The 5 Simple Marketing Metrics You Should Know

The 5 Simple Marketing Metrics You Should Know

When you’re running a business, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with everything you need to do. A lot of business owners look at marketing as an afterthought. They’re focusing on other things.

That attitude’s a common one – but it’s not a great idea to ignore marketing. And while you might not have a ton of time to spend on marketing, there are a few basic marketing metrics that you should have at your fingertips all the time. In fact, not knowing them can negatively affect your business’s profitability over time.

#1: The Size and Demographics of Your Audience

Your audience, whether they’re subscribed to your email list or following you on social media, is the pool from which you’ll attract most of your new customers. It’s also representative of the people who’re most likely to buy from you even if they’re not in your audience now.

There’s no denying those things are important. You should always know three things about your audience:

  • The number of people in your audience
  • Where they are
  • What they have in common with one another

Let’s look at each question in turn. The number of people in your audience is probably the easiest thing to track, but you’ll need to check multiple locations regularly. For example, you can check:

  • Your blog metrics to see how many readers you have, on average
  • Your social media following on various sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram)
  • Your email and text subscriber lists

Getting a handle on the numbers will also help you understand where your audience is. You may notice that you have far more followers on Facebook than on Instagram.

The final thing you’ll need to do is to analyze your audience. On Facebook, for example, you can view age, gender, and geographical breakdowns of your audience. You can also see what interests they have in common. Having this data at your fingertips can help you build lookalike audiences and do a good job of creating content that your audience will enjoy.

Online MARKETING METRICS

#2: Your Online Review Status

Online reviews are important to every business. Research shows that 86% of all consumers read online reviews, and that 89% read company responses to reviews. Those aren’t numbers you should ignore.

To get a handle on your online reviews, you’ll need to:

  • Search for your company listings on review sites such as Google My Business, Yelp, and Angie’s List, and claim them.
  • Update your listings to accurately reflect your current address, phone number, business hours, and prices.
  • Set up a system for responding to all reviews, especially negative ones, in a constructive and professional way.
  • Find ways to encourage your customers to leave reviews for your business.

Another related “must” is to set up alerts, so you get notified when there’s a new review of your business. You’ll need to respond quickly to show existing and potential customers that you care about them and their experiences.

#3: Your Google Ranking

The third marketing metric you need to know – and it’s a hugely important one – is your website’s Google ranking. You’ll need to conduct regular Google searches for your most important keywords and keep track of how you’re doing.

Your ranking for one page may be high while another page is down on the second (or third, or tenth) page of Google results. If that’s the case, you’ll need to improve your SEO and increase your visibility to improve your ranking.

Why does this matter? Well, research shows that the first result on Google’s SERP for any keyword grabs about 30% of clicks. The second and third positions can get as much as 10%, but after that the fall-off is precipitous. You’ll be lucky to grab 2% of the traffic.

The good news is that focusing on local SEO and voice search can help you improve your ranking – but you must know where you are now before you can attack the problem and rise in the ranks.

#4: Ad Performance

Whether you’re running just a few ads or juggling dozens of marketing campaigns, it’s necessary to track the performance of each ad. It’s the only way to know whether your marketing mix is right – and whether your money is going down the drain.

Let’s use Facebook as an example. Facebook provides tons of insights for businesses. You can see how many people your ads are reaching, get an overview of their demographics, and even track the days (and times of day) when your posts get the most engagement.

If you prefer an all-in-one solution that will allow you to track your performance on all social media accounts, you can use UTM tags to track them with Google Analytics. Or, if you prefer, you can use a social media tracking tool.

#5: ROI by Campaign

ROI Campaign dollar bill

The final metric you should track is your Return on Investment, or ROI, for each marketing campaign. In case you don’t know, ROI is calculated as a percentage using a simple formula. Here’s how it works:

  • Calculate your total revenue from the campaign
  • Calculate the total costs associated with the campaign
  • Subtract the costs from the revenue to calculate your profit
  • Divide your profit by the cost to calculate your ROI

For example, say you spent $200 on an email marketing campaign. Some of that money might be from hiring a writer to craft the emails and the rest might be the associated costs from your email provider.

Email marketing has a high ROI (4400%, to be exact). Let’s say that your revenue from this campaign was $9,000. That would mean the calculation would be:

$9,000 revenue – $200 cost = $8,800 profit, and $8,800 profit/$200 cost = 4400% ROI
ROI calculations will help you identify the marketing campaigns that are earning you the most revenue. You can use that information to:

  • Rethink your marketing mix
  • Split-test and improve underperforming campaigns and ads
  • Put more money into the marketing tactics that are most impactful

You don’t need to be a marketing guru to run a successful business. You do need to be aware of these 5 key marketing metrics – and know how to use them to attract new customers and increase your profits.

How to Cash in with Snapchat (Local Business Edition)

How to Cash in with Snapchat (Local Business Edition)

Snapchat is just for teens, right?

Wrong!

While Snapchat isn’t as big as Instagram or Facebook, it’s still a huge social media site with millions of users. And if your target audience includes Millennials, then you can’t afford to ignore Snapchat.

The trick, of course, is knowing if Snapchat is right for your business – and if it is, how you should be using it in your marketing.

snapchat

What these numbers should tell you is that Snapchat is a huge, untapped source for marketing. You probably won’t reach as wide a cross-section of your target audience as you might on Facebook, but you’ll have less marketing competition – and a better chance of grabbing their attention.

Create a Snapchat Business Account

Ready to use Snapchat for marketing. You’ll need to start by setting up a Snapchat business account. The process is very easy. 

  • You’ll be prompted to enter your:
  • First name and last name
  • User name (this should be your business name or brand name)
  • A password
  • Your phone number
  • Your birth date

Once your account is set up, you can attract followers, post content, and create marketing campaigns to help you achieve your goals.

Grow Your Audience

Attracting new followers on Snapchat isn’t difficult but you’ll need to do a bit of work. The first and easiest things you can do are:

  • Add a Snapchat follow icon to your website
  • Include your Snapchat ID and a follow link in your marketing emails and texts
  • Post about your new Snapchat account on your other social media accounts

After you do that, you can also use some in-app tools to attract new followers. Snapchat allows users to send Snapcodes to users. You can also send ‘Add Me URLs’ to the people in your target audience.

We’ll talk about paid advertising a little later in this article.

Create Snapchat Stories

Snapshot Stories are Snaps that are meant to be viewed sequentially. Unlike stand-alone Snaps, which disappear almost immediately, Snapshot Stories live on the site for 24 hours before vanishing. They’re an ideal way to connect with your audience.

You should make sure to give your Snapchat Story a compelling narrative arc. Some of the Snapchat Stories I’ve seen businesses use include:

  • Behind the scenes footage or tours
  • Expert tips
  • Fun facts
  • Product demos
  • Teasers
  • Testimonials
  • Live events
  • Special offers and coupons

When you create your Snapchat Story, remember that it should be fun. Make ample use of Snapchat’s stickers, text, and doodles. You should create your Snapchat Story with a specific marketing goal in mind and then have someone review it before you post it. Your goal is to create something entertaining and effective.

All the content you share on Snapchat should meet the site’s technical specifications. They are:

  • File size should be a maximum of 5MB for images and 32MB for videos
  • Image files should be in .jpg or .png format
  • Video files should be in .mp4 or .mov format and H.254 encoded
  • Full screen canvases should have 1080 x 1920 pixels and a 9:16 aspect ratio

Adhering to these specs will ensure that your content is high quality – something that Snapchat’s sophisticated users will appreciate.

snapchat

You can find a massive list of Snapchat hacks here.

Track and Refine Your Results

Like other social media platforms, Snapchat has some useful analytics that you can draw on when you pay for advertising. You can use them to track:

  • Clicks to your website
  • Clicks to your app
  • Website conversions
  • Catalog sales
  • Engagement
  • Video views
  • Lead generation

You can find complete details about Snapchat ads and policies by clicking here.

Once you’ve started using Snapchat for Business, you should keep an eye on the above results. You can use them to refine your Snapshot marketing strategy. You may notice that your video Snaps are getting far more engagement than your other content and adjust your marketing budget accordingly.

Marketing on Snapchat can give you a leg up on your competitors…

Remember, only a little over a quarter of businesses in the United States are using Snapchat. If your competitors aren’t – and they probably aren’t – then you can get access to a huge audience of Millennials and grab them as customers before your competitors know what hit them!
Marketing Opportunities on Instagram

Marketing Opportunities on Instagram

What’s Instagram to you?

If your response is something like “a platform to share selfies” or “something my kids use,” then guess what? You’re missing some exciting marketing opportunities for your business.

The truth is that more small businesses using Instagram for marketing than ever before. And the best part? It’s easier to get started than you’d think.

All you need is a mobile phone and a strategy – and we can help with the strategy part.

You may not know that Instagram has some very cool features that local businesses can use to connect with their existing customers and attract new ones. Here’s what you need to know.

Instagram Has Millions of Users Insert Millions of people

Instagram isn’t as big as Facebook – but so what? As of 2018, there were more than 77 million active Instagram users in the United States, and one billion users worldwide.

That’s a lot of potential customers.

And while you might be tempted to dismiss Instagram as being too young for your target audience, you should know that 35% of all adults in the United States have an Instagram account. Do you really want to ignore more than a third of all adults?

Of course, there are some businesses that are better suited to Instagram marketing than others. Service providers may not find the same value in Instagram as businesses that sell photographable products. But, if you have a product that people may want to buy online, then it’s worth it to give Instagram marketing a try.

Shoppable Posts

In the past, the only way to sell products on Instagram was to include a link in your bio. Understandably, online retailers weren’t thrilled with that option. It required the user to click on a profile pic to be redirected to the bio, and then click again to be redirected to a sales page. Not ideal.

Now, that’s all changed. Instagram has recently added a Shoppable Posts option that allows small business to link directly to a sales page from a post. In other words, if you take a picture of one of your products, you can post it to Instagram and include a direct link to the product on your website.

Big change, right?

Here’s what you need to know to get going with Shoppable Posts.
First, as of the time I’m writing this, Shoppable Posts are only applicable to organic posts. That means you can’t promote a Shoppable Post. To get more traffic on your posts, you’ll need to make judicious use of hashtags to make sure that potential customers can find your content.

You’ll need to take some important steps before you can take advantage of Shoppable Posts. Here they are:

Instagram
  1. First, create an Instagram business profile if you haven’t already done so.
  2. Read both Instagram’s merchant agreement and their commerce policy to make sure that you understand them. You’ll need to stay in compliance at all times.
  3. Create a Facebook product catalog using one of the following:
  • Your Facebook business page
  • Your Facebook business manager account
  • Your Shopify account
  • Your BigCommerce account

If your product has country or age restrictions, you won’t be able to sell on Instagram. Of course, that might change in the future, but as of today it’s not possible.

Once you’ve taken these steps, Instagram will review your account and if you meet them, you’ll be given access to Instagram Shopping features. You can expect the review to take several days, but in some cases it can take longer if your account requires additional review.

When you’re approved, you’ll receive a notification. At that time, you’ll be able to activate product tagging in your account settings.

Instagram

Tips for Using Shoppable Posts

One of my favorite things about Shoppable Posts is that you can tag multiple products on each post. Here’s how it works.

On an individual photograph, you can tag up to five products. To do it, simply click on the product you want to tag. You’ll get a search box where you’ll need to enter the name of the product you want to tag. (The menu is linked to your Facebook product catalog.)

Once you’ve tagged all of your products, your post will be updated. People who view your photograph will see a link with the name of the product. When they click on it, they’ll be taken to your sales page where they can buy the product directly from you.
Even better, you can tag up to 20 products in a carousel. If you’ve got a new line of products that you want to feature, you can tag a bunch of them in one carousel.

One of the most important things you’ll need to do when you create a Shoppable Post is to choose the right hashtags. You can add up to 30 to each post. Make sure to include:

  • Your brand name
  • The name of the product
  • The category of the product
  • Key uses of the product
  • Key benefits of the product

It may require some trial and error to get it right. Adding new hashtags may help if your post isn’t getting the amount of traffic you expect.

The final thing you need to know is that once you have posted nine Shoppable Posts, you’ll get a shopping icon that will show up on your bio. Your products will also be added to the Instagram Store, where users who are interested in shopping can view your products along with others that are available on Instagram.

As you can see, Shoppable Posts are easy to create once you go through the initial sign-up process. They’re a simple way to attract new customers.

Instagram
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.

How to Create a Killer Facebook Video Ad

How to Create a Killer Facebook Video Ad

Not using Facebook video for advertising?

I’m not going to beat around the bush. You’re making a mistake. In fact, I think Facebook video marketing may be the single best way to increase conversions and sales for your business.

That’s a bold statement, but I can back it up. People watch a huge amount of video on Facebook:

Facebook Video Ad

See what I mean? Just a few years ago, video marketing on Facebook was seen as cutting edge. Now, it’s the norm. If you’re not doing it, you are losing customers to your competitors. It’s just that simple.

How to Capture Your Audience with Video Advertising on Facebook

So, you know you need to be using video to appeal to your audience. What you may not know is that there are some specific qualities your video most have to work on Facebook. Here are some of the things your video should do if you want your campaign to be successful.

Grab the Viewer’s Attention Quickly

A recent Nielsen survey found that as much as 70% of an advertising video’s impact can be felt in the first 10 seconds. That means you’ve got only a limited time to grab your audience’s attention.

Video ads on Facebook play automatically in the feed – we’ll talk more about that later. That means that you have a unique opportunity to grab a viewer’s attention as they scroll past.

The key is to use powerful visuals right at the beginning of your video. You’ll need something that is visually engaging, surprising, and gets your point across quickly.

One example we like comes from Purple Mattress. This video features two Sumo wrestlers on top of a Purple mattress and it’s designed to demonstrate the strength of the mattress pad.

When you watch it, you’ll notice that the Sumo wrestlers appear at about 9 seconds. I think it might have been even more effective if they’d started with the Sumo wrestlers and then cut to the announcer. But as it is, the colorful video with its surprising visuals captured viewers’ attention.

To make the most of your Facebook marketing video, think of a strong visual story that demonstrates the uniqueness of your product. Then, introduce the story at the beginning of the video, ideally within the first 5 seconds.

Allow Viewers to Watch without Sound

The next thing your video must do is work without sound. Facebook videos in the feed play automatically, but viewers must opt to use sound. You can (and should) make it clear that they can click for sound, but your video should make its point even if a viewer doesn’t do that.

There are, of course, several ways that you can get by without sound:

  1. Create a video that’s all about visuals and doesn’t require any sound at all.
  2. Use bold titles and graphics on the screen.
  3. Include subtitles in your video.
  4. Create an animated video to tell your story.
  5. Add a “tap for sound” reminder on the screen.

Some people may be scrolling Facebook in a place where playing the sound on your video is not an option. The reason you want to make your video compelling without sound is to capture their attention.

Here’s an example we like from the website Tastemade, which features recipes, cooking advice, travel videos, and more. They created their Tiny Kitchen series to capture attention on Facebook – and they did it without any sound.

Here’s one video they created. It shows a human chef preparing food in a tiny kitchen. The only sound is incidental. With the hands there for scale, it grabs attention immediately and kept viewers watching all 13 minutes of the demo – showing that a Facebook video doesn’t need to be short to be compelling.

This was a Facebook Live video that grabbed more than 3.8 million view and was shared more than 17,000 times. Why? Because its surprising content and visually compelling style made people stop and pay attention.

Tell a Story

There’s plenty of evidence to show that stories are an effective form of marketing. Stories engage our brains by triggering an emotional response. An effective advertising story may be moving or humorous. It can be long or short.

One of the most effective things you can do is to find ways to tell a story that supports your brand’s personality and message. You don’t necessarily need a lot of time to do that, but you do need imagination.

Here’s an example I like from the company MeUndies. They claim to sell the most comfortable underwear in the world, but their story is not just about comfort. On their website, they say, “Finding underwear that makes you feel good is an easy way to boost your mood and your confidence.”

How do they get that across in a video? Check out this short video – it’s only 21 seconds long – that features a man wearing the company’s glow-in-the-dark Star Wars briefs to act out his fantasy of being Darth Vader:

This video gets is message across quickly. It uses a pop culture reference to one of the most successful film franchises of all time with a dash of humor as the man in the video realizes that his towel looks like Darth Vader’s helmet.

MeUndie’s Facebook video campaigns ultimately reached more than 1.4 million viewers and garnered them a 97% increase in incremental purchases.

capturing facebook audience
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