Digital marketing evolves at an incredibly fast rate, so regardless of whether you are new to digital marketing and looking to grow your small business or if you’re a seasoned professional, there will always be new things to learn.
If you are looking to expand on your digital marketing strategy, have a thought about the following areas.
SEO
SEO might sound too essential for you to consider – it’s one of the fundamentals of digital marketing. If you’re doing any digital campaign, you should have a good knowledge of SEO. However, it makes this list because algorithms are always changing. That means you can’t rely on your existing knowledge to carry you ahead of the competition, you need to always be evolving your game. That being said, to fully stay on top of the SEO game, you need to almost work full-time on it, which is why most companies just outsource their SEO to specialists. Many small businesses feel that they don’t have the budget for that. Still, times are changing, and agencies like Spark SEO are keeping costs low by operating entirely online without a physical office.
Proximity Marketing
If you have any physical location, even if you just set up a stall to hand out promotional material, you need to look into proximity marketing. It operates under a basic concept, market to those who are near you. By using technology that automatically markets to those who are physically nearby, you can convert a lot more people. An excellent example of the potential of proximity marketing is getting customer’s SMS details and texting them a discount when they walk past your store or are in the general area.
Google has seen the potential in this niche and launched Google beacons, aiming to provide easy ways to enable location targeting; in-store messaging and promotions; guides for more significant locations (e.g. shopping centres or airports); and creating interactive gaming opportunities to keep potential customers in the store for more extended periods. The possibilities of proximity marketing are vast and what is most exciting about it is that it provides opportunities for incredible creativity, which a good marketer should always be on the lookout for. As this is such a new technology, if you find a way to creatively deploy it for your brand, you run the chance of it being picked up and going viral.
Conversational Commerce
People like to have conversations. Your brand should be able to join in with those conversations and communicate with potential customers about the benefits of your products on the social medium that they use. Chatbots are a way to achieve this at scale; a good chatbot software can be spread across your website, instant messaging apps and different social media channels to make sure that if anybody has a question or wants an interaction, you can provide them with what they are looking for. Among other uses, you can use these conversations to provide expertise, with the best brands using a chatbot to provide information and guidance on all manner of problems that those in their industry experience.
