NTA Digital

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Digital Marketing Trends For The Future

Digital marketing comprises of multiple moving parts i.e. PPC, SEO, marketing automation, social media, among many others. New techniques, technology, and the constantly evolving Facebook and Google algorithms mean that digital marketing teams always have to be on their toes. So our question to you is, is your digital marketing agency telling you about future trends?

If you want to make sure that your digital marketing campaigns remain effective in 2020 and beyond, here are some of the digital marketing trends you should know about and try to keep up with:

Shoppable Posts

Social media is an important part of online marketing today and is likely to continue being so in 2020 and beyond. However, you might probably not know that a significant number of social media users actually use the platforms to shop. 70 percent of Pinterest users and 60 percent of Instagram users have reported discovering new products on the respective platforms.

Social media platforms have also noted that people love using them to shop and have therefore made it easier to sell on those platforms. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest have all introduced ways for ecommerce stores to create shoppable posts easily. If you are an online retailer, this can be an excellent way to drive traffic to your product pages.

The Rise in Immersive Technology Such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have experienced a surge in popularity in recent years and are bound to still be one of the top digital marketing trends in 2020 and beyond. Virtual Reality might have been the more popular of the two for a long time, but it is estimated that Augmented Reality will quickly outpace Virtual Reality and will be the more popular one beyond 2020.

If the product or service you sell allows it, you should try implementing AR and VR into your business. After all, even leading brands such as IKEA have already started implementing it. IKEA customers can use their app and AR to see what a piece of furniture would look like in their space before they even make the purchase.

Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing is likely to be a dominant digital marketing trend in 2020 and beyond. Today’s consumer is tired of seeing the same old generic ad that has nothing to do with them. Customers regularly change the channel when commercials are on and actually pay extra to music streaming services to avoid ads. Generic ads are growing increasingly ineffective.

Personalized marketing, however, can make all the difference. You can easily implement this form of marketing using segmented email lists. Personalized email blasts have actually been found to outperform generic emails that you send to your entire email list. Fortunately, it is easy to do email segmentation since most of the email marketing and marketing automation tools already have this feature.

Voice Search

Today, more than 25 percent of adults in the United States own a smart speaker such as Google Home or Amazon Echo. 31 percent of smartphone users around the globe also currently use voice-activated search such as Siri and Cortana at least once every week. By 2020, it is estimated that all searches will be voice searches. It means that voice search will be one of the leading digital marketing trends in 2020 and beyond.

With that being said, it is time to start optimizing your website for voice search if you haven’t done so already. You basically need to understand what your audience is searching for. You also have to understand the nuances associated with audio/voice search queries. If somebody is searching for something, it will sound more of a conversation. For instance, instead of searching for “Divorce Lawyer London”, they are more likely to say: “Where Can I find a Divorce Lawyer in London?”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch in computer science that focuses on teaching computers/machines to think and act like human beings. Machine learning, on the other hand, is usually what runs behind the Artificial Intelligence programs.

Simply put, while AI is all about teaching machines for the purpose of replacing human beings, machine learning focuses on teaching machines things that the human brain cannot easily grasp such as making predictions for the future based on current patterns or even complex data mining.

AI and Machine Learning are and will continue being invaluable marketing tools now and in the future since consumers tend to rely on AI-powered algorithms to discover new products with each new generation.

Top brands have already started embracing AI and it is time you started embracing it too. Amazon currently uses AI to analyze the decisions of buyers and suggests products to them while Netflix uses AI for content recommendation.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is nothing new, but it probably won’t go away any time soon. Influencers used to be huge celebrities with tens or hundreds or even millions of followers online. However, brands are now turning to people with significantly lower social media followers to be their influencers.

The power of influencer marketing both now and in the future comes from leveraging influential people on social media and reaching their audiences with a voice that they trust. Brands have reported gaining an ROI that’s 11 times higher than that of other digital marketing methods.

Chatbots

Chatbots (which is another term for conversational marketing) have been around for a while now, but it is only recently that businesses have started embracing them more. The advances made in AI and machine learning mean that chatbots have grown increasingly sophisticated and capable off handling more complex requests.

Chatbot technology is likely to keep advancing moving forward and many more businesses will embrace it. Customer service via chatbots is becoming faster and more efficient, which is why you should make them part of your digital marketing strategy moving forward.

Final Thoughts

The ways customers shop and search for information online have evolved to include voice search, AI-powered personalization, new content types, and advanced segmentation among many other new technologies and a fresh new take on old marketing approaches.

The technological advances have great potential in 2020 and beyond, but only for those capable of using them to their advantage. With so many businesses in your niche competing for the same customers, the quicker you can utilize these new ways of marketing, the more competitive you will be.

A good blog post can help you drive engagement, generate leads, and boost conversions so you can make more money in your business. 

If you are wondering what makes a good blog post, then you’ve come to the right place. 

Creating an engaging blog post comes down to knowing your audience – their behaviors and expressed preferences –  and being able to present them with ideas that are relevant to their needs and interests. 

In this article, we take a look at 10 data-driven tips to help you create outstanding blog posts.

1. Choose the Right Topic

Your first step to crafting inspiring and informative posts is to decide what to write about. Rather than picking topics at random, use data driven tactics to help you choose the best topics for your blog posts. 

Doing this will help you become more effective as a blogger so you can garner a higher audience response with each of your posts. 

When your audience knows that you know what you’re talking about and that you also understand their needs, it helps boost your credibility and positions you as an authority on your subject. 

This naturally leads to higher customer engagement as more and more people see that your content is insightful, helpful, and relevant to your readers’ needs. 

Here are a few tips to help you choose blog topics that are likely to perform well: 

Determine what already works for you

Find out what works for your competitors

See what your readers are saying on social media, forums, groups, review sites, etc.

Survey your webinar attendees, email and blog subscribers, etc. 

Get sales expert advice from your sales team about your customers pain points

Use Google’s “People Also Ask” section

For example, a site like Preply that teaches people how to speak different languages might search for: How to learn Spanish” to find the following ideas for new blog topics:  

2. Create Captivating, Data-Driven Headlines

As a marketer, you already know that more people read the headline of a blog post than the actual content. Even after they click on the headline, they tend to skim the post first before deciding whether or not it’s worth their time to read the entire thing. 

That’s why it’s crucial to create curiosity-provoking headlines that will compel them to stay and read the rest of your blog post. 

Below are a few data-driven tips to help you create attractive headlines based on your audience’s needs, desires, and pain points. 

You can then add personal insights to any of the data-driven themes you come up with to help you drive for meaningful engagement.

Use a headline analyzer like this one from CoSchedule.

Build a headline around your main keyword. E.g. “Marketing Budgets” becomes “7 Genius Ways to Stretch a Small Marketing Budget” 

Search for headline ideas from popular blogs in your niche 

Use Smart Blogger’s proven headline formulas and follow best practices 

This blog post from an Austin detox center on The Top 5 Most Dangerous Drugs on the Planet shows how powerful headlines can be for drawing the audience’s attention to your post: 

  Source

3. Use Analytics to Inform Your Content Strategy

Your own website analytics can be a goldmine for data that will help you create interesting, helpful, and better-performing content. 

You can search for the topics on your blog with the most page views. If you have been tagging and categorizing each of your blog posts so far, then this should be easy to determine. You can then focus on the common denominators you find in those blog posts. 

You might discover, for instance, that your audience responds more to your infographics, list posts, and how-to posts. Or maybe your video posts get the most shares. 

For example, on the AwesomeX blog, posts like this Wix vs. Shopify comparison review tend to perform particularly well. 

Source

  You can also analyze core metrics like:

Time on page

Bounce rate

Social shares

Leads generated

Email opt-ins, etc.

  Gathering this type of information will help you determine which topics are most likely to attract and maintain your audience’s interest.

The Sender blog is another great example of how analysis of current posts helps them build a content calendar around the most popular posts that their audience is likely to find relevant and useful. 

  Source

4. Use Real Images

A usability study from Jacob Nielsen discovered that images of real people were among the most engaging types of web content. 

The data shows that users online spend 10% more time on pictures of real people than they do reading the content associated with those pictures. 

Even though the content took up a lot of space, and was, therefore, more quantitatively dominant, evidence shows that the majority of people preferred to look at the pictures instead, as shown by the heat map image below:

Source

  But, the caveat to this is that they preferred real images as opposed to generic stock pictures that are purely decorative.

The use of real, high-quality images (whether it’s people or graphs, screenshots, etc.) in your blog post has been proven to benefit you in the following ways:

Images help support persuasive copy and calls to action

They increase customer retention and engagement

Images also help establish the credibility of your content

Data from Blog Pros shows that the top 100 highest-ranking blogs and the Internet right now have an average of one image per 350 words. You can use this as a guideline for your own content creation to make your blog posts as impactful as possible.

You can also use graphic design tools to help you add text to images – a tactic that has been shown to be extremely effective for boosting engagement. 

For example, a blog like this one that focuses on CRM with predictive dialer might use real images of people using their product with text explaining different aspects of the software. 

Source

If you’re not very good at creating or editing your own images, you can always hire a freelancer to get the job done quickly and professionally. 

5. Write Longform Blog Content

According to studies, longer content is typically better for ranking at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Source

  As you can see from the graph above, the pages with more content have the highest positions. Notice that each of the results on the first page has content that exceeds 2,000 words. This means that good quality longer content is important for SEO rankings and will be something your SEO agency can discuss with you. 

There are many reasons why longform content performs so well. 

For instance, the more content there is on a page, the more Googlebot can index. Googlebot is Google’s web crawler responsible for indexing all content on your website. The more of your content that gets indexed, the better the post’s performance in search results. It’s as simple as that.

Another reason why longform content usually ranks high is that the longer your post, the better you can optimize your keywords.

Take this Bluehost vs. Hostgator in-depth post, as an example. It contains a lot of long-tail keywords which allows the site to rank for a multitude of keywords and boost the posts overall SEO (search engine optimization).

Also, the higher the word count, the more backlinks you’ll likely get from other websites in your niche. This is particularly true if your post contains a lot of statistics and data pertaining to your industry.

Of course, there are some exceptions to this rule. 

For example, if your blog is in an industry where long-form content just wouldn’t work, such as a news blog or an eCommerce lingerie store, where your audience might not appreciate a 2,000-word blog post.

Source

6. Create a Conversation

Your blog posts should never be a monologue, but rather, you should write in a conversational tone that helps to encourage engagement. 

Use “you” and “I” when writing blog posts so you can create a conversation with your readers, otherwise, your post will read like a boring essay. 

Do your best to be personable and relatable. Using a conversational tone will improve readability and ultimately drive a lot more engagement and comments on your blog. 

Influencer Marketing is a site that does this particularly well and they get tons of engagement on each of their blog posts. 

Remember to use a tool like Copyleaks to check your posts and comments for grammar mistakes to avoid looking unprofessional to your audience. 

And don’t forget to ask your blog readers a question at the end of the post and encourage them to leave a comment. This not only causes them to stay longer on your blog, but it also gives you an opportunity to respond to each of your readers’ comments so they can return to your blog.

Conclusion

I hope this article has answered any questions you may have on what makes a good blog post.

The bottom line is that writing great blog posts doesn’t have to be hard. All you need is the right formula for choosing the right topics and post formats. 

You can then follow current best practices to help you create engaging and useful blog posts that are relevant to the needs and interests of your audience.

What other tips do you know for creating outstanding blog posts? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Some marketers strongly believe that E.A.T is a vital SEO success factor today. Others believe that the popularity and importance of the E.A.T. concept are overblown. The conflicting opinions from both sides raise critical questions for both marketers and business owners.

Is E.A.T a direct or indirect ranking factor?

Is it an important factor in Google’s ever-evolving algorithms?

Expertise, Authoritative, and Trustworthiness (E.A.T) became popular following its inclusion in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. The concept comprises three crucial factors that search engines use to determine how much trust they should place on a particular website or brand. Today’s advanced search engine algorithms want to offer consumers the best user experience and this is the reason E.A.T (expertise, authority, and trust) of a website matter.

Companies and domains with a commendable display of expertise in a specific industry, authority, and trust shouldn’t only perceive themselves as promoted by search engines. Instead, they should also correlate with a higher level of trust and relevance to their target consumers.

Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E.A.T) Explained

Each of these terms represents an essential metric of an enterprise’s right to be evaluated and considered a leader in its industry. Google’s ranking algorithm considers the E.A.T metrics to determine the overall value of a brand (or website), its pages, and the content creators.

Expertise (E)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, expertise refers to knowledge in a specific field or an expert skill. Suppose you provide products or services that you have a wealth of knowledge about. In that case, you could be perceived as an expert in that field, particularly if you can successfully demonstrate that your knowledge exceeds your competitors’.

Suppose you and your competitors were to stand in an identity parade line and physically demonstrate to consumers how in-depth your knowledge is. Could the depth and strength of your insights make you stand out? If you know more about search engine optimization than your competitor, then you have a better chance of outpacing them.

Regardless of the subject, if you can successfully demonstrate that your expertise is higher than that of the other brand or website, search engines and consumers will perceive you as an expert. Your online brand and its webpages are continually being examined by search engines to determine if they demonstrate a deeper level of expertise than other webpages found on the internet.

Authority (A)

Can consumers trust your website to be true, reliable, and accurate? As much as you can demonstrate the expertise in a specific niche, it would be best if you had the authority to reveal how well your business or website and content it offers can stand apart from other available options.

When consumers search the internet, they are simply looking for a trusted and authoritative platform that can provide the reliable answers they seek. They not only need to trust your expertise but they also need to be sure that you are the best person who can address their needs successfully.

This is why Google’s ranking algorithm scrutinizes your website and its current content to determine if it is expertly written, and its authoritativeness matches the evolving consumer needs.

  Trust (T)

Trustworthiness refers to the ability to be depended on, truthful or honest. It is an important metric as it determines how much credence your website and its content have. Just think about it: it is one thing to roll out a lot of articles on the internet, but it’s another thing for that content to be trustworthy.

The advent of the internet and technological advancements have revolutionized consumers’ choices and demands. Today, if a deal seems too good to be true, most consumers will simply lose trust on the website or brand offering it.

For instance, if a travel company is offering consumers a pair of tickets to Costa Rica for 80% of the market price, the consumer assumes that there is a catch, and they are right to feel so because this deal is too good to be true. However, there is a good chance the target customers will lose trust in that offer, and probably the future offers that the company will make to them. The bitter truth is that lost trust is rarely regained.

For many years, the Google rank algorithm has been measuring an online platform’s trust level based on the quality of the backlinks it gets from referring domains. A higher trust level in the referring domain translates to a higher authority that Google puts on your domain.

Google has been expanding this concept much farther than the algorithm science digital marketers used to pay attention to five years ago. It now measures a website’s trust level using various types of factors a real consumer like you would consider. For instance, if a business has repeatedly proved to be trustworthy, you will definitely trust it. Google uses the same concept to determine the trustworthiness of a website or a brand.

Is E.A.T Important?

If your business policy analyst isn’t trustworthy and lacks expertise, you are likely to look around for an expert who can help take your company’s operations to the next level. Today’s consumers or internet users are the same. If they find a page that lacks authority, trust, and expertise, they simply look around for an alternative.

As mentioned earlier, Google’s advanced algorithm continues to analyze these factors and use them as important signals to determine whether they can trust your company’s domain to satisfy consumers’ needs. If your website’s metrics don’t satisfy the matching consumer needs, Google will simply choose another platform that offers answers that match the relevant audience’s needs. This is why a poorly-designed site with spam content is likely to take a backbench in search engine results pages (SERPs)

Do you now know why E.A.T plays a key role in delivering your brand or website to your target audience? Do you now know why it is important to invest in your content marketing strategy and a team that can help build website authority and trust?

Share your views in the comments section below.

There are quite a lot of things you can do for a fresh new website, in order to increase its chances for success. Everything matters if you expect anything to come out of your online business. Of course, everything starts with graphic design. It is very important that all the aspects of a website, including the colors, the design of the menus, and so on, are completely in tune with the services or products you are offering. There is always room for improvement but starting on the right food with a professional web design company will help you a lot in your future efforts. For now, everything stops in regard to the website itself because the next step which is keyword research is absolutely imperative.

Keyword research services are used to determine and correctly identify the customers you intend on addressing to. Upon the completion of the keyword research campaign the next step is to create high quality content for the website. Now, like any of the other content you will be placing all over the internet through articles, profiles, press releases, and so on, the content of your website must incorporate considerable doses of your main keywords. Like in the case of the design, you should really get expert writers for your content because it is not enough to be attractive for the search engines but also keep the visitors and customers happy. Naturally the next step, and the final one for this initial start-up stage, is onsite optimization.

Recognized as being absolutely invaluable for any websites big or small, onsite optimization lets the well established search engines that you mean business. More precisely, onsite optimization helps the crawlers sent out by the search engines to get a faster and better feel for everything that is present on your site. The easiest form of on site optimization is possible when dealing with a brand new website, because on site optimization addresses all the aspects including here the content also.

Apart from this, onsite optimization is basically a form of tweaking all the small features that any website has, thus improving not only its potential but also its exposure, so basically you can view onsite optimization as a way to boost the effects of any of the future marketing or search engine optimization campaigns you will deploy. It might seem easy to do at first site, but onsite optimization requires a great deal of careful planning in order to be completely effective.