Online marketing is the cornerstone of any business that wants to grow in 2020. You have probably already heard of it, and likely spent resources on making it work. This blog will take you through the most relevant online marketing tips and tricks that you need to do in 2020.
SEO Website Optimisation
Your website has to be optimized and up to date with the latest trends to attract more users. In these new times, SEO has become the strongest tool to become visible on search engines. SEO is all about optimizing the experience for users and not search engines. You achieve this through these basic steps, On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Enhanced Mobile Experience.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is critically important as it has a large impact on the user experience and satisfying the search engines. On-page SEO includes targetting the correct keywords, adding meta titles and meta descriptions, alt-texts for images, and other elements. Combined this will provide a better user experience.
On-page SEO also includes updating your content. If you have a blog, the information continuously needs to be updated to create value for users instead of just spamming the internet. The aim here is to provide relevant and useful information for users that are looking for it.
You can read more about On-Page SEO here.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO is all about your website’s authority that is measured through metrics like Domain Rating, DR and URL Rating, UR. Your website’s authority will have a direct influence on where you rank on the search engine results page. You can increase your authority by increasing the number of backlinks to your website. Backlinks refer to other websites and homepages linking to your site.
The more websites refer or link your website the higher authority you will achieve. However, it’s not only the number of links back that you receive, but it is also their relevance and authority. Think of it as a voting system, the more links you get the more votes. But it’s, not one link equals one vote, links with higher authority and relevance count towards more votes. Hence, you are looking to increase backlinks that have a high DR and UR.
You can read more about Off-Page SEO here.
Mobile-Friendly
Today more and more people are using mobile phones for search instead of desktops and tablets. Therefore having a mobile-friendly website is increasingly important. Google looks seriously at measures like website speed, responsiveness, and ease of use. Ensuring that you have the same URL and HTML working responsively on any device will go along way in your SEO optimization.
You read more about Mobile SEO here.
Content Marketing
Content marketing aims to generate leads and grow traffic to your website. Mostly through creating and sharing online material that includes videos, blogs, and social media posts. These online materials do not necessarily directly promote your brand, but they create interest in your products and services.
Content marketing is important for organic growth, it allows you to improve conversions through connecting and educating your customers and leads. You are encouraging conversions by providing relevant and useful information for your potential clients. It is also a fertile ground to create engagement which is critical for any business that wants to go viral.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great opportunity for grooming your leads. It is more than just sending an email to promote services and products. Email marketing is also used to develop and nurture relationships with potential customers. There are two sides of email marketing, all the spam emails that you receive which are claiming to offer great deals is an example of a bad email marketing campaign. No one wants to receive or deal with all that unwanted spam.
A great example of email marketing is targetting specific segments, groups or even individual customers with targetted offers. An e-commerce shop may send an email on a customer’s birthday offering them 40% off on their next purchase. Personalizations like this will allow your business to maintain and grow your customer relationship and increase both sales and brand loyalty.
The biggest advantage of email marketing can be seen as the price and reach of it. It is relatively a low cost once you have acquired a list of emails, either through subscriptions or otherwise. Setting up an email marketing campaign and measuring it’s KPI’s usually costs less than other marketing strategies. Keep in mind that e-mail marketing is very relevant today, as more than 90% of email users check their inboxes at least daily.
If you need inspiration to creating the best ad design, click here.
Call-to-Action
Having a call-to-action on your website, email campaign, or any online content allows you to invite clients to take a certain action. It can be offering them an informal talk where they hear more about your services and products. Or simply to read more information on your blog page or download an ebook.
Call-to-actions are like your ultimate goal from the content you are sharing, the next step, or the answer to “now what?”. After someone has visited your website and read the information what do you expect them to do? Having a call-to-action will allow them to make that choice easier and will allow monitoring the effectiveness of your message.
Social Media
Social media today has more users than ever, almost 50% of the world’s population or 3.8 billion people use social media today. You can use social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter and others to directly reach potential clients and customers. Some channels are better than others depending on your business model and target audience.
The aim here is to be present where your target audience is active. For example, if you are a B2C you probably want to make use of Facebook since it has the largest share of users, more than 1 billion. However, if you are a B2B LinkedIn will likely be the best platform to generate and groom leads. There are several ways to utilize these platforms, you can promote your products or services through paid ads, each platform has its model.
Another critical aspect of social media is the immense amount of data that you can use to target and tailor your campaigns. Monitoring and tunning your campaigns using a data-driven approach will allow your campaigns to reach their full potential.
Finally, many companies make the mistake of having an account on every social media platform, while failing to be active on all of them. It is best practice to have one social account that you are really active and engaging on, instead of having several redundant ones.
Facebook Ads
We have already mentioned that more than half of the world’s population is on social media. Well, Facebook alone has more than a billion users. You can quickly realize the incredible potential for growing traffic, generating leads and increasing brand awareness and engagement. Comparably, Facebook ads are probably amongst the most cost-effective platforms (besides ranking organically).
This doesn’t guarantee your value for money, what does, is actually capturing the right audience and communicating the right message. This will result in one of the most affordable conversions you can achieve.
There are a variety of elements and strategies that you can use in Facebook Ads. Selecting the right ones will allow you to drive traffic to your website, promote your services/products and even collect data. Data can be in the form of subscribers’ emails, which is powerful for email marketing as mentioned above.
If you want to learn more about Facebook Ads click here.
Google Ads
Google Ads earlier known as Google Adwords, is probably the most famous PPC Pay-Per-Click advertising scheme. If you have been searching on Google for a while, you would have definitely realized the Ads at the top of google search results page. Google Ads allows you to bid on keywords to compete on the four top positions on the SERP. Here you pay each time your link is clicked by a user. Considering the number of users on Google, and it being the largest search engine by far, it is easy to see the potential here.
However, Google Ads can run up your expenses without having a viable return, and many businesses end up terminating their google ad campaigns. The main reason for this is not setting up the campaigns correctly, either bidding on the wrong keywords or not setting up the right type of campaign or… You can always ensure your maximum spending, either by placing a maximum bid limit or a maximum daily spend.
Google Ads can be very powerful to make you reach the very top of Google’s result page but at a price. Note that since you are using keywords for your Google Ads, and using them for your SEO optimization the two have to be interconnected, and your plan should encompass both. This way your SEO strategy and your Google Ads Campaign can complement and work with each other to deliver the best cost-effective approach for your business.
If you want to read to more about PPC click here.
Conclusion
At Miklagard, we have specialists in the most relevant online marketing practices, that can help answer any questions you have, and even help you set-up your strategy and drive your business to its full potential. You can always reach out to us here.
