Digital marketing is crucial for online businesses to earn business. Every business needs a foolproof marketing strategy to get the optimum business results. Online marketing is a fickle industry, and you have to keep up with the changing trends and latest best practices to have profitable business results and lead the industry.
Here are some of the best digital marketing practices of 2022 compiled for your online business.
1. Conversational Marketing (Chatbots)
Kayako shows that 79% of businesses have experienced positive growth in sales, revenue, and customer loyalty as a result of their live chat services.
Conversational marketing is the marketing that talks to the customers. Basically, it is nurturing the website visitors through talking and giving them proper support to convert them. Chatbots are an amazing option to do conversational marketing. People these days expect brands to be more responsive and easily approachable. Chatbots allow real-time messaging, so visitors can connect with you easily, and you can provide instant support.
2. Voice Search Optimization
Voice search is on the rise. People are using more and more voice searches through Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortona, Google Home, etc. Voice search is more convenient instead of text search. Moreover, blind people can also perform the search, and search engines even dictate the results.
You may restructure your content and answer common questions to appear directly in the search result as a featured snippet. Moreover, you need to make your content more conversational so that you can appear on the long casual tone voice search queries.
3. Personalization
There is much content and options available on the internet that people are sick of generalized content now. Online users see tons of promotional content every day, and now they have developed a behavior of ignoring such content. So, you can’t achieve anything with your salesy content.
People prefer content that is highly relevant and helpful to them, and that’s where personalization comes in. Marketers are adding more layers of personalization each year to make the strategy more relevant to the target audience, facilitating the business goals. You can segment your audience and plan a customized strategy for each segment to drive better results from your online marketing.
4. First-Party Data Advertising
Google has announced that they will discontinue the third-party in their advertising services to improve user security. So, we are moving towards cookieless advertising and won’t be able to access the users’ information from third-party sites to plan our advertising campaigns. Now, the only option we have is the first-party data that we collect from our sites. Google is also working on a new targeting model to help the advertisers target their ads without affecting the security. So, you have to redesign your ad campaigns according to this change to continue having the potential results.
5. Short Videos
Shorts videos are the content format with the most engagement, and the platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels have bloomed with this format. As people like snackable or bite-sized content, short videos are popular across the world. Many brands are creating explainer and DIY content to engage their audience.
As the above graphic shows, videos can even help you nurture your audience turn into customers. Along with the short videos, you should also invest in long videos to fulfill the requirements of the people with long-form content needs.
6. Social Commerce
Social commerce is selling on social media platforms. Previously, users were redirected to a particular website to buy the product. This transfer of users from social platforms to your website may result in a drop in your sales. Social commerce allows users to buy the product from the platform itself without any redirection, increasing the chances of conversion.
The number of US social commerce buyers grew to 80.1 million in 2020 and is anticipated to increase to 96.1 million in 2022. (eMarketer)
Social channels like Instagram has a feature of the shoppable post. Users can buy directly from a shoppable post. It makes shopping easy for the customers and grows your sales.
So, if you are an eCommerce business, social commerce is something you must do.
7. Micro-Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has been in action for a long time. However, it’s evolving day by day. Earlier, influencer marketing was associated with collaborating with some celebrities, but now businesses are focusing on micro-influencer and ambassadorship from their niche. Micro-influencers have a small audience, but all are highly relevant to a particular niche.
So, you can reach out to your industry influencers to collaborate and do your business promotion. As you reach out to a relevant audience, your collaboration will turn out really effective for your business.
Even you manage to create amazing industry-specific content; you can also become an influencer of your industry.
One thing you need to double make sure is the influencer to reach for collaboration must have the audience that is your target customers.
8. Be MUM-Friendly
Google rolled out a MUM update to reduce the number of searches one has to perform to get the answer to their query. For example, if you have this question, “Will I find the same weather in Turkey as Egypt?” you have to search for the weather of both the countries and then compare. Google MUM update target to answer your question in one search.
To optimize your content for this update, you need to answer questions people ask in your niche. You may create long-form content with a question-answer format to align with this update and secure your top rankings in search.
9. Be Hyper-Local
When you are a local business, it’s crucial to make your marketing more local. General strategy won’t work. Its crucial people can relate to you and have that neighborhood vibes. You may create dedicated city landing pages. Moreover, your blogs should also share local experiences and knowledge to make them more relevant to your nearby customers.
When it comes to advertising, you can employ the local service ads and DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) to run hyper-local ad campaigns that convert. Local marketing delivers amazing results but needs a highly customized strategy that you can create with the help of an online marketing agency.
10. Remarketing
It’s a great advertising option for eCommerce businesses, especially for small businesses with a limited ad budget. Remarketing is targeting your ex-visitors and showing them the ads of the product they are interested in. You can use social media channels and search engines for remarketing ads for targeting your previous site visitors and cart abandoners. As you target the interested audience with remarketing ads, the conversion rate is most likely to be high. So, this is one of the best online marketing practices that you must use for your business.
Here you go!
Follow these online business marketing practices or trends to nurture your business and fetch exceptional results. You always have to keep up with the trends and follow the best practices to have the best results continuously. So, implement these and stick around to know the upcoming online marketing trends!