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Where 2022 Ad Spend Is Going (And How To Get Ahead Of The Trends)

March 1, 2022 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

There is a multitude of factors to consider and important decisions to make when creating an advertising budget. Aside from choosing the right channels and tactics to meet their own strategic goals, a brand must take the state of its industry as well as the latest marketing and advertising trends into account to create ad campaigns that will stand up against those of its competitors.

Brands don’t want to jump on any old bandwagon or social platform without a good reason to do so, and this year, they’ll once again be seeking the right avenues to reach their target markets. From diversifying with an integrated multichannel approach to doubling down in a specific medium such as digital, television, print or social, the options are endless.

With their insight into where ad dollars are being spent in real time, the members of Forbes Agency Council can forecast where brands will be spending their budgets this year. See their predictions below, along with good ways for brands to get ahead of these trends.

1. Digital Marketing To More ‘Connected’ Consumers

Digital marketing is something that cannot be ignored! The pandemic has made people even more connected to their devices with the demands of remote work and staying in touch with family and friends. This shift has made digital marketing a great vehicle to get your brand noticed by your target consumer in a cost-effective manner. – Thomas Morganelli, Centipede Digital

2. Connected TV Ads Informed By First-Party Data

Where your media dollars are spent really depends on your marketing goals. One area where we see continued growth is connected TV. There is real power that comes with the ability to serve up video on the big screen in your target’s living room. Combine that opportunity with the strength of first-party data, and it’s clear why CTV offers opportunities unavailable on other marketing channels. – Jonathan Schwartz, Bullseye Strategy

3. Online And Offline Platforms With Consistent Media Availability

Ad dollars will continue to increase on digital platforms that are optimizing their ad strategies, such as TikTok. There will be a continuous amount of spending on offline platforms that follow the supply-and-demand curve, where media availability is consistent. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC

4. Higher-Funnel Digital Efforts With Advanced Tracking

Ad dollars will be spent in digital, but more specifically in higher-funnel efforts where advanced tracking and attribution are now showing true impact and ROI. Think about over-the-top content, streaming video, audio and more, which were once stuck measuring impressions or maybe view-throughs. Agencies implementing better tracking systems will be able to show the trickle-down effect of these higher-funnel efforts and get better buy-in for a full-funnel digital investment. – Brian Walker, Statwax

5. Niche Targeting Via OTT And CTV

I see a switch from spend on social and search to a surge in OTT and CTV advertising. With the level of understanding of these mediums growing, the barriers to entry are not so high now. For companies with the right level of budget, both OTT and CTV present fantastic growth opportunities and the ability to reach new markets in this increasingly niched-out world. – Christopher Tompkins, The Go! Agency

6. Digital And Social Media Advertising Strategies

Ad dollars will definitely be best spent this year on digital and social media. Brands can get ahead by starting to implement result-driven social media advertising strategies. There are more users on social media than ever before, and platforms such as Facebook and Instagram give businesses the opportunity to yield a considerable return on ad spend and stay profitable year-round. – Jonathan Durante, Expandify Marketing Inc

7. Small-Budget Programmatic Buying On CTV

2022 will see lots of ad dollars move into the CTV space. Many major brands will take their first steps into CTV, especially as they discover how effectively smaller budgets can operate in this less-crowded space. With programmatic buying and audience-targeting tools, it’s possible to make a big splash in CTV, and I expect we’ll see lots of 2022’s ad dollars migrating in this direction. – Jason Wulfsohn, AUDIENCEX

8. The Right Social Media Platforms For Narrow Targets

The growing addiction to social media in all the age groups and interest groups makes social media the best place for marketing investment. Social media ads allow for narrow targeting, which helps increase brand awareness among the target audience, and thus conversions. Agencies should identify the right social media platforms for their clients and develop a focused marketing plan to exploit this trend. – Ajay Prasad, GMR Web Team

9. Specific Content And Content Creators

While the easy answer is “digital,” I think “content” is more accurate. Forget about which screen, or even which delivery method, will be dominant—consumers are becoming more tied to specific content and content creators. This is a meaningful shift in consumer behavior and an opportunity for agile and innovative marketers to find their audiences. – Andrea Palmer, Publicis Health Media (PHM)

10. Video Content Designed For Omnichannel Use

Designing campaign creative for omnichannel use—with a focus on video through CTV and linear TV—is key. Our in-house production company and agency-owned studios allow us to quickly create video, and this is something all agencies should consider. Even out-of-home placements can leverage video more in 2022. Video content is the 2022 campaign anchor. – Vix Reitano, Agency 6B

11. Inbound Marketing Technologies

It depends on the audience. The goal of digital marketing is to get the right message to the right potential client at the right time. The best way to do that is to utilize the marketing technology that most clearly communicates ROI. I believe that inbound marketing technologies that show the full buyer’s journey are where ad dollars should be spent. – Christopher Carr, Farotech

12. Increased CTV Ad Spend Across All Industries

While spend by channel typically varies by industry, we expect a surge in CTV spending from brands across all industries. While many marketers are shifting spend away from linear TV, we expect investment to come from digital channels, as CTV offers the sophisticated targeting of programmatic advertising with a comparable reach to linear TV for a much lower cost. – Donna Robinson, Collective Measures

13. Product Placement In Streaming Content

Marketers and agencies are increasing their interest in product placement in streaming content on platforms such as Netflix, Amazon and HBO Max. This is driven by the fact that they themselves sat watching hundreds of hours of streaming episodes and films over the course of the pandemic, none of which included traditional advertising. – Stacy Jones, Hollywood Branded

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Why Digital Marketing Should Be A Top Priority For Small Businesses In 2022

February 15, 2022 No Comments

By Joe Pascaretta

The internet has become an indispensable tool for almost any consumer making a decision. Today’s internet users spend a daily average of nearly three hours on the internet, using it for communication, entertainment, research and information. In 2020, global retail e-commerce sales surpassed 4.2 billion U.S. dollars. One of the biggest fallacies I hear from small business owners is that they don’t need to worry about engaging with their customers digitally. So, what does this combination mean for small business owners and entrepreneurs?

First, if you’re selling something online, then it’s likely your target audience is online at some point during any given day. And second, even if you are not selling your product or service online, then you likely could still count on your target audience being on the internet at some point during any given day.

What does this mean for your small business?

As a previous small business owner, I knew that being agile and updating my digital skill set and go-to-market strategies were a must, given the pace at which marketing technology was changing. In fact, in our 2020 survey of small business owners, 60% stated they had to pivot to a stronger online presence and offering because of the pandemic, and 24% shared they knew that acquiring new and emerging digital technologies would be required in 2021 and they intended to investigate how to advance in the digital space. There are likely hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs trying to leverage digital marketing and other key business strategies in this age of digital transformation, which can make the competition for audience attention fierce.

What might not be as obvious for small business owners and entrepreneurs is how to effectively implement and manage a digital marketing strategy that will reach their target audience at the right place and the right time with the right message. Marketing experts usually give guidance on deploying social media marketing, email marketing and digital display. That’s sound advice; these channels are all effective. Yet, there is much more to consider when it comes to digital marketing, and not all small business owners have the same marketing knowledge base to work from. But there are also many self-service tools available that allow novice, small business owners to take advantage of some very powerful tools. How can you get started?

Meet the customer where they are.

I always say as a small business owner that it is important to meet the customer “where they are.” There are five generations of customers out there, and they vary greatly as to how they make decisions. While social media is one of the most popular ways to use the internet, when it comes to digital marketing, it’s important to be selective for the sake of clarity and effectiveness.

Some social media platforms appeal to one demographic while other social channels appeal to an entirely different age or group, and still others effectively bridge the gaps and meet the needs of numerous groups simultaneously. In other words, not all social media channels are right for every business model because every business is trying to reach a different group of people. I have heard dozens of success stories from the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when small business owners who had never used social media tried it for the first time and are now actively engaging with new and existing customers to this day.

Tailor your marketing efforts.

Other marketing channels — digital display advertising and SEO, for example — are intended to catch everybody’s attention by casting a wider net; however, you can absolutely tailor them to meet specific needs. They are also only two of multiple marketing avenues that can require significant time and financial investments to implement effectively. And don’t forget about a mobile strategy. At Dun & Bradstreet, we see more than 30% of our over 1.5 million small business subscribers log in through mobile platforms on a daily basis.

Lean on digital marketing tools.

Because there are so many digital marketing tactics to learn, each with its own strategy that requires a set budget and effort, it often can make more sense for an entrepreneur to keep their focus on the business. Turning to an agency isn’t always affordable, either. For owners who know enough to self-direct with a digital marketing tool, a good option can be to lean on a tool that reduces time spent learning all the nuances and can fully automate critical pieces of the effort, such as audience targeting. This approach simplifies the digital marketing playing field while still deploying an effective, targeted digital marketing strategy across multiple channels. I learned this first-hand as a landscaper; I found I was able to significantly increase my sales pipeline through targeted digital campaigns toward driving marketing to the specific ideal customer persona and demographic.

As technology advances, artificial intelligence and machine learning are now being leveraged to understand what target audiences are doing online and how to turn their behaviours into insights that deploy messaging on sites “where they are.” Such technology takes the guesswork out of choosing a social platform that your target audience is using and determining which websites they’re visiting.

In today’s world, it’s no longer a question of whether digital marketing is necessary. The question is how you will make the internet work for and with you and your business to effectively reach your target audience. Whether you are a landscaper or a retail store owner or a sole proprietor, digital marketing is critical in today’s environment.

If you don’t have the time or the desire to learn all the digital marketing platforms available and an agency seems out of reach, then consider taking advantage of the ability to self-direct your campaigns, messaging and budget. Your audience is out there waiting for you to reach them.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Joe Pascaretta

General Manager of Small Business at Dun & Bradstreet, overseeing the company’s small to mid-size business portfolio. Read Joe Pascaretta’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

The Covid Effect: Why CEOs Must Adapt a Digital Marketing Mindset

January 31, 2022 No Comments

By Joe Galvin

Four factors are shaping dramatic shift in buyer behaviour. What the C-suite needs to do in response

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Joe Galvin

Sourced from Inc.

In News

Plan the Marketing Work, Then Work the Marketing Plan

January 28, 2022 No Comments

By Christina Mautz

I’m one of those truly weird marketing geeks who loves planning, simply because I can’t stand just doing “stuff” without having conviction around whether or not it’s the right stuff.

So how do we approach marketing planning with the greatest chance of success? Here’s how I’ve worked with my teams on planning, along with a few tips for planning during these hybrid times.

Start With the Customer

As with most things in marketing, good planning starts with the customer. This typically means revisiting your ideal customer profile (ICP) and customer segmentation. Has anything changed? What is your data showing — is one segment far outperforming another? Has your ICP changed, or (for enterprise) has your buyer’s committee expanded to include more influencers? Ask yourself these critical questions before you start formulating those brilliant marketing ideas. It’s also helpful to look at the market and see if any outside factors have had a significant impact on your customers’ businesses. For example, how has the global pandemic affected your businesses? What changes have you made as a result?

Don’t Ignore Your Competitors

Unless you’re working for one of those huge tech companies that have few (if any) competitors, it’s also a good idea to take a look at what your competitors have been up to. Have they launched new features that they’re promoting? Have they changed their pricing strategy? Have they updated their website with new messaging that makes you think a little differently about your own?

While I think it’s smart to stay more focused on your customers’ needs vs. playing chicken with your competitors, it’s helpful to stay current on what they’re up to so you don’t find yourself scrambling to compete one month into your new marketing plan. I find it particularly helpful to create SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities, threats) grids for each competitor as well as my company. Doing this can help you define where to place your bets. If you go this route, be sure that you don’t make assumptions about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses — rely on objective facts you gather from actually using their product(s), from customer reviews on third party review sites, and from your competitors’ websites.

A List Is Not a Plan (and an Objective Is Not a Goal)

One of the biggest mistakes I see marketers make is jumping right to the fun stuff: that list of marketing ideas they want to try! No matter how creative or even how data-driven that list is — and even if it’s a timeline or calendar view — it’s still just a list of stuff unless you’ve started with an idea of what you’re trying to achieve. In other words, what is your objective? It’s important to understand that an objective is not the same as a goal. For example, an objective might be: Grow business from the Retail segment. Whereas your marketing goal would be: Deliver 1,500 MQLs from Retail by June 30, 2022.

The objective helps set the stage for the marketing strategies you’re going to employ. Whereas the goal is simply a measurement of whether or not you achieved the objective.

Strategy … the Hardest (and Most Critical) Part

I’ve seen great marketing plans that started with an objective, had a great list of creative marketing tactics … and still failed. Typically when this happens it’s because there was no clear glue between the objectives and the tactics. The “glue” that’s missing is the strategy, and it’s often missing because it’s the most misunderstood word in business. I guarantee that if you Google the word “strategy,” you’ll likely find multiple different but somewhat overlapping definitions. I think of strategy as the way you define at a high level how you’re going to achieve your objective.

Feature Image Credit: travelnow.or.crylater

By Christina Mautz

Sourced from CMS WiRE

In News

Everything you need to know about digital marketing for small business

January 11, 2022 No Comments

By Jennifer Allen

Learn more about digital marketing for small business

Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, involves publishing online marketing communications, promotions and digital adverts to connect with customers. It can include email, social media, and web-based ad banners.

Using the best CRM software can be a good starting point with digital marketing, helping develop customer relations and establishing what connections they may have with your firm. From there, you can use targeted marketing for specific interests.

What does digital marketing do?

woman giving presentation on digital marketing — Digital marketing transposes standard marketing into the online world (Image credit: Pexels)

Digital marketing is the natural evolution of traditional marketing. While the latter focuses on magazine ads, billboards, and direct mailings, digital marketing uses online video, website adverts, search engine marketing, and much more.

It can be divided up into more hands-off advertising, such as by displaying an advert to a customer as they watch a video or browse a website; or it can be more direct, such as via social media. Whether through sponsored adverts on a social media platform, or by a company posting information on their social media, it all comes under the banner of digital marketing.

A separate field includes search engine optimization (SEO), with websites that rank highly in search results often performing best amongst their customers. In conjunction with content marketing, it enables customers to gain more attention from potential clients, via driving awareness of the product.

After all, Google is often a key place for all consumers to search for something, so ranking highly proves beneficial.

How departments can use digital marketing for small businesses

whiteboard with digital marketing written on it — Various different SMB departments can take advantage of, and utilize, digital marketing functions and services (Image credit: Pexels)

Customer service

Digital marketing in conjunction with good customer service can build up customer insight, ensuring that customers get the best service possible. Combined with digital marketing tools like HubSpot, Hootsuite, and various CRM software platforms, customer services can be more informed about the past history of a customer, as well as how they have previously interacted with a marketing campaign.

That leads to better customer service for the client, as they feel more like they’re gaining an individual service rather than being treated as a number. It also typically leads to issues being solved faster.

Sales

Sales relies heavily on good marketing. With more people using the internet and social media than ever before, digital marketing is a key component of that. With good quality digital marketing providing a strong message to potential customers, a sales team has an easier job converting a lead into a sale.

In turn, a customer feels far more informed thanks to seeing more of a product via digital marketing, so that they feel more confident in knowing they have purchased the right product for their needs.

Particularly for small businesses, a good reputation and a personal service goes a long way, meaning a well-combined digital marketing campaign and sales department ensures everyone is happy, and that feedback is positive.

Marketing

Traditional marketing and digital marketing can co-exist. For some businesses, one type may work better than the other.

It’s important to keep options open when starting out on a marketing campaign. Using marketing automation can help cut down some of the more tedious tasks associated with both traditional and digital marketing. B2B marketing automation may be required for small businesses that work with other companies.

Via automation, it’s possible to schedule social media messages to be sent out at a specific time. Automated emails can also be helpful. At all times, it’s important for both sides of marketing to communicate too, with CRM software helping here.

HR

HR departments can use digital marketing as a form of virtual paper trail. The HR department can check that marketing is working effectively by monitoring sales leads that are developed through it, via the use of relevant software.

They can also predict more accurately what the future holds for a small business based on prior results. From there, the department can work out if more investment in terms of employees need to be made when it comes to digital marketing services, which can also be used to help with recruitment.

Finance

Finance’s main role in conjunction with digital marketing is to determine budgets. A finance department can track the performance of individuals as well as specific campaigns, knowing where investment needs to be made to make the best of a digital marketing strategy.

It can also test scenarios to determine where the most successful marketing campaigns might lie, before creating reports that show what’s likely to occur. Being able to allocate budgets most appropriately is immensely useful to digital marketing, especially when it comes to acquiring funds for SEO-based campaigns, or purchasing social media software that aids automation.

Features and benefits of digital marketing for small business

laptop displaying slideshow with meeting in background — You can reach more customers and improve sales by investing in digital marketing (Image credit: Pexels)

Modernization

Digital marketing is the most modern form of marketing. It’s not essential for all firms to implement, but it’s a good way of making even the smallest of businesses look very modern. Its modern nature is highly varied, ensuring that anyone can reach out to potential clients through various forms of social media, or go further by using advertising services to expand their horizons online.

Reaches a wide range of people

Because digital marketing is online, it can reach a wider range of people than traditional marketing that often relies on geography to make things possible. A social media presence ensures that a business can reach out to potential clients hundreds or even thousands of miles away, with locale no longer being a limited factor in getting the message out.

Thanks to algorithms on social media platforms, such messages can also pinpoint users that find the service more relevant, rather than relying upon adverts at bus stops or in local magazines, which tend to provide more scattershot results.

Better return on investment

A lot of digital marketing can be achieved relatively inexpensively compared to billboards or TV adverts. Devising a social media campaign takes time and money, but issuing it is relatively straightforward, meaning a better return on your investment.

It’s also more efficient, which saves the business time. Once certain services are set up, digital marketing can soon pay for itself through better reach and sales performance.

Better lead quality

Much of digital marketing is focused on a personalized service. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media services all use algorithms to recommend services and accounts that are most likely to be of interest to a user. By using social media for your digital marketing, users can instantly appeal to the customers best suited to them; meaning customers aren’t distracted by something irrelevant, and that a company’s sales team has genuinely-interested clients.

Builds up brand recognition

Marketing isn’t just about sales. It’s also about establishing brand familiarity. A name that someone sees everywhere is a name they are more likely to recommend to people, even if it’s not a product they use themselves. In the case of digital marketing, a strong social media presence can help immensely with creating a positive view.

It doesn’t need to be used for customer service or selling products. Many successful campaigns simply encourage interaction in a fun way, making a company seem more human than just a place to buy a product. It can even be used to develop product ideas.

Feature Image Credit: Pexels

By Jennifer Allen

Sourced from techradar.pro

In News

The Rise of Digital Marketing: A Game-Changer

December 24, 2021 No Comments

By Chris Davis

All successful businesses must have a strong digital marketing strategy to bring in more clients and more revenue.

Digital marketing means advertising and selling products through various modes such as social media platforms, search engines, mobile applications, emails, websites or any digital marketplace. Usually it involves an electronic device that is used to purchase something online.

Why are These Platforms Helpful?

With these platforms, you can easily promote and advertise products and services to your target audience. And because the world is still dealing with the pandemic, many people prefer to shop and purchase goods over the internet. Consider that 81% of people search online for a product or service, 74% have purchased online via any device and 67% use mobile shopping apps.

Identify Your Target Audience

For your digital marketing venture to be successful, first thing’s first: You need to identify who your target audience will be. No campaign can reach everybody. Every person has a particular taste. It would be best to target people or future clients who describe and exemplify the product, service or brand you are promoting.

To identify your audience, you need to specifically characterize them. For example, you are promoting a skincare product, and you also need to consider people who have sensitive skin that needs more care. Try researching the service area or location of your target audience.

Some examples include:

• Budget.

• Connection.

• Location.

• Hobbies.

• Target age.

• Existing purchases.

• Online searches regarding a product.

Identifying your audience might take you some time. Doing research and conducting surveys can help gather necessary information before you go all out. The more target clients you get, the more profitable your business will be.

Building Your Digital Advertisement

Before we go into the process itself, you need to know what digital advertising means. It is simply promoting products and services through the internet. It is the dissemination of materials using various online platforms such as social media platforms and websites.

Digital advertising is typically included in every business’s marketing strategy. There should be details on how the ad will connect with clients, not only via the promotion proper but also via email, blogs, social campaigns and search engines.

Steps Involved in Digital Advertising

Once you’re aware of what digital advertising is, you are ready to start the process:

1. Strategize

To succeed in your chosen business, you need to find ways to encourage and promote your brand to your clients. This is done by conducting surveys or research. The goal of this process is to identify any possible problems you might encounter and determine how you will solve them without compromising the effects on your audience.

People nowadays are quick to rely on the internet. Many easily trust what they see on social media. But there are still pros and cons to this approach, and it’s important to deploy your critical thinking skills.

2. Set a Budget

Your business won’t be successful if you don’t have adequate funding. After creating your strategy, allocating your budget comes next. This depends on what your goals are and your target market. Make sure to focus on:

• The people: If you decide to make a TV commercial, maybe your client is the general public. You’ll need to be ready to pay the price.

• The timeline: You must have a clear and concrete timeline of activities that will be involved in executing your business.

• The platform: Whether your chosen platform is social media, website or email, it will come at a cost. You will likely be choosing among paid searches or advertising channels.

3. Create a Production

Good production can lead to good business. It involves a creative strategy and teamwork — don’t try to go it alone. Make sure every aspect of the production emphasizes your business’s objectives.

4. Focus on Distribution

Lastly, the distribution process: This is where you want to promote your products and services through various platforms. It includes all those social media platforms, websites and even radio or television. The broader the scope, the better.

Importance of Digital Marketing in the Digital Age

All successful businesses must have a strong digital marketing strategy to bring in more clients and more revenue. Thanks to the rise of modern-day technology, you can easily reach people with just one click.

Here are some of the benefits to keep in mind:

Easy Access

Unlike the typical ways of delivering information to clients, you can quickly promote your products and services to target clients with digital marketing. You can keep them updated on the latest news via social media and email.

Easy Monitoring of Prices and Feedback

Conducting surveys through advertising might be time-consuming and expensive, but you can quickly check the number of clients, purchases and feedback with built-in analytical tools.

Many Affordable Tools to Choose From

Besides Facebook, Google Ads and YouTube, there are a lot of options for marketing your products online. You might want to consider affiliate marketing, which can help you reach a vast number of people.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is just one way of helping your business grow. Still, it can help you be innovative and creative in improving and enhancing your products and services. I hope this information makes you more aware of how digital marketing can help you keep your clients well-informed about your company’s offerings. Remember that as a business owner, the future of your company is in your hands.

Feature Image Credit: Jacob Lund/stock.adobe.com

By Chris Davis

Co-founder, Revcarto

Sourced from Newsweek

In News

5 Signs You Should Start Using Paid SEO Tools

December 7, 2021 No Comments

By Aashirvad Kumar

I expect that you are using Free SEO tools but facing some problems in ranking your website. There are chances that you can make a brand of your online business, but these chances are pretty low with Free SEO tools.

If you are struggling to mark your online presence, you must start using paid SEO tools instead of free ones because Paid SEO tools will give you a more detailed report of your competitor’s website.

With proper analysis, you will be able to replace your competitor on every search engine.

In this article, I’ll be discussing five signs of your website that indicate that you should start using paid SEO tools now. But, first, let’s Optimize for SEO to get more and more engagements.

5 Signs Indicating you to use Paid SEO tools

#1 Conversion Rate is low

You are getting enough impressions to attract many visitors/customers, but you are getting enough CTR, so eventually, you aren’t getting enough people on your website. This is a problem because your website lacks some crucial aspects that search engines require.

Generally, free SEO tools don’t have enough data to analyse the flows of a website; to thoroughly analyse your website and understand what is stopping your website from converting your impressions into visits; you should use paid SEO tools.

Paid SEO tools will give you detailed and correct information about your website’s optimization. In addition, paid SEO tools will help you optimize your website according to search engines.

#2 Not getting enough Sales

There are situations where you are getting visitors, but your website cannot convert them into your customers. If you are struggling with this problem and free SEO tools aren’t helping you. So, now it’s time to switch to paid SEO tools so that you can understand what is wrong with your content and your website’s layout.

You have enough backlinks and good off-page SEO to attract visitors, but your content has some problems. Once someone lands on your website, then it’s your content that can convert the visitor into your customer.

Paid SEO tools like Grammarly can help enhance your website’s content.

#3 Unable to generate quality content

This is somewhere similar to the above situation, but here you have neither visitors nor the content to upgrade. So here you are struggling with the essential requirement of a website that is content, Right? And Free SEO tools aren’t effective in helping with content quality.

Only paid SEO tools can help you in such situations because they will make the content creation process much easier for you.

For example, Grammarly will analyse each sentence you write and find errors, if any. If it finds any errors, it will highlight the particular word/phrase where the error is present.

Apart from this, Grammarly will suggest possible corrections that will undoubtedly help you generate better content relatively quickly.

#4 Unable to find worthy keywords

Keyword Research is the most important aspect of SEO. You can’t rank on search engines without proper keywords, and without keywords, you can’t even make your SEO strategy. But, on the other hand, if you pick the wrong keywords, you will waste your effort and time.

You have to be very careful while picking your keywords to work on. However, I discovered that most of them aren’t accurate enough to rely on while using Free SEO tools. Thus, for me, Paid SEO tools like SEMRUSH, AHREFS work perfectly fine.

These tools are regularly maintained and upgraded by a bunch of professionals, and these are entirely reliable.

#5 Email Marketing isn’t working

If you are facing problems with email marketing, then you are pretty much sorted with the website’s optimization and content-related issues; if you aren’t, then before email marketing, you should concentrate on them. Then, once you are satisfied with your content, you can use Email marketing to grab some extra visitors.

If you are already generating quality content and your website is also well-optimized. Still, emails aren’t working for you, then it may be because of a wrong template, or your mails are piling into the receiver’s spam folder.

You need to pick a reliable tool for email marketing because most of the free email marketing tools aren’t very effective. So you have to keep on shuffling with some paid SEO or email marketing tools and need to analyse which one is working for you.

Final Verdict

Using paid SEO tools for your business, you can also generate income and increase your online presence through some free SEO tools. But, again, as mentioned above, the chances are pretty low. However, many Digital Marketing Companies, such as an SEO Company in India, SEO Company In the USA, SEO services in Vietnam, etc. are started using many tools for their clients.

If you are using some paid SEO tools, then no doubt they will give a good ROI. It is mainly because most of the paid SEO tools are accurate and precise. This makes them reliable to use.

To get faster results and you want to make your website/business a brand, then I think it is entirely worth it to invest in some good Paid SEO tools.

Feature Image credit:- freepik.com

By Aashirvad Kumar

Aashirvad Kumar is a Writer at Tele Trick Mania and SEO Executive at Optimize For SEO. He has been blogging since 2016 in the technology niche. He has experience of more than 5+ years in Digital Marketing.

Sourced from readwrite

In News

10 Entrepreneurs Share The Digital Marketing Trend They’re Most Excited About

November 30, 2021 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

The digital marketing industry has seen an influx of growth over the past few years. More businesses than ever are adapting to the digital arena brought on by the global pandemic. This change of pace has spurred new digital marketing trends that have replaced previous outdated strategies.

Below, 10 members of Young Entrepreneur Council explain which recent digital marketing trends they’re most excited about and why. Here’s what they believe the future of marketing will look like, and how these trends have already impacted their own efforts.

1. AI Writing Assistants

I’ve been getting excited about AI writing assistants which are mainly tools that can produce ghostwritten content. There’s Narrative Science, Wordsmith and Automaton, for example. All these AI assistants work by combing databases and finding patterns in order to make educated guesses on what the content is about. Advantages: an illusion of higher quality and less personal bias in articles, they’ll likely churn out more articles than there would be human writers, will lower prices for clients, less stress on writers. Disadvantages: potential loss of author voice (depending on how much control is given to the software), possible breach of integrity when personal biases become part of the production. Regardless, AI writing assistants should be an interesting trend to watch in digital spaces. – Brett Farmiloe, Markitors

2. Video Marketing

Our firm has invested in video marketing, to revel in the potential. Watching a video for a product or a service not only improves brand recall for the consumer but also gives them a chance to immerse themselves in the experience. They receive a few minutes of either entertainment or information and are incentivized to share it within their networks. You can also use the elements of storytelling to weave an unforgettable narrative. For example, one UPS commercial, inspired by a YouTube channel that rescues dogs from the street, showed a driver taking in a stray dog. The transformation associates UPS with positivity and care. A small business doesn’t need as high a budget to reach the same emotional connection. You simply need a good script and actors. – Duran Inci, Optimum7

3. Giveaways

I love the idea of using contests and giveaways to drive traffic to your website and boost conversions. They’re fun and generate excitement with your target audience, encouraging them to take action and interact with your brand. The great thing about contests is you can set rules to boost engagement, such as requiring social shares or comments to get entries. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms

4. Audio Social Apps

I have never seen the ability to create momentum behind a product or service like you can with audio social apps such as Clubhouse, Greenroom or the new social app Fireside. Even market research can be done with the press of a button and you can hear from your potential clients in real-time about what they want or don’t want. Even finding out what problem to solve and add on to your current portfolio. Plus being able to speak directly to your customers builds a strong bond and rapport where no other social platform can. We have created services and even businesses based on the demand and what people want. – Daniel Robbins, IBH Media, Bintana Sa Paraiso, His skincare

5. Accessible QR Codes

I’ve been getting excited about QR codes as an access point to products. During Covid, the rise of restaurants using QR codes to display their menus on people’s phones means almost everyone knows how to open a cellphone camera and scan a QR code. This is a rising trend that is going to become more and more popular. Companies like Apple are adopting this with app clips. You can scan a QR code on something like a scooter and it will pop open a segment of an app so you can interact with that product without downloading the entire app. I think many more things will soon be able to be accessed with a QR code, and that will be a big shift in how people get their products into the hands of customers more easily. – Cody Candee, Bounce

6. Social Media Shares

Social media content that spotlights our clients, stakeholders, partners and collaborators is an amazing way to get at least one share of your content. We have changed the way we measure success in a post from just reviewing likes and comments to how many shares we are getting. This approach is a game changer and really builds relationships. We focus on talking about their achievements, stories and congratulating them. It is simple and works. – Saana Azzam, MENA Speakers

7. The Rise Of Audio Content

There has been a shift in media consumption. Written rules the world and the internet but something has changed for some time now. Writing isn’t the only major option for media consumption. We’ve moved to audio and video. And the trends can be seen in books being preferred in audio form and blogs becoming podcasts. You might get into trouble reading a book or watching a video on company time but an engaging podcast can get you through your shift. It has informed my decision to create content on audio and video platforms instead of writing articles alone. The dividends have started paying off already. My YouTube show “Coffee With Closers” has been a platform to interact with entrepreneurs whom I admire and am friends with while creating content that’s valuable to business prospects and people in general. – Samuel Thimothy, OneIMS – Integrated Marketing Solutions

8. Leveraging SEO

SEO PR is very exciting and is allowing for proven ROI from building high-value PR links on major news outlets. This concept can drive more organic users and obtain highly sought-after publication backlinks. It’s certainly worth the time to learn more about it and implement it into your marketing strategy. You can work to learn this yourself or reach out to professionals to help implement it. – Tyler Quiel, Giggster

9. Social Media Stories

Stories on social media such as Instagram have taken over as a fast strategy for growth. Benefits of using stories include building the know, like and trust factor which helps with sales. Stories are a quick, low-pressure way to communicate without worrying about editing or design. When people show their face on stories they can upload daily and speak directly to their target audience. This trend is so powerful that it serves as a tool to conduct market research and sell directly to clients. The results are so effective that I ask my audience to use the hashtag #showyourface and tag my account @dietitianboss on Instagram for accountability. Every day my audience tags me and I re-feature them in my stories. The act of showing up gets both my clients and company recurring business. – Libby Rothschild, Libby Rothschild

10. Optimized Podcasting Platforms

A digital marketing trend that I’ve recently been getting truly excited about is the increase in podcasting platforms working to increase the integration of podcasts with content marketing channels like blogs, social media posts and email lists. Podcasts have transformed into one of the best ways for brands to target their ideal client avatars with pinpoint accuracy, enjoying tremendous boosts in credibility and brand exposure to key audiences. Even better, niche podcasts can be very affordable to market through. When combining podcast marketing with other methods of content marketing, the entire marketing campaign is more effective, with far better integration of promo codes and links for fine-detail tracking and better insight into cost per acquisition of each channel. – Richard Fong, ProcessingCard.com Check out my website.

YEC is an invitation-only, fee-based organization comprised of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs 45 and younger.

Sourced from Forbes

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Why Businesses Can’t Afford To Skip Market Research

November 24, 2021 No Comments

By Andrew Faridani

When launching a new campaign, product or new line of service, many businesses – both large and small – choose to forgo an important step: market research. While many companies cite cost as the reason to skip this crucial step, others think it’s too time consuming or simply not necessary.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Market research is the most critical piece of a marketing launch because it helps businesses understand the audience segment and, by extension, the actual need of a product or service.

Some companies think it should be the first thing cut when discussing an upcoming launch. Because it’s a long-term payoff and doesn’t immediately turn into revenue, it’s quickly ignored or discarded for something more immediate.

If you’re not doing market research, what needs to be remembered is it’s very likely your competitors are. And the business with the better understanding of what a consumer needs and wants is going to come out on top.

Take Target. It’s hard to believe from such a large company, but when they launched their brand in Canada, they skipped market research and banked on name recognition to drive customer traffic. After buying the leases for a defunct discount chain in Canada in 2013, Target quickly turned the empty stores into new Target stores.

The big store conglomerate spent millions on marketing on social media, radio, TV and billboards but never took the time to deep dive into the specific Canadian consumer segment. Customers in Canada knew the brand, but when they went into stores, they saw different products than what they’d seen in U.S. stores and prices were higher. It took less than two years for Target to close its Canadian stores and call the launch a failure.

The main lesson learned is: Do your market research! The time and cost of doing proper research is worth the investment, every time. And here’s a secret: it doesn’t have to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sure, if you’re Pepsi and launching a new beverage or Nike testing out a new shoe, market research will cost upwards of millions. But if you’re a small business trying to determine whether you should launch a new line of business, or if a product is a good fit for a specific locale, there are cost effective ways to do your market research. Some are even free!

Here are a few of the best tried-and-true best practices in market research:

Free Please!

Before you dip your toe into paid research, use the free online tools at your disposal. The best tool? Google. Search the phrase you’ll use to describe your product and review its popularity. If the popularity is high, ie. millions of searches, it’s in high demand. If there are only a couple hundred results, you may be barking up the wrong tree.

Another important tool is the keyword search query within Google Adwords. Their keyword research tool tells you how frequently certain words and phrases are searched and how they changed over time. This tool gives insight not only into what is being searched, but how. It will help refine the best words and phrases to use when promoting your product or business. And it will also give insight into the popularity and search volume of those terms.

Go Digital

For many, the image that comes to mind when you say “market research” is a person standing in the grocery store offering free samples of a new product. And while that can be effective, the digital realm is a much easier and faster option. You don’t get quite as many opinions standing in line in the grocery store as you might running an online poll. Think 20 people versus 5,000: That’s a significant difference.

LinkedIn and Twitter both host online polling and provide solid results. It’s important to slice and dice the audience until you’re polling the right segment. Make sure your geographical location is accurate – it’s not uncommon for those polling to accidentally use a much bigger geo target setting than necessary, which can skew results.

You can hire a third party vendor to do your polling and/or surveying or find a self-serve platform, like Survey Monkey. The best way to determine which solution is by budget and campaign size. If your budget is $10,000 or less, use a plug-and-play, self-serve option. Anything over $10,000 should be handled by the pros.

And don’t forget simple ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter. Running an A/B test using different images, slogans, and copy can tell you what is resonating with your target audience – and what isn’t.

Email For The Win

Another smart tactic to use for market research is an email marketing campaign. Whether you use an internal email list or purchase one from companies that specialize in list creation, targeting a segment audience via email works phenomenally well.

There are many digital ad agencies that specialize in surveys. They help you buy legitimate lists to purchase within a specific vertical which is a great way to target specifically. For example, if you’re a dental manufacturing company, there are very specific lists you can buy to help you find and target dentists. You can break down the list by location, speciality, size of practice, etc. Email marketing is an effective way to do market research without breaking the bank.

Market research can make or break your business. Be smart and put in the time and effort to make sure your product or line of business is truly going to resonate with your target audience.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Andrew Faridani

President and CEO at BreezeMaxWeb. Read Andrew Faridani’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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How AI Is Transforming The Future Of Digital Marketing

November 3, 2021 No Comments

By Bernard Marr

When people think about artificial intelligence (AI) today, they might think of computers that can speak to us like Alexa or Siri, or grand projects like self-driving cars. These are very exciting and attention-grabbing, but the reality of AI is actually thousands of tools and apps running quietly behind the scenes, making our lives more straightforward by automating simple tasks or making predictions.

This is true across every industry and business function, and particularly true in marketing, where leveraging AI to put products and services in front of potential customers has been standard practice for some time, even though we may not always realize it!

In business today, the term AI is used to describe software that is capable of learning and getting better at doing its job without input from humans. This means that while we’ve become used to using machines to help us with the heavy lifting, now they can start to help us with jobs that require thinking and decision-making, too.

A huge number of questions that would previously have needed human intervention to answer – such as “will this person be interested in my products?” or “what results will I get from this advertising campaign?” can now be answered by machines – if they are given the right data. And because machines can answer questions far more quickly than humans, they can easily chain together complex strings of queries to come up with predictions, such as who is most likely to buy your products and where the best places to advertise might be.

That’s the basic principle behind all business AI today – automating the processes of learning and decision-making in order to create knowledge (usually referred to as “insight”) that helps to improve performance. And marketing is one area where it’s certainly been put to good use!

Targeted marketing

The high-level use case for AI in marketing is that it improves ROI by making your marketing – often one of a company’s biggest expenses – more efficient. In the old days, before online advertising, businesses would pay huge amounts of money for TV, radio, or newspaper adverts, in the full knowledge that only a small number of the people who saw their ads would ever become customers. This was tremendously inefficient, but companies didn’t have any choice if they wanted to position themselves as market leaders.

In the online age, we’ve developed the ability to learn a great deal about who is or isn’t interested in our products and services. The first breakthroughs came thanks to the likes of Amazon with their recommendation engine technology and Google and Facebook with their targeted advertising platforms. Today, each of those platforms has been augmented with machine learning technology that allows them to become increasingly effective as they are fed more data on customers and their buying habits.

AI-driven content marketing

The rise in social media marketing and our growing appetite for online content has made content-based marketing the dominant form of marketing in many industries. AI lends a hand here by helping us work out what type of content our customers and potential customers are interested in and what the most efficient ways are to distribute our content to them. Advertising creatives have always strived to find formulas for creating adverts that will get people talking and sharing the message with their friends. Now, this can be done automatically using any number of AI-powered tools. For example, headline generation algorithms that monitor how successful they are and tweak their output to achieve better metrics, such as the open rate of emails, or the share rate of social media posts.

Taking this a step further, AI is developing the ability to take care of the entire content generation process itself, creating copy and images that it knows are likely to be well-received by its audience. A huge buzzword in this space will be personalization – where individual customers are served content that’s specifically tweaked to them, perhaps using information and reference points that the AI knows are relevant to them, intertwined with the overall marketing messages.

AI will also increasingly be useful for identifying what stage of the buying process a customer is at. If it detects that they are “shopping around” – comparing products and services that are available – it can serve content designed to differentiate your product or service from those of competitors. If it detects that they are ready to make a purchase, it can target them with promotions urging them to “act now” to take advantage of a limited-time offer.

A digital marketing agency called 123 Internet has embraced the ongoing industry developments by utilizing various AI-based technologies to improve service delivery. Scott Jones, CEO said:

“We’ve been using AI tools for a while now, in particular automatically checking website designs in hundreds of screen and browser types, this speeds up our design and development process”.

Their team also use an AI generated website audit which can be downloaded from their website and runs without human interaction.

Identifying micro-influencers

Influencers are another huge trend in marketing right now, and AI algorithms are already in use to make sure the personalities that are most likely to appeal to you are appearing in your search results and social feeds.

Increasingly, advertisers will also use AI to identify smaller influencers that are most likely to gel with their brands and audiences. This has led to the emergence of “micro-influencers” – typically everyday people, rather than celebrities, who have a specialist knowledge they’ve used to build a niche audience that cares about their opinion. AI enables companies to find the micro-influencers with the right audiences for them, across a large number of niches and audience segments. AI helps establish when it makes sense to pay 100 people $1,000 each to talk about their product, rather than pay $100,000 to Justin Bieber or a Kardashian. Once again, here it is about creating efficiency by following the data, rather than simply doing what a marketer thinks or feels is the best plan.

AI in CRM

Customer relationship management is an essential function for any marketer to master, as existing customers are often the most important source of a company’s revenue. Here, AI can be used to reduce the risk of customer “churn” – by identifying patterns of behaviour that are likely to lead to customers heading elsewhere. These customers can then be automatically targeted with personalized promotions or incentives to hopefully restore their loyalty. AI-augmented marketers are also increasingly turning to chatbot technology – powered by natural language processing. This can segment incoming customer inquiries, meaning those who require a quick response can be urgently catered to, to minimize dissatisfaction. AI-driven CRM will also allow businesses to more accurately forecast sales across all the markets where a company operates, meaning stock and resources can be more efficiently distributed. Additionally, it can be used to maintain the quality of data in the CRM system, identifying customer records where errors or duplicates are likely to exist.

The future of the marketer

If you work in marketing, you would be forgiven for worrying that we’re heading for a future where humans in your role will be redundant. You can take heart, though, from current predictions that state AI will end up creating more jobs than it destroys. It’s inevitable that your job will change, though. Marketers will spend less time on technical tasks such as forecasting or segmenting customers and more time on creative and strategic tasks. Those who are competent at working with technology, and identifying new technological solutions as they become available, will be hugely valuable to their companies and are likely to have a bright future!

Feature Image Credit: Adobe Stock

By Bernard Marr

Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies. He helps organisations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, blockchains, and the Internet of Things. Why don’t you connect with Bernard on Twitter (@bernardmarr), LinkedIn (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/bernardmarr) or instagram (bernard.marr)?

Sourced from Forbes