The online market place is getting ever more saturated and the average cost per click on PPC campaigns seems to be shooting through the roof, damaging ROI on marketing campaigns and decreasing brand loyalty.
It is harder than ever to be heard over the millions of other voices in your industry, so it is imperative that you stay ahead of your competitors.
Below are some tactics, tools and strategies you should either have in place or should be looking to introduce over the next 6 months.
Embracing Mobile
Each year we were told this was the year of mobile, however it finally came in 2015, as mobile traffic overtook desktop traffic in several countries, including the UK and the USA. This was the same year as ‘mobilegeddon’, as companies quickly pushed out a mobile-friendly version of their site in order to avoid witnessing a decrease in their mobile rankings. Mobile optimisation should now be fundamentally at the front of your mind when considering any campaigns, from app development to hiding elements on a webpage to make them shorter and easier to navigate.
Gary Illyes previously stated that around 600,000 websites have already added AMP code to their site, increasing page speed for anyone who comes through this avenue, while page abandonment is shown to double with a 1 second added load time according to multiple surveys.
Voice Based Search
Quite remarkably, voice-based search rose from almost zero percent to 10% of all searches globally according to Google in 2015. This has only increased in 2016, with many reporting the figures to be closer to 20%. Despite this unprecedented growth, businesses are still slow to adapt their content strategy to embrace this change.
You need to ensure elements of your content are conversational so that you can appear for results matching a question someone may ask Siri. One great way to implement this is to take a look at your FAQ’s and attempt to answer each separate question as a blog post. This could also have an added benefit, with the chance for your answer to feature as a rich snippet on SERP’s in response to the question being typed in.
Personalisation Of Marketing
One of the greatest advances in marketing over the past decade has been the ability to personalise messages to the individual user, while this will only increase over time. From adjusting email content and custom landing pages to match customer data to localised ads and alternative copy or video thumbnails being observed by different customer segments. In short, this is the year of customer-centric marketing.
Make Transactions As Easy As Possible
A recent survey showed that 78% of people that use an Apple Watch will be using Apple Pay to make purchases at least once per week. This is great news for many, but not for those that aren’t ready for this form of technology. Wearable tech has finally reached us and will be used in multiple ways, so a business’s ability to adapt to this advancement could make a huge difference to your sales figures.
Pret A Manger were one of the early adopters on our high streets, allowing for quick purchases as well as many happy customers. This will undoubtedly be boosted by the fact that smart phones are becoming increasingly cheaper to purchase, while Emirates recently became the first global airline to allow Android Pay, however we’re expecting many to follow.
Big Data Is The Real King
Every point prior to this one is all based around the data you should be gathering from your consumers.
Data analysts are becoming hot property and your ability to identify and embrace patterns and trends in your data could transform your businesses results.
Traffic to the site was always the killer answer to everything, before Conversion Rate Optimisation became the new buzz term for everyone. After all, there is no point gaining those visits if you aren’t gaining anything from them. Well big data is the next level.
You can break up the data you gather into key points and write them up into a blog post, helping to support your content strategy. You can gain links with the data you have pulled by targeting big publications with ground breaking data. You can adjust your email marketing and social media posts to target the right demographics and adjust your message for optimal results.
It can help you to notice customer trends and to adjust the way your business works in order to reach this evolving market and ever demanding customer base. It can help you to identify fraudulent activity before any damage is done. It can help you to offer vouchers and discounts to customers based on their previous activity and purchases.
The options are endless with big data, while it should be embraced by all industries from education (identifying student progress and students who are struggling) to banking (highlighting potential fraud and highlighting customers suitable for certain deals or schemes).
