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The Top Underrated Digital Marketing Opportunities Most Businesses Overlook

Author: Eleanor Hecks

It seems as though every brand has a strong presence online. Therefore, standing out from the crowd can be highly difficult.

With social media feeds updated every second and news articles published constantly, gaining some traction is a success for most.

However, you might be thinking of other ways to boost your visibility. Rising above others is one way to get noticed, but how can you diversify your marketing efforts?

Sometimes the best way is to apply an overlooked digital marketing technique.

Here are some of the most underrated digital marketing opportunities to improve your brand awareness.

1. Featured Snippets

Many businesses often ignore the steps of claiming the prized spot of a featured snippet.

Featured snippets are relatively new to the Google results page. They are small excerpts lifted from pages. Normally, they appear near the top of the SERP (search engine results page) — and they show up in response to an information request.

Google implemented these excerpts to resolve a user’s problem without the need to load a hosted website. Featured snippets significantly enhance the user experience. Plus, it builds trust and credibility for the site source.

Take into account that featured snippets aren’t always in the first spot of the results page. Instead, it acknowledges the language and concept of the excerpt, the page’s authority, formatting — and the most relevant answer.

Take advantage of the featured snippet by optimizing your content in natural language and identifying the context of that language. You could also consider using Schema markup to help search engines understand your content and obtain a higher chance of getting featured.

2. Offline Marketing Channels

Most businesses often don’t think about creating a strong digital marketing strategy offline. They separate digital marketing from the traditional methods because they believe it’s the only way.

With traditional marketing, you might think of having a beautifully-designed sign to attract customers outside your store. Or, maybe you’d spend time sending mail-outs to promote your brand.

Yet, it’s possible to give your traditional marketing strategies a digital twist. You’ve most likely seen standard approaches like leveraging Snapchat to offer coupons. Other methods also include QR codes or app pairing — where an app brings up online reviews instantly when you tap a phone against a product plate, for example.

Plus, paper can also do wonders for your digital marketing strategy. For instance, if you’ve created a blog post you’re proud of, you could print it out and post it at local coffee shops.

Just be sure you’ve got a URL labeled clearly, so it leads back to your website or social media profiles.

3. Virtual Reality Video Content

Of course, video conquers when telling a brand story. People connect more deeply with engaging content than the posts you see on social media feeds.

However, why not give your audience something more to experience? With the tools available at the hands of businesses, most overlook the opportunity to market with VR (virtual reality) video.

360 degrees-video is an emerging technology that businesses have the potential to use for sharing brand moments and connecting with customers.

With it being available on YouTube and Facebook, businesses can expand their content to 360 degrees-video — bringing a new depth that photos can’t capture.

If your business is all about connecting with your audience, consider posting VR-compatible video content to enhance your interaction.

4. Voice Search

Voice search is one of the most recent top investments of Google and for a good reason. The rise of mobile devices largely spurs virtual assistant technology. Therefore, voice search is becoming more commonplace for users.

With that in mind, many businesses often overlook content optimization for voice search. However, it only calls for small restructuring in your content.

For instance, you’ll need to shift your keywords in favor of longer phrases and include direct answers to queries rather than simple restatements.

Consider using the “People Also Ask” section in a Google search to find keywords and phrases to improve your search engine rankings.

You may also see other changes in the future. These might include improved natural language processing where the algorithm can dissect sarcasm, background information, intonation, etc.

For instance, an intonation could deliver optimistic content versus pessimistic according to a specific topic.

Therefore, you’ll need to understand your audience more efficiently than ever to take advantage of this digital marketing opportunity.

5. Gamification

Gamification is a gaming technique used to improve customer engagement. If you’re thinking of ways to connect with more prospects, build brand awareness and increase conversions, gamification is it.

You can gamify practically any stage of the customer journey. Contests, incentives and scoring systems are a great way to interact with potential customers. Yet, it helps to consider your goal and audience interests before building an entire campaign.

Once you have those ideas in place, you can develop a gamification approach and its incentives.

Remember, it’s always best to keep things simple. Too often, you’ll see a great campaign, but too many rules and conditions apply to participation.

6. Native Advertising

The native advertising market is rapidly growing, and now is the time to take advantage of it. According to ADYOULIKE, native advertising spending will jump by 372% from 2020 and be worth over $400 billion by 2025.

Native advertising is a paid form of advertising involving a seamless ad design on the platform they appear. Unlike banner ads, native ads are less intrusive and don’t affect the user experience.

However, many businesses are missing the opportunity to improve their content output.

Native ads are typically on social feeds, below articles and eCommerce sites. While building an effective native ad campaign takes time, the effort is worth it. These ads have higher click-through rates and are often more engaged by consumers.

To optimize your native ads for the best results, ensure you establish clear goals, choose the right advertising platform — and align the campaign content with your goals.

Own Your Digital Marketing Endeavors

While these are the most underrated digital marketing opportunities, there’s also no one-size-fits-all solution to growing your brand. Often business owners use social media as their go-to digital marketing strategy.

However, you have plenty of ways to drive great results. Consider testing different approaches and running campaigns others haven’t thought of yet. Your marketing efforts won’t go unnoticed as you stand out from the crowd.

Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.

6 SEO Trends That are Bound to Rule the Coming Decade

Author: Hazel Raoult

Optimizing and ranking your website pre-2010 era was pretty easy. You’d just have to follow simple steps like getting your website up, throwing in a bunch of keywords, writing a bit about the topic, and Voila! Google would start ranking your website on top.

However, that’s not the case anymore. Also, due to the internet revolution, the number of websites that compete with each other to rank higher exploded. Due to these reasons, it started getting difficult for search engines to crawl and index the massive database of the internet.

Today, the Google search index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes. Thus, it needs a formidable way to evaluate and rank each page.

The evolution of Search Engine Optimization as seen in the last decade that ended with 2020 was, if described in one word, stellar.

Search Engines, especially Google have improved their quality and user experience by shifting their focus from keyword-oriented to quality-oriented results. And as the days pass by, SEO will keep getting evolved as and when new trends emerge.

Meanwhile, let’s see some of the SEO trends that are bound to rule the coming decade.

6 SEO Trends That Will Dominate the SERP Ranking for Coming Decade

1. Content Quality & User Intent

Yes, content quality has long been here and affects significantly on the SERP rankings. However, many websites haven’t adopted this as their SEO mantra. They are still focused on short-term SEO gains through building backlinks, optimizing technical SEO, or doing digital PR.

However, these are not suitable for long-term SEO gains. Also, due to the massive size of the database, the Google algorithm will only rank pages that offer remarkable quality on a consistent basis.

Websites creating generic content will have lower chances of ranking than the ones that publish unique, quality content on topics not covered by others previously.

One way to adopt this in your competitive content marketing strategy is by researching well for the user intent of your target audiences to scour unique topics. Now, organize and prioritize these notions by relevance and cover them one by one.

The quality content doesn’t necessarily have to be SEO-friendly but it must fulfill the users’ intent and their expectations. And if the industry leaders are to be believed, Google has long been working to detect the intent behind every search users make.

Thus, considering the value of content quality and user intent it encapsulates, this trend is bound to rule the coming years as a SERP ranking signal.

2. SEO Automation

From admin workflows to IT services and marketing, automation has proven its effectiveness. SEO practices such as website audits, competitor analysis, search intent detection, and many others have already been automated. And from 2022 onwards, it’ll become more widespread as more SEO professionals around the world increasingly adopt automation with open arms.

Driven by AI and machine learning, SEO automation can intelligently do technical audits to scour issues by content type. Also, many SEO experts utilize SEO automation as quality assurance for their SEO services.

Moreover, AI-powered automation tools monitor potential SEO issues in real-time and warn as soon as possible to eliminate and resolve them beforehand. The SEO automation trend is continually picking up the pace. And it has gone from ‘nice to have’ to necessary when dealing with larger and more complex sites.

3. Mobile & Page Experience

Not so recently, Google had announced the mobile-first indexing for the whole web. And recently, it has started implementing a page experience update that aims to rank sites with better user experience scores for both mobile and web.

Thanks to this update, the entirety of the mobile and web, from the discovery phase to engagement, everything will correlate and be in sync to offer the best possible page experience.

The ripple effects of mobile-first indexing and page experience updates will cause a massive re-organization in the SERP ranking that we all can witness in the coming years. Thus, brands should start preparing their website from the onwards to not lose any significant SERP rankings.

4. SERP Localization

As per Brightlocal’s Consumer Survey, consumers that use Google for local business evaluation increased from 63% in 2020 to 81% in 2021. Also, the following graph shows that 21% of consumers use the internet every day to find information about local businesses and 99% have done so in the last year.

(Image Source)

From these statistics, we can idealize that Google will focus more on presenting localized content in the SERP results over the next few years. Already, the location-specific pages or content is outranking those who ranked at the top and focused more on global reach.

This will keep on picking up and become more obvious in the coming decade. Thus, websites with global target audiences will have to necessarily form a local presence to rank higher on localized SERP.

5. Metaverse Marketing

Metaverse marketing may seem like a new trend in the marketing sphere that’s thought to fade away with time. However, it has come a long way from being just another buzzword to a revolutionary strategy for marketers.

Metaverse can be conceptualized as the successor of the internet that we enjoy today. It brings the capabilities of the internet, virtual reality, and augmented reality together. As per Statista, there will be around a billion AR active users in 2022, which is supposed to cross the 1.7 billion mark in 2024.

Just like how brands optimize their web presence to get found on the current internet, they’ll have to find different ways to optimize their presence on the next generation of the internet i.e. Metaverse. A visual content strategy will play an important role in getting found on the Metaverse.

Audit your content strategy to find and optimize it with new content types and can implement AR, VR, and 3D experiences to leverage Metaverse marketing.

6. Voice & Visual Search

As mentioned in the previous point, visual as well as voice search will take precedence over the normal search approach.

As per one report, more than one-third of Americans use a voice search feature while 71% of consumers prefer making a voice search over typing. Another report projects that Google Smart Speaker Sales will hit 140 million in 2025.

This foreshadows that Google will prioritize the sites optimized for voice search and will feature them in the snippet results or show/speak when searched using smart assistants.

The same will apply for the visual search. After the introduction of Google Lens, the search engine giant is becoming better at interpreting SEO-optimized images day by day. The image recognition software will enable users to search for products and other things on the web.

Also, Google Discover uses images for tailored results. Thus, it’s predicted that normal search may start to resemble a lot more like Discover results filled with visuals.

Conclusion

Trends are known for their quick appeal when they appear first in the market. Many of those trends become obsolete after a certain period or when they are no longer relevant to the market. However, the above-mentioned SEO trends have been here for a few years now and we believe they’ll continue to be relevant in the coming years.

As more research and development are being conducted in the same direction, many of the trends listed in this article will go mainstream and rule the coming decade. Thus, brands need to sharpen their knowledge horns to drive sustainable and meaningful growth in the near future.

Author Bio

Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.

Digital Marketing In 2022 – Top 3 Reasons Why Small Business Need It

Author: Motif Creatives

Digital Marketing in 2022 – Top 3 Reasons Why Small Business Need It

When starting a small business, the focus is often on how to reach your first customers. They can rely on traditional advertising methods, such as print ads, coupon posts, or large roadside signs. They can be trusted because they know they are offering a good product or service, and it will take time for customers to reach them.

While this strategy can lead to business growth, there is a better and simpler way. First, small businesses need to consider a large market for online customers. No small business, no matter how new, should be forgotten in this vast market.

Don’t postpone Digital Marketing anymore?

Why do you decide to put time and effort into digital marketing? Different small businesses may offer different reasons to avoid this type of market, but in the end, the delay is the delay.

Small businesses sometimes feel they don’t have the time or money to compete online. They think they can face many problems at once and are still learning all the intricacies of e-commerce. Most of them can choose to go slow and stick to one or two main types of advertising. Thus their business will grow over time.

They may think that the best strategy is to wait for customers to arrive. Because they have a small business, they may think they need few customers.

This is not a good practice. There is no guarantee your business will attract customers because it exists, and even then, you may not attract as many customers as you need to make your business successful. You have to implement new strategies like the countdown timer plugin to create a sense of urgency for people to make a purchase decision faster. Digital marketing involves both strategies for your online store as well as for social platforms.

Top 3 Reasons Why Small Business Need It

#1. Your Customers Are Online

If you’ve avoided digital marketing, is it because you think you’re not ready for it? Do you think you need time to calm down and then understand what digital marketing is?

The problem with this approach is that your customers and suppliers are online. This. Today. They seem to be looking for a company like yours, but if they can’t find you, they’ll probably choose another one.

This is how people trade today. So, for example, if someone is interested in your business or your public domain and wants to know about your trademark, the first thing they do is search the web and find out what works. After that, they’ll find out about you.

They hope to find you there with your website and social media ads. In addition, they can look for reviews to see what other people say about your company and whether it is an excellent place to do business.

If a customer can’t find you online, they may think your business doesn’t look right. It is very likely that many of these potential customers will decide not to value your business and will quickly switch to something else.

Once they have made that decision, they are unlikely to return.

#2. Reviews Matter

Online reviews can attract or enhance your business’s ability to attract new customers or businesses. While all businesses can share their products or services, other customers can provide accurate and unbiased information. If you get a lot of information from trusted sources, your business can stand out from the competition and build trust even if they don’t appear on your website.

The most helpful business search is through Google Business. They are the most trusted and visible resource, and your Google business listing allows people to visit or call your site. Facebook is another excellent source for web reviews, and you can use it to create a newsletter on your website, but Yelp is great for restaurants, hotels, and entertainment businesses.

To increase the number of reviews, link to Google’s list of companies to review for customers. Even if you get all five stars, the low -performing companies get more minor changes than the 100+ listed companies, even if some of them are low.

#3. The Rise of Voice Search

Voice research has come a long way in recent years. More Americans are using devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home than ever before. By 2022, more Americans are expected to use in-depth research than ever before. Gartner predicts that the entire web-based investigation will begin with sound.

This means that it is vital to satisfy your voice requirement to find you, Siri, and Alexa. Let’s talk about how in a minute. But first, let’s discuss another small business model.

Small Business Marketing Strategies for 2022

Below are the marketing strategies for small businesses in 2022 that they can achieve, no matter how much money they invest in their market budget.

  • Respond to Customer Reviews

The majority of the online stores did not respond to the review. This is a big mistake. First, it helps build customer loyalty. A simple thank you can help make a good impression on your customers and encourage them to return. In addition, responding to reviews can improve the quality of your research business. Finally, Google has proven that responding to reviews will help your SEO.

  • Implement Webchat to Your Website

Webchat works for business. Because it’s much easier than other media: phone and email. Most people today try to avoid phone calls whenever possible, and emails are often ignored. Webchat offers the best of both worlds, customer friendliness and a great way to get answers to your questions.

  • Stay Active on Social Media

While you may already have a Facebook profile page, remember to stay active on social media. Consumers today expect to operate companies on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. While it’s true that Facebook has few opportunities for traditional advertising, these business customers are expecting to post on social media regularly.

Conclusion

Digital marketing will allow you to meet your customer’s expectations. You can gradually get to know them and what they hope to achieve. Do a little research or try to get to know them. Listen carefully to their comments or survey responses.

This is how you start building relationships with your customers. You can be more than just a business. You will become a reliable partner. People buy a lot more from companies they have already bought from.

Compared to advertising on TV, radio, or direct mail, digital marketing costs more while reaching a larger audience. . Using online marketing to promote your small business can help you have a better chance of success.