What Every Business Needs for Successful Marketing in 2019
Some updated statistics available here, May 2020 – https://ahrefs.com/blog/57-seo-statistics-for-2020/
Can you keep up with the ever-changing world of marketing?
Disruption is very real in marketing. New tools and technologies emerge, innovative thinkers spin old tactics on their heads, and audiences everywhere continue to set the bar higher and higher as they’re exposed to exponentially more content every day.
As we look towards marketing in 2019, it’s important to look around the curve in preparation. From non-negotiables like a fully optimized website to scaling your business using content marketing and SEO, in 2019 you’re going to need to work even harder to stand out from the crowd and build trust with your target market.
Here are 5 components of your digital marketing that your business can’t afford to overlook if you want to crush your marketing goals in 2019.
1. A Great Website is a Non-Negotiable
It’s 2019 people! If your business doesn’t have a fully mobile responsive website, let alone any website, you’re kissing a vast quantity of potential customers goodbye.
Did you know that 81% of people do their research online before making a purchase? Even if some of those people learned about your business from a different marketing source like by word of mouth or from a non-digital ad, they’re still going to follow up online. You usually only have one chance (and less than 20 seconds) to make a favourable first impression, or you might never have another chance to capture that customer’s attention again. If you don’t have a terrific website, you’re going to lose them.
Your website is your 24-hour storefront, and you need it working for you to tell your brand story, build trust, and convert browsers into buyers. It needs to be responsive, easy to navigate, and on-brand so it makes a lasting impression on your potential buyers.
Even if your website isn’t old, if you haven’t made any significant updates to it in the last 2-3 years, it might be time for a facelift—or at least a digital facial. Now is the perfect time to evaluate your website: here are some points to watch out for.
It’s important to review your website regularly to ensure that the technology is fresh and up to date, that the user experience is flawless, and that your message is on point. Now that we’re in the 21st century it’s easier than ever to build a great website. We always recommend WordPress for building your website because it can evolve and grow with you.
Particularly important, WordPress has the power to back up your marketing plan like no other platform. Google absolutely loves WordPress, it’s easy to use, and it comes with a host of plugins that make customization almost limitless. Find out more about why we love WordPress so much in our helpful blog post here.
NB: If you don’t have a website (read: a great website), you can’t possibly incorporate the rest of the well-rounded marketing strategy that you absolutely need to succeed in the coming year.
Bottom line: Don’t skimp on building and caring for your website! As experts in the digital marketing field with an international client base, we assure you that it’s worth hiring a professional.
2. Ace your Marketing in 2019 with an Active Blog
Part of having a terrific website that your customers—and Google!—will love means having an active blog on that website. To compete for top rankings, your website needs to include as much engaging and valuable content as possible for your target audience.
What better way to do that than by having an active blog?
Maybe you’ve dabbled with some blogging in 2018, but you’re ready to get more serious with it in 2019. Well good, because it works!
For a very small business, one blog post per month might be sufficient while for larger businesses, as often as daily posts can be an effective part of your marketing strategy. In fact, some businesses reap such strong benefits from an active business blog that we help them write 5-10 daily news articles each and every business day, sometimes also with translations into other languages such as Spanish. For a business with an international presence, we recommend at minimum one daily news article per business day with the sweet spot being 3 to 5 posts per day, to leverage search rankings with Google.
What makes blog posts and daily news articles so effective is that they aren’t (nor should they be) sales pages. All good marketing plans include well-written copy that’s designed to relate to your specific niche in a way that’s useful, engaging, educational, or entertaining for your target audience. In doing so, you’ll appeal to those niche readers, establishing familiarity and a trusting relationship with them. This relationship helps readers feel more confident buying from you when they’re naturally ready to buy.
Remember, if you aren’t churning out value-added content, all you’re doing is selling, and people don’t like to be sold to or told what they want.
Blog posts will also help drive engagement with your customers via quality content that people are searching for. Plus, updating your website frequently through your blog posts and news updates keeps your target audience engaged and excited to visit your website over and over again. With the right value-added content, your products or services will sell themselves. It’s truly a win-win!
3. It’s All About SEO
Your products or services aren’t good for anyone if they can’t find you! The fact is that if your website isn’t ranking on the first page of Google, you run a substantial risk of losing potential customers when your competitors pop up in the top rankings instead of you.
Your Google rankings matter. On average, 33% of search traffic will visit the site ranked number one in their search results. By the tenth ranked listing, only a measly 2.4% will actually visit the site. Even worse, up to 95% of the traffic doesn’t even bother looking at the results on page two! Poor Google rankings can be a business killer.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the process by which your website is actively optimized in every possible way in 2019 so that the people who need your products or services will actually be able to find you online. When someone is looking for certain words or demonstrates certain online behaviour, you want to make sure that Google will list you as high as possible.
Because Google rankings are so competitive with everyone vying for the top ranking, if you want your target customers to be able to find you, you’re going to need Google to rank you as high as possible in 2019.
SEO really goes hand in hand with your blogging, news, and content initiatives. It’s really the backbone of any good 2019 marketing strategy! As a matter of fact, SEO works so well that 57% of B2B marketers reported that SEO was their most successful marketing initiative bringing in more leads than any other.
Successful outcomes from SEO can include:
- Increasing the organic traffic visiting your site
- Increasing the organic conversions
- Decreasing your bounce rate
- Decreasing cost per lead
- Ranking higher in search results for keywords
- Increase in links from quality sites
Do you ever watch Shark Tank or Dragon’s Den? Among other KPIs, they often talk about the cost of acquisition for new customers. Excellent SEO will contribute to decreasing your costs while increasing traffic and customers.
Don’t forget that a big part of SEO is your content. Google loves fresh, relevant content and that’s why you need a great website and an active business blog. If you need help aligning your SEO and content marketing, get in touch with us and we’d be happy to offer a free consultation.
4. Be Active on Social Media
Another critically important way to drive your marketing in 2019 is to be active on social media.
However, social media is ever-changing, and the strategy you used in 2015 just isn’t cutting it anymore.
The fact is, if you’re relying on Facebook posts, you need to understand that your organic reach is now pretty much dead. Simply posting to your Facebook business page is not an effective strategy. You need to work with the ever-changing algorithms that affect both Facebook and Instagram, and increase your hustle on key platforms so that your energy is being used in places that will actually deliver results in 2019 and beyond.
Depending on what industry you’re in, you need some combination of the following platforms. Not all of them but some of them, based on your specific 2019 marketing strategy:
Whichever platforms you choose for your business, there are two sides to the coin:
- Sharing your own content
- Active outreach
(There’s a third side and that’s paid advertising, explained in the next section.)
The only “easy” way to get these platforms working for you is to throw a lot of money at them, but the *better* way to leverage their potential is by honing in on specific target groups and perform targeted outreach. You can do this by joining Facebook groups, Instagram pods, asking questions about other people’s content, retweeting and sharing curated content, etc. A great social media campaign doesn’t just include sharing content; it also includes outward engagement with your audience.
Effective social media marketing campaigns are integrated and work flawlessly with the content from your blog, your website, and your SEO.
- Attract your target audience; know them, understand them, and make a lasting connection with them.
- Allow your audience to get to know you while you get to know them.
- Create relationships of trust by understanding customers’ likes, hopes, and needs.
- Strengthen social relationships that will help you make more sales and capture repeat customers.
- Position your brand in front of existing and potential customers; strategically, tactfully, and often.
- Accomplish strong brand awareness and accelerate your business growth!
Social media is an extremely effective marketing method for most businesses in 2019, but it takes a lot of time and effort. It may be best to outsource. Take us up on the offer of a free marketing consultation, and we can help direct you on the right path for social media marketing in 2019.
5. Leverage Facebook & Instagram Ads
The good news in 2019 is that Facebook and Instagram are more powerful than ever! They provide an incredible opportunity to build brand visibility, drive people to your website, and convert more social media users into customers.
Facebook is still the number one social media platform with over 1 billion users logging on every single day! Since Facebook owns Instagram, all of the advertising is run through the Facebook dashboard, so when you create a Facebook ad, it will reach users on both platforms, based on the target audience attributes that you choose.
The targeting potential with Facebook and Instagram ads is incredible. Not only can you hone in on the right audience with incredible targeting specifications, you can also track behaviour from your ads through to your website and retarget your ads to the people who showed the keenest interest and took the actions you wanted when they saw your original ad.
This retargeting potential is something that marketers in the 1990s could only dream about!
By the way, if you haven’t got a full ad account set up using business.facebook.com then you’re not leveraging the full potential of Facebook advertising. There are many layered options to how you can access Facebook ads from basic boosting and ads from your personal account to sophisticated ad management. If you’re not sure if you’re using the full advertising system, contact us and we can help.
Any good marketing strategy for 2019, for almost any industry, should incorporate Facebook and Instagram ads because they’re cost-effective, they make it super duper easy to track your ROI, and they work. You’ll be able to build brand awareness by reaching people you would never have been able to reach before and drive more conversions and lower your cost per conversion with retargeting tools.
We Can Help
There’s no doubt that every business can benefit from a terrific website, a blog strategy, SEO, social media, and paid advertising as part of their marketing strategies in 2019. But as you can see, these marketing efforts are going to take more time, effort, and expertise than ever before.
As a decision maker for your business, your time and effort are better spent elsewhere than trying to manage the moving parts of a sophisticated marketing campaign yourself. By outsourcing your marketing, you’ll free up time to focus on what you do best and boost your return on investment by letting dedicated and focused professionals take charge.
We offer a free marketing consultation. Get in touch with us today, and we’d be happy to look over your business and come up with a marketing strategy that will hit all your 2019 goals!
