Eight Digital Tactics to Optimize Your Product Marketing Strategy
Marketing is continuously evolving and even though some tactics will always be labelled as old time classics, there are also some pioneering trends that come to shake up what we thought we knew which in the end can make a difference in your digital strategy.
A digital strategy is the blueprint of how you plan on executing your online tactics.
In this article, I will outline eight of the best practices and emerging trends that you should no longer ignore if you are eager to shape a promising digital strategy.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Buying new visitors may work for some time, but let’s not kid ourselves, no-one wants to keep throwing a big chunk of their revenue into continuously buying users. Attracting new visitors to your site may seem like an endless battle if you do not consider investing in SEO. Without visitors, you cannot be serious about scaling a business.
Applying SEO properly is basically ensuring search engines discover you boosting your visibility higher on the page, so that next time someone searches a need, you are the first thing popping right in front of them. Pretty awesome right?
Sure, SEO can be proven to be arduous, so either hire an expert or consider outsourcing this to a company that can do it for you.
2. Unique Content is Queen
Another practice that has a direct impact on SEO is unique content. In fact, 72% of marketeers claim relevant content is their most compelling SEO tactic, regardless of its nature as it can span from a blog post, to an article, or a webinar.
What is interesting to consider is 47% of buyers have viewed 3–5 pieces of content, before going ahead and engaging with a sales representative.
Content is bridging the gap between the influential trend and the product/service that is addressing the customer’s need.
For content to be valuable, it has to fulfill certain criteria, such as always assuring it is indeed relevant to the audience you are targeting, stimulating, informative, to the point, as well as reliable. It also has to be mobile-enabled whether we refer to email campaigns, websites or landing pages since a recent study showed that 69% of people allocate their digital media time to their smartphones.
3. Master your Audience
Knowing who you are targeting supports you in trimming the fat and effectively reaching your audience, eliminating any needless spending along the way. Sounds rather straightforward right? Well, in today’s world, where you are battling for a distracted audience, you cannot imagine how many companies struggle to get this right.
A quick example of using a targeted strategy, borrowed from the Belo Media Group, would be excluding Snapchat from your strategy, because your business caters to adults over the age of 50, instead focusing on email or Facebook.
4. Responsive Web Design
Ethan Marcotte was urging designers and developers in 2010 to practice Responsive Web Design (RWD), as he believed this would help them in future-proofing their work.
We can make our designs more adaptive to the media that renders them and treat them as facets of the same experience
This was all the buzz 9 years ago, but you would expect it to be standard practice now. Unfortunately, not really. As a product manager I still witness product owners feeling proud when presenting new features, saying to others “… and it works on mobile, woohoo.”
RWD in essence has the design and development responding to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation.
Dropbox with its fluid grid and flexible visuals, Shopify and Slack with their call-to-action buttons spanning the entire column on tablets and mobile phones, are just three of many websites that have done a great job in achieving responsive web design.
5. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is another train you do not want to miss. Techgrabyte refers to AI as the most promising opportunity for companies, industries, and nations over the next few decades. AI is expected to increase global GDP by up to 14% between now and 2030.
Gartner analysts anticipate that by 2020, AI technologies will be omnipresent in almost every new software product that is developed — a prophecy that Harvard Business Review seconded earlier this year.
We can already see AI knocking on our door in email personalization, product recommendations, e-commerce transactions, customer service chatbots as well as content creation.
6. Chatbots
It comes as no surprise that this AI-based technology is expected to power 85% of customer service by 2020 whereas by 2022 chatbots will help businesses save over $8 billion per annum.
63% of respondents prefer messaging an online chatbot to communicate with a business or brand as it encompasses 24-hour service, instant responses to inquiries and answers to simple questions.
Some brands are already making use of the chatbot technology, include Uber, whose chatbot communicates with customers, making it easy for them to hire cars via their mobile app, Facebook Messenger, Google Maps and Slack.
7. Personalization
I bet it is not the first time you read that if you wish to stand out, you need to personalize your marketing with tailored content, products, emails, etc.. With 80% claiming they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences, it is not the last time you are going to come across it either.
Having access to data like purchase history, consumer behavior and links clicked, as well as sophisticated software to implement campaigns, customized content should not be a difficult challenge to master.
Over 78% of B2B buyers expect companies to personalize interactions based on information from their online activities and 63% of consumers are highly annoyed with generic advertising blasts.
Prime examples when it comes to personalization applied well include Coca Cola with its famous “Share a Coke” campaign, in an effort to reach out to millennials by adding the most popular first names to bottles of Coke, Spotify with their discover weekly feature, Amazon with its product curation and recommendation algorithm, as well as Netflix and their endless effort to bring the right titles in front of the users.
Knowing that engaging customers by offering them a personalized experience can build a long lasting relationship that would encourage repeat usage, why would you risk waiting?
8. Embrace Video Marketing
If I were to tell you that the world reportedly watches 1 billion hours of YouTube social video per day, I am sure you would reconsider your stance towards video marketing.
In the digital era, we are on the look out for connection and actual engagement, and we consider it a must have to easily share content across multiple platforms.
Consumers are 64–85% more likely to purchase a product or service that has video representation.
Video marketing is a win-win for both consumer and marketer, as on the one hand it’s easy to digest, entertaining and engaging, and on the other hand it potentially has a huge return on investment (ROI) through many channels. Needless to mention that it is very accessible to pretty much anyone with Internet access.
As once reported by Google in 2016, almost 50% of internet users look for related product or service videos before visiting a store. Embedding a video thumbnail in the search results can lead to a significant search traffic boost, increasing your organic traffic by 157%.
Being mindful and dedicated towards your digital strategy, keeps you ahead in the game. Now that you are exposed to eight of the best practices and emerging trends, which one are you investing in first?
