Nothing, seriously, nothing will help you get more business faster and less expensively than letting people get to know the “real” you. People want to have a connection with other people.

I’m doing more live online events like my weekly Quarantini Happy Hour and it’s becoming my number one converting way to bring in new clients. I host local marketing events every month each focused on a different topic. I’m getting 25 to 50 people in the room. Many of them now becoming regular. They come to my meetings every month and I’ve already gotten three new clients from it. I have a client in Florida that’s starting to do seminars to bring people into their practice. I have a client in California that is doing Meetups to build a local following. It works. There is power in personal connection.

So what does all of this have to do with digital marketing? You can incorporate digital marketing into your use of live or in-person events. You can promote it ahead of time with social media, right? Video, email, even text marketing. These are all digital strategies. You can even stream your live events, thus getting a double bang for your buck.

So today I just outlined three ways to leverage the trends and changes in digital marketing so that you can grow your business:

1. Search
2. Video
3. Live events (online)

So my question to you is, what are you going to do to put these into action?