With a new year comes new goals, new ideas and, let’s not forget, the latest trends list. We decided to take a slightly different spin on the trends list and look at the top best practices to implement for three digital marketing strategies our clients rely on the most: Video Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Email Marketing.
Video
We continue to see stats that showcase the power of video. For example, 72% of businesses say video has improved their conversion rate and 65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video. Here’s a few ideas to incorporate video into your digital marketing mix in 2019:
- Start with YouTube and expand beyond – YouTube, while the primary video channel online, isn’t the only place to post video content. Post videos where your customers and prospects are found – on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. And consider live video for interviews, demos, events or announcements broadcast via your social channels.
- Video SEO – SEO is important not only for your website. To rank higher in search engine results, when posting video content on YouTube include keywords in your description, title and tags. Make sure there’s a link back to your website within the description.
- Unique video content – try showcasing your content from a unique perspective. Video options, depending on need and budget, can include: drone footage, 360-video, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). For example, VR can be considered as an option for training videos or to create an immersive experience at trade shows.
SEO
Search engine optimization remains a hot topic every year. Here are three of the top SEO opportunities to take advantage of in 2019:
- Page speed – Google has made speed ranking a major factor for mobile devices so watch load times carefully. If you’re seeing page load times creeping up, review image file sizes or if you can compress video on page.
- Voice search – with more people using voice to search on mobile devices (Hello Siri!), researching keywords that resemble how people normally talk and incorporating this type of content into your website will be increasingly important
- Mobile-first – make sure your website is responsively designed and mobile friendly as Google will be using the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still an important part of your marketing outreach. Get the most engagement from your efforts by focusing on these best practices:
- Responsive Design – even in this mobile age, emails still need to look good on both mobile and desktop, especially in B2B where only 35% of users check email on mobile versus 59% for personal email (Marketing Profs).
- Fewer Graphics – emails heavy on the graphics are more apt to get caught in spam filters so keep the graphics for the landing pages and consider using plain text emails where it makes sense.
- Reduce Frequency – reducing the frequency of your emails (e.g. from bi-weekly to once a month or once every six weeks) while ramping up the engagement factor with better content is key. Your customers want more relevant information, not more frequent information so be informative, not an irritant.
Content is still King
Behind all three of these core strategies is content. The need for content hasn’t changed, in fact content development is still rated as one of the top marketing activities in 2019 according to Smart Insights latest Managing Digital Marketing report. As you develop your video, SEO and email marketing plans for the year consider areas where you can improve your content including:
- Content at all stages of the buyer’s journey – for some B2B organizations, the buyer’s journey from interest to purchase can be long and convoluted. By providing content that supports each step of a buyer’s decision-making process, you can shorten sales cycles and create higher levels of trust that you’re the right company to purchase from.
- Letting the data guide you – What search queries are visitors using? Where are they exiting your site? Which pages are they focusing on? What’s the path they take through your site before purchasing? What types of content do they click most often on in emails? What content is downloaded the most? Questions like these can guide the review of your site analytics and marketing automation reports to help generate new ideas for content generation.
- Chunking out content from larger assets – content does not have to live in one format. For example, if you create a whitepaper, chunk it out in various formats including video, blog posts, podcasts, infographics, and social posts to get the most out of those major content assets.
We’re looking forward to an exciting year helping our clients bring their digital strategies to life. Reach out to us today to see how you can leverage these best practices for your business.
