Four Steps to Turn Fans into Brand Ambassadors

Four Steps to Turn Fans into Brand Ambassadors

In a perfect world, everyone who buys your products would talk about them to everyone they meet.

The problem is, we don’t live in a perfect world. And, while some of your customers might be ardent fans, others may need a bit of coaxing to get there.

The good news?

You can turn customers into enthusiastic brand ambassadors in just four easy steps.
That might sound too good to be true, but it’s not. The trick is knowing what makes someone a brand ambassador – and then leading them down the road instead of hoping they’ll get there on their own.

What Can Brand Ambassadors Do for You

Brand ambassador

Brand ambassadors are more than just enthusiastic fans. When brand ambassadorship is at its best, customers identify heavily with the brands they love.

One example is Apple customers. You’ve probably noticed that they:

  • Associate the brand with their self-image
  • Assign traits of the brand to themselves
  • Eagerly await the release of new products

Apple might be an extreme example because it’s a big company, but brand ambassadors can do a lot to increase awareness of your brand. They can give you a competitive advantage in your industry. If you’ve got fans who talk about you all the time, you’re getting free advertising from them every time they mention you.

Brand ambassadors can also help you build customer loyalty. Knowing that others are enthusiastic about your products can increase their perceived value. A truly enthusiastic fan can even create new Brand ambassadors for you.

What Does Engagement Have to Do with It

You know that engagement is the Holy Grail of social media marketing. What you might not know is what engagement means nowadays. Your engagement might be up while your sales are down – and when that’s the case, it’s hard to get excited about a few hundred likes on Facebook or Instagram.

Not all engagement is the same. There are levels and you must understand them if you want to understand how to create brand ambassadors. Here’s how I break it down:

  • Stage 1 engagement: casual observers. These are people who read your Tweets or view your Instagram photos without commenting, liking, or sharing. They see your content but don’t do anything about it.
  • Stage 2 engagement: simple supporters. These are people who like your posts but don’t comment or share them.
  • Stage 3 engagement: conversationalists. These are customers who comment on your posts or, in some cases, DM or email you directly. The dialogue might be brief but it’s a step up and requires effort on the part of the customer.
  • Stage 4 engagement: broadcasters. These are the fans who share your content with their social media followers or post reviews of your products online. They’ve taken a step beyond casual support to try to share their passion for your brand with others.
  • Step 5 engagement: cheering section. These are fans who will go out of their way to come to events that you sponsor, whether they’re livestreams or in-person events.
  • Step 6 engagement: superfans. These are customers who create content that you can share and use to bolster your brand. Think of the people who post Instagram content at the request of a brand or show off their purchases online.

Your goal, of course, is to get as many people to step 6 as possible.

The Four Steps to Brand Ambassadorship

As I said before, there are four steps you can follow to create brand ambassadors. They’re not difficult, but they do require some planning and persistence on your part.

Brand Ambassadorship

Here are two examples of brands I think have done a good job of creating brand ambassadors.

Starbucks runs a white cup contest on Instagram every year. They challenge fans to create designs on plain white cups and post photos of them. The company shares the posts with their fans and produces a limited-edition run of the winning design.

Beauty brand Dove often asks its fans to tell stories about themselves and their families. They’ve run Mother’s Day promotions where they request information about customers’ mothers and then create one-of-a-kind social media “cards” for them.

What you can see from these ideas is that fans will engage with your brand if you ask them, incentivize them, and reward them.

Your brand ambassadors are waiting to be inspired…

It’s time to start thinking about what’s going to convince your current customers and followers to embrace your brand as ambassadors.

Not sure where to start? Try asking on social media! Your fans who are already engaged will be eager to tell you what they want – and you can use their advice as guidance to get things started.

7 Ways You Can Market Your Business Better

7 Ways You Can Market Your Business Better

Is your marketing strategy helping you accomplish your goals?

I’m willing to bet it isn’t – at least not all of them. And, if it’s not, that means there are things you could be doing better.

The tricky thing, of course, is figuring out what those things are. It’s not like they’re going to walk up and announce themselves to you, right? (But wouldn’t it be great if they did?)

Since you can’t count on marketing suggestions knocking on your door, let me help. Here are 7 things you can start doing right now to market your business better.

#1: Identify Your Unmet Goals Where You Expected to Do Better

The first step is to review your marketing plan and business plan and figure out what you still haven’t accomplished. You might have specific goals that remain out of reach, like attracting a certain number of new customers this year or passing a profit milestone.

Even if you haven’t articulated a goal, you might still feel disappointed about some of your marketing. Maybe readers aren’t finding your blog or you’re not getting as many people to sign up for your newsletter as you’d hoped.

Whatever it is that isn’t meeting your expectations, write it down.

#2: Update Your Market Research

The answers to marketing difficulties are nearly always found in the data. If it’s been a while since you conducted any serious market research, it’s time to retest those waters and see what’s new.

You should be gathering two sets of information about the people in your target audience. They are:

  • Demographic information, including age, gender, marital status, education, income, and geographical location; and
  • Psychographic information, including likes, dislikes, problems, concerns, and preferences.

The information you collect is what you’ll use to revamp your marketing to connect with the people most likely to buy from you.

market research

#3: Sneak a Peek at Your Competitors’ Marketing

Competitor research doesn’t get enough attention, and if you’ve never checked out your competitors’ marketing for ideas, you’re missing out.

You should be looking to see:

  • How they differentiate themselves from their competitors
  • Which keywords they’re targeting
  • Which social media sites they’re using
  • How many followers they have
  • Where they’re spending money on advertising
  • How they get customers to engage with them

This is such an important topic that I wrote a whole article about it this month. Make sure you don’t take your competitors for granted.

#4: Find Out Where Your Target Audience Is

Once you’ve evaluated your competitors, it’s time to start thinking about where to focus your marketing efforts to reach your target audience. For example, if your customers are mostly women and you have an aspirational product, then your marketing budget will be well spent on Pinterest. If you’re a B2B company, you should focus on LinkedIn.

You’ll also want to think beyond social media and ask how your target audience will find you. Remember that voice search is on the rise and think about where people are going to look for your products – and how they’ll do it.

target audience

#5: Revamp Your Marketing Plan

This is step is a big one – but it’s necessary if you want to achieve your marketing and growth goals. Take all the information you’ve gathered and sit down and rethink your marketing plan. You should be planning:

  • Which short-term and long-term goals are most important to you
  • How much money you’re prepared to spend to achieve them
  • What methods you will use to reach your goals (content marketing, email marketing, retargeting, etc.)
  • Which platforms you want to use (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, Bing, etc.)
  • What kind of content you will create
  • How you will track your results and measure your goals

In other words, this should be a complete, soup-to-nuts plan of how you will achieve your goals.

#6: Automate as Much as Possible

Marketing automation can save you a ton of time and money as you work to achieve your goals. If you try to do everything yourself, you may wind up missing deadlines or failing to keep up with your intentions.

I’m a big believer in email automation for marketing. There are tons of good marketing email providers, including companies like AWeber and Constant Contact. You can use them to create email sequences to send out to your subscribers – or hire someone to create them for you.

I also suggest using automation to monitor your social media mentions and post on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. You’ll need to set up the posts and schedule them, but the beauty of this approach is that it means you don’t need to worry about remembering when to post something. The automation will do it for you.
You may also want to consider setting up automatic replies on your Facebook page. Lots of companies use bots to handle customer questions and increase engagement – and you should think about it, too.

#7: Test Everything (and I Do Mean Everything)

The final step is not to assume that your new marketing plan is perfect. Even seasoned marketers make mistakes. They guess wrong and need to correct course.
Tracking your results will help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t. You should know:

  • How many people open the emails you send
  • What your click-through and conversion rates are
  • Which social media posts get the most engagement

Once you know which efforts aren’t delivering, you can test new versions of them. For emails, it might mean testing new headlines, content, and calls to action. Or, if you notice that video content gets three times as much engagement on Facebook as everything else you do, you may need to revisit your marketing budget and allot more resources to video.

market your business

And there they are…

Marketing isn’t an exact science but doing these 7 things can help you realign your marketing strategy with your most important business goals – and at the same time, increase your profits and help you attract new customers.
Here’s Why Your Business Isn’t Growing!

Here’s Why Your Business Isn’t Growing!

Your business is in a rut.

And guess what? Even if it isn’t right now, it will be some day. It happens to every business. The marketing techniques that worked last year, or last month, are no longer as effective as they used to be. You try everything you can think of, but it doesn’t work.

You’re stuck.

But, the good news is that it doesn’t need to be that way. When your business gets stuck and stops growing, there are things that you probably aren’t doing that you can do to kick things back into high gear.

Ready to get things going again? Here are some of the most common things that cause business to stagnate.

You Don’t Have an Email List

This one’s a biggie for me – so much so that one of the first questions I ask new clients is:

Do you have an email list?

I’m always amazed when people don’t. It’s so easy to do and email marketing earns great returns. There’s really no excuse for skipping email marketing as a method of growing your business.

And, here’s the thing. It is very easy to build a list. All you need to do is come up with a lead magnet that’s designed to appeal to your target audience. It could be a short report or eBook, a cheat sheet, a tip sheet, a value-packed video, or even a template.

Then, you create a landing page around your cheat sheet, advertise it, and boom! You’ve got an email list.

email list - grow your business

You’re Dialing in Your Marketing Strategy

Let’s face it – most small business owners don’t have a ton of time for marketing. They might set aside an hour or two to deal with it each week, but it’s often the first thing to get pushed aside when time is tight.

I get why that is, but it’s a mistake. A big one. Why? Because marketing is one of the best ways to engage with your existing customers and attract new ones.

If it’s been a while since you revamped your marketing strategy, here are some tips to help you get back on track.

  • Analyze your current marketing campaigns to see which ones have stopped working. If you’re not getting a great conversion rate, then keeping a campaign running is a waste of your money.
  • Come up with some killer content that’ll appeal to your target audience. It could be a video, a blog post, or an infographic. Just make sure that it’s irresistible and actionable.
  • Build a marketing campaign around your new content. Use whatever platforms will allow you to reach your target audience. They could include Facebook ads, Google AdWords, or even native advertising.
  • Test each element of your campaign and track the results. Testing can be time-consuming, but it’s truly the best way to fine-tune your campaigns until they’ve delivering the results you need.

Most importantly, make tracking your campaigns an ongoing concern. When a campaign stops delivering stellar results, make a change immediately.

You Don’t Have a Referral Program

If you’re not asking your existing customers for referrals, you’re making a big mistake. Referrals are a great way to attract new customers. They’re free (or pretty close to it) and they allow you to turn your valued customers into ambassadors for your brand.

It doesn’t take much to create a successful referral program. You’ll want to start by deciding how to incentivize referrals. Your customers are more likely to help you out if there’s something in it for them. It could be a free product, a discount on your services, or even a cash incentive. Figure out what’s most likely to appeal to them.

Then, you’ll need to tell your customers about the referral program. If you have employees, get them involved. Make sure every one of your existing customers knows about the program. Then, when you get new referrals, make sure to deliver your incentives immediately.

Your Brand Messaging isn’t Consistent

What do people think of first when they hear your brand name? If you’re not sure what the answer to that question is, it’s a sign that your brand messaging is falling short of the mark.

Consistent brand messaging is one of the cornerstones of great marketing and business growth. If your brand message is diluted, then it’s time to tighten it up.

Let’s start with some of the most common ways that a brand message gets diluted:

  • Your brand message has evolved but you haven’t had the time, money, or inclination to update your website to reflect the changes.
  • You’ve updated your website but haven’t bothered to update your social media pages and other online content to match.
  • You’ve added new products that have expanded your brand beyond what your website says.

The key is to identify how your brand has changed, refine your message, and then standardize your branding across all platforms.

You Aren’t Using Social Media to Your Advantage

How are you using social media? If you’re not regularly getting leads from social media, then you’re probably not using it to your best advantage.

Your social media posts should be engaging and shareable. That means that you can’t simply post a sales pitch and call it a day. Your social media content must be:

  • Tailored to your target audience
  • Valuable and actionable
  • Designed to be shared

Every post you put out should include a specific call to action. Not every CTA should be sales-oriented. Some can encourage readers to comment or share your content. The key is to use every social media post as a way of expanding your reach and attracting new customers.

marketing target - grow your business
grow your business
10 Marketing Tools You Aren’t Using – But Should Be!

10 Marketing Tools You Aren’t Using – But Should Be!

A marketer is only as good as the tools they use.

That’s easy to say, but it glosses over one of the real challenges that small business owners must face. With so many marketing tools to choose from, how do you know which ones are worthwhile?

It’s a good question – and I’m here to help with the answer. Here are 10 marketing tools that you aren’t using yet, but should be.

#1: Meltwater

Meltwater is a tool that lets you accomplish several marketing goals at once. With it, you can:

  • Monitor your brand in real time, including tracking brand mentions
  • Identify your best-performance keywords
  • Find the latest trends that apply to your business
  • Analyze your marketing campaigns
  • Create drafts of your publications days, weeks, or months in advance

Best of all, it collects all your results in one place so you can easily compare and evaluate your data and adjust your marketing campaigns accordingly. Pricing is based on your needs, and you can fill out their form to get more information.

#2: Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a tool that Google created to help businesses keep track of the latest information that’s relevant to your brand. You can log in to Google Alerts using your Google ID or Gmail address. Then, you can set up alerts as you choose.

Here are some of the things you can do with Google Alerts:

  • Track mentions of your brand
  • Track activity related to your top keywords
  • Track what your competitors are doing online

This is a free tool, and a good marketing option for beginners who want to wrap their heads around the web activity that’s most relevant to their companies.

Marketing Tools

#3: Simply Measured

Simply Measured is a social analytics tool that’s owned by Sprout Social. You can use it to dig into the activity on your social media accounts. For example, you can:

Here are some of the things you can do with Google Alerts:

  • Discover what interests your audience
  • Learn which content is driving engagement and interest
  • Identify emerging trends with advanced social listening
  • Collect detailed analytics to help you fine-tune your marketing campaigns

Simply Measured is one of the most powerful social analytics tools available. You can learn more and sign up for a free trial here.

#4: Facebook Insights

Marketing Tools

Facebook Insights is a tool that Facebook provides to its business customers. It offers marketers an impressive collection of analytics and statistics that can help you fine-tune your Facebook ads. Some of the information you’ll get includes:

  • Gender, age, and geographical breakdowns of your audience
  • Information about how people are finding your page
  • Data about the people who click through to your website
  • Breakdowns of your ad spending, including each ad’s reach and engagement
  • Information about which posts perform the best

It’s a deep well of information you can use to refine your Facebook ads – and you can apply the insights to your advertising on other platforms, too. Facebook Insights is a free tool. You can access it by clicking the Insights tab on your business page.

#5: Promorepublic

Promorepublic is a social media scheduling tool that allows you to schedule your posts easily across multiple platforms. They also provide some cool content creation tools, including:

  • More than 6,000 handcrafted templates
  • More than 100,000 images

Their services are broken down into self-service and full-service, and from there you can add options that include social monitoring and intelligent ads. There’s a free trial available for the self-service model. You can get more information here.

#6: AdEspresso

As its name suggests, AdEspresso is like a shot of caffeine for your advertising strategy. They have a huge gallery of advertising examples you can browse online. (As of this writing, the gallery was being updated, but they also offer free eBooks with sample ads. You can find them here.)

They have tools to help you create, manage, and analyze your ads. They also have a great blog and other educational material to help you perfect your ads and grow your business. You can get a 14-day free trial. After that, they have multiple tiers available, which you can learn about here.

#7: Promo

Promo is a video creation tool that even people with no video production experience can use to create professional-looking videos to post on their websites or social media. Users get access to:

  • A library of tested video templates to use
  • Access to thousands of images
  • Tools to help you create videos perfect for Facebook, Instagram, and more
  • Top-notch customer service

You can get a free trial, and after that they have three plan tiers to choose from. Find more information here.

Marketing Tools

#8: Canva

Canva is one of my favorite content creation tools. They offer an impressive collection of things to help you create memorable social media posts, including:

  • A library of professional templates for everything from Facebook posts to newsletters
  • Easy drag-and-drop design features
  • A huge collection of images and graphics
  • Photo editing tools

Canva is simple to use even for people with no design experience. Best of all, it’s completely free. You can create an account by signing up with Facebook or Twitter. Learn more here.

#9: SpyFu

SpyFu is an espionage tool for marketing. Using it, you can track your competitors marketing activity, including:

  • Every keyword they buy on AdWords
  • Every ad variation they’ve tried
  • Every rank change

Using it, you’ll get a huge amount of information that you can use to piggyback on your competitors’ ideas and – just as importantly – find holes in their marketing strategies. They offer three plans and all of them come with a 30-day, money-back guarantee. Learn more here.

Marketing Tools

#10: Hemingway App

Hemingway App is an editing tool that can help you improve the quality of your written social media posts and ads. When you plug text into the app, it will highlight it to show ways of improving it. For example, it targets:

  • Overly long or complex sentences
  • Long words
  • Adverbs and weak phrases
  • Passive voice

You can format your text right from the toolbar. It’s a free desktop app and you can see examples of how it works and download it here.

Marketing Tools

Your tools are waiting…

The tools I’ve mentioned here are my very favorite marketing assistants. You may not use all of them, but I encourage you to check them out and add a few to your toolbox.

5 Foolproof Ways to Get Visitors BACK to Your Website

5 Foolproof Ways to Get Visitors BACK to Your Website

Attracting a visitor to your website once is good. It means that your marketing is strong enough – or your Google rank is high enough – that you stood out from the competition and snagged some traffic.

So what?

If you know anything at all about marketing, you know that it’s rare for a first-time visitor to a website to buy anything or even fill out a subscription form.

It’s what they do on their NEXT visit – and the one after that – that will determine whether you’ve gained a new customer.

Makes sense, but it never ceases to amaze me how many businesses don’t focus on repeat traffic. But, that’s about to change.

Here are 5 foolproof ways to get those first-time visitors BACK to your website so you can make some money.

Get Them to Opt In to Your Mailing List

I know, I just said it was asking a lot to get a first-time visitor to your site to subscribe to your mailing list. But I didn’t say it was impossible!

The key, of course, is to give them a compelling reason to subscribe. Here are some ways you can do that:

  1. Put your opt-in form above the fold. That way, they won’t need to scroll down to see it – and they’ll know what they’ll be getting if they decide to subscribe.
  2. Simplify your form. I get that it’s tempting to ask a new subscriber for extra information – but all you really need is their email address and maybe a first name if you want to personalize your emails. Anything else – whether it’s their phone number, mailing address, URL, or shoe size – is extra. You should think long and hard about adding fields to your form.
  3. Incentivize the opt-in. A compelling and useful lead magnet can do a lot to get someone to fill out that form.
  4. Write a killer headline and call to action. Instead of just “Subscribe to our newsletter,” try “Get new marketing tips every day” as a headline. And make the CTA just as exciting.

Once a potential customer’s on your mailing list, you can email them with reasons to come back to your website. Simple, right?

Get Them to Opt In to Your Mailing List

If people aren’t coming back to your website, it could be because they didn’t enjoy their experience the first time they visited. That means that prioritizing usability is one of the best ways to encourage repeat visits.

Some of the things to think about when it comes to usability are:

  • Your site’s loading time
  • Mobile responsiveness
  • Clear and easy-to-use menus
  • Text that’s broken up with white space, images, and formatting (sub headers, bullet points, numbers, etc.)
  • Working internal and external links that make it easy to find related content

If it’s been a while since you’ve evaluated the usability of your site, now’s a good time to do it to make sure that you’re not frustrating visitors and discouraging them from returning to your site in the future.

Are people finding what they expect to find on your site? If a customer comes to you because they’re searching for art supplies, for example, think about what you can offer them that will add value to the products you sell. Can you provide a video tutorial on painting technique? A link to the website of an artist who uses that product?

The idea is to make sure that the content on your site – whatever it is – is directly relevant to the people you most want to attract. If you’re selling Human Resources software, have blog posts about topics that are relevant to HR professionals.

Because it’s rare for first-time visitors to convert, it’s essential to have a way to connect with them again even if they don’t opt-in to your mailing list. That’s where re-targeting comes in.

As you probably know, re-targeting is a kind of advertising that targets individual visitors to your site based on their behavior when they’re there. For example, you can:

 

  • Display an ad for a product they viewed – or an alternative product.
  • Let them know about a new blog post on a similar topic to an older post they viewed.
  • Remind them of the lead magnet they passed up when they didn’t opt in.
  • Encourage them to complete the checkout process if they added items to their cart.
  • Re-targeting is something you can do on Google or on social media. Simply pick the actions you want to target and watch your conversion rate soar.

The final thing you can do is to make the content on your website solution-oriented. Most people who type a keyword into Google do so because they’re looking for answers. That means that if you want them to bookmark your site, you need to provide them with what they need.

Focusing on solutions can also help you improve your site’s rank for keywords in voice search. Given the increase in the use of “Ok Google” as well as virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, it makes sense to think about the questions that searchers are likely to ask when looking for sites like yours. Then, you can optimize your useful content for those questions.

Your solutions may come in any format you choose. You might create a blog post with a response to one question or produce a video or even a short webinar for another. The key is to focus on the visitor’s needs instead of promoting your company or brand. There’ll be time enough for that later.

Visitors need an excuse to return to your site
Top 7 Marketing Trends You Cant Afford to Ignore

Top 7 Marketing Trends You Cant Afford to Ignore

Who cares about marketing trends, right?

If that’s your attitude, I get it. Some trends are here and gone before you even have time to figure out how to take advantage of them. It’s easy to dismiss trends as fleeting.

But the truth is… some aren’t fleeting. Some are here to stay. As the year ends and 2019 approaches, it’s a good time to take stock of your current marketing strategy. And, if you’ve been ignoring all trends in favor of the tried and true, then guess what? 2019 is the year to shake things up.

Now, I’m not saying that you need to jump on every trend as soon as you become aware of it. I am saying that I’ve noticed that a lot of small businesses aren’t taking advantage of the big trends – the ones that, for better or worse, aren’t going anywhere. And with that in mind, here are 7 trends that you can no longer afford to ignore in 2019.

1: Artificial Intelligence

I wrote about artificial intelligence last month, so you already know I think it’s important for small businesses to embrace this technology.

In marketing, the use of AI in the form of chatbots has taken root and many small businesses are adopting it. The bottom line is that a well-programmed chatbot can improve your customer service and increase sales.

AI is also becoming increasingly important in the field of marketing analytics. You can use it to make market predictions and get ahead of the curve as your audience’s preferences change and develop. And, let’s not forget that programmatic advertising – which uses AI to automate ad buying – is on the rise.

2: Personalization

One-size-fits-all marketing is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. While there’s still some benefit to targeting ads to a large audience, the trend increasingly is toward the kind of one-to-one marketing that Amazon has done brilliantly for years.

If every visitor to your website is seeing the same content, it’s time to think about how to personalize it. You can do that using cookies that make recommendations based on a user’s previous activity on your site. Or, you can allow users to choose the type of content that they want to see. Either way, the goal is to make every customer feel that you’re speaking directly to them.

Incidentally, the same trend should be applied to email marketing. Sending emails that are triggered by a customer’s behavior is three times more effective than sending batch emails – something to keep in mind in the new year.

3: Influencer Marketing

Ad blocking has been a challenge for marketers for years now, but the recent stats show that it’s now impacting mobile advertising as well as desktop. What can you do to get around it?

I’ve written about influencer marketing before, but it really has proven to be one of the best ways to engage with potential customers without needing to worry about ad blockers. It uses influential social media accounts that appeal to your audience.

It can take a bit of trial and error to find the right influencers but once you do, influencer marketing can be a cost-effective way of attracting new customers to your business.

4: Video Marketing

If you’re not making marketing videos to share with your audience, it’s time to stop pretending that video is too expensive (or too technical) to be worth your while. Research shows that businesses who use video marketing grow 49% faster than businesses that don’t. How can you ignore that?

The good news is that video doesn’t need to be expensive and you don’t need to be Spike Lee to make a terrific marketing video that will attract new customers. Even a simple Facebook Live session where you take questions from your followers can help you grow your business.

5: Social Messaging Apps

Did you know that every month, businesses exchange 2 billion (that’s with a B!) Facebook Messenger apps with their customers? That’s not just a trend – it’s a tsunami.

Using social messaging tools like Messenger or WhatsApp can help you connect with customers on a personal level. And – hearkening back to the first trend I mentioned – artificial intelligence can help you do it.

Creating a chatbot for Messenger or any other app is a relatively easy (and affordable) thing to do. A lot of companies use chatbots to suggest products or answer simple questions. That means that using messenger apps is an extremely effective way to connect with your existing audience and attract new potential buyers for your products and services.

6: Voice Search – smart speaker

If you’ve said “Okay Google” or asked Siri, Alexa, or Cortana to find something for you online, then you know that voice search is here to stay. In fact, researchers estimate that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020 – and that means that it’s time to optimize your web content for voice search now.

You can start by using the language of voice search – optimizing for the terminology that your audience is most likely to use. You may also want to start thinking about audio-only ads. It’s probable that you’ll start hearing sponsored content on Alexa before long. This is an opportunity for you to beat out your competitors who may be lagging in this area.

7: Social Media Stories

If you’ve logged onto any social media account lately, you’ve probably noticed something: stories. Facebook may prompt you to add to your story, and other platforms – including YouTube – have jumped on the trend.

A social media story is temporary content that can be used to trigger your customers’ FOMO (that’s fear of missing out.) It’s ideal for seasonal promotions and deals, and it can be a great way to engage your audience. If you’re not already using social media stories to connect with your customers, 2019 is the year to start.

marketing trends typewriter storytelling