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Digital marketing trends to follow in 2018

Digital marketing trends to follow in 2018

At the beginning of the year, if you notice a drop in visits and sales on your website, it may be time for you to review your digital marketing strategy by inspiring you in particular new trends 2018!

Do you see a drop in visits and sales on your website? And if it was time to review your digital marketing strategy by taking inspiration from the new trends 2018? To continue to increase your strategy in order to meet the expectations of your customers and consumers, here are the digital marketing tools and best practices to follow this year and to adapt to your field of activity.

1 – Influence marketing

Influencer marketing that works through ‘influencers’ (bloggers, public figures …) allows brands to deliver powerful messages on social networks like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many others. Consumers of social networks indeed pay greater attention and more credit to the publication of products or services by an influencer than through Social Ads.

To launch a good campaign of influence, it is then necessary to mobilize the good influencers, to define your objectives, your type of visibility and image, as well as the type of adequate partnership (test of video product, gifts, sponsored articles, contests …).

2 – The GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force on May 25th in the whole of the European Union, is a golden opportunity for companies and their marketing managers to strengthen their customer relationship, gain more confidence from consumers and thus gaining ground on their competitors.

How? By creating, in particular, complete transparency in data collection, reinforced protection of these as well as a real experience when they are shared. Do not be afraid of GDPR, but make it a marketing opportunity!

3 – The audio content

If brands have adapted their marketing strategy and content to social networks for several years to capture the attention of thousands of users of these tools, they must continue to adapt their content to the trends that are happening on the networks…

In this 2018 year, it is difficult to do without audio and video content when we see the impressive growth that we had the ‘stories’ and more generally the video on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, but also Youtube. The public appreciates its content and brands must also create their stories, fun content, proximity and adapted to the language of consumers. Beware, however, algorithms favor the publication’s commitment and the video content just as much as possible turns a passive reader into an active reader.

4 – Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the cutting-edge technology of the moment for marketing professionals. AI is becoming more accessible in 2018 and many digital marketing players anticipate an increase in the use of AI by more than 50% by 2020.

AI is a tool that can be part of an integrable digital marketing strategy, for example, an engagement platform. It personalizes messages and adds relevance to content sent to consumers. It also addresses real-time needs and determines the best channel for a customer experience that is ten times more powerful than statistics.

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5 Questions to ask before creating a new website

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Why have a website?

Creating a website for your business is a great idea. Not having one at the moment is to take the risk of losing a large share of the market. Because the Web is now a very powerful prospecting site. Think about it! What do you do when you want to buy a product or use a service? You start by searching on Google or another search engine. Well! Know that your customers and your prospects are doing the same. Not being visible on the Internet is, therefore, depriving a very interesting clientele.

Web Design Agency: A major asset

A website is not done in a day. This is a job that takes time, but also skills. Contrary to what some platforms suggest, creating a free and easy website is not necessarily a good idea. Because of the mere fact of owning one is no longer exceptional: many companies have a website. The big challenge is to create one with real goals and a strategy to achieve them.

Applying to a web design agency is, therefore, a real asset for companies wishing to develop a good website, which will allow them to distinguish themselves from their competitors and to be important on the Internet. Thanks to Great Northern Marketing, you can enjoy the benefit from the expertise of our Web professionals who will realize for you an effective communication and marketing strategy.

Website creation: The 5 questions to ask

Creating a website is not an innocuous gesture for companies. It requires careful thought, even before it starts. To help you, GNM Web Design agency has decided to take up 5 questions that you must ask before starting your project.

1) What are the goals of your website?

For an Internet site to be effective, the first thing to do is to determine its role, that is to say, the objective (s) it pursues. Based on these objectives, you will then create an adapted and measured communication and marketing strategy that will allow you to reach them easily.

What goals can be attributed to a website? They are many and varied and can, in some cases, be combined.

  • Selling your products and services online
  • Increase your brand awareness
  • Present my company and my products/services
  • Acquire new customers
  • Build customer loyalty

For each of these objectives, a specific strategy must be put in place. For example, if you want to retain your customers, you can create a blog on which you regularly publish relevant tips that will make them want to come back regularly to read new ones. Or you can set up a personal account system that allows customers to identify themselves to follow an order or have benefits.

2) What are the important keywords for your business industry?

In order for your website to be visible, it must be well positioned in search engine results like Google, Bing or Yahoo. And for that, two solutions, usually worked together, are available to you: you can optimize your site with SEO and create SEA campaigns (Google Ads).

For both, it is necessary to determine keywords relevant to your industry. What is it about? A keyword (or a key phrase) is a set of words typed by a user in the search bar of Google, Yahoo, Bing … It allows the user to navigate among thousands and thousands of internet sites that exist on the Web and thus obtain the most relevant answer for its query. It also allows search engines to understand the content of a site and, thus, to reference it when someone searches on the subject.

But how to determine the useful keywords for your website?

You have to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and determine what they could type in the Google search bar to find your services or products.
There are tools created specifically to do this work, some of them are free, others are paying (examples: Moz, Keyword explore, Google Ads …).

3) How does the competition work?

Another important point is to follow the level of competitors on the Web. Are they real competitors, hard to beat? Or, on the contrary, going past them will not be so complicated? These are questions you need to ask yourself. The interest of a web design agency is that it can achieve for you a competitive study. The objective is to determine the best and worst practices of your competitors and ways to distinguish yourself from them.

It is therefore important, even if you use a web design agency, to think about the competitors of your website yourself. Be careful, however, not to limit yourself to the competitors you know. The best referenced on important keywords are not always the ones we think about in the first place. Broadening your competitive analysis is therefore essential: you must also find out about companies that you do not know but which are well referenced on the keywords that interest you because they are also part of those you have to beat.

4) What budget do you want to spend on your website?

By going through a website agency, you will necessarily have to pay a certain amount for your website. One of the very first questions you have to ask yourself is about the budget: how much are you willing to pay to have a good website? The price of a website depends on many different data: the type of website it is about (e-commerce, showcase site …), the number of pages, the writing or not of the website content, hosting or not the site, the chosen features, etc.

And what about price differences between agencies? How is it that some web agencies request a larger budget than others to do the same job? If it happens sometimes that the price is indeed excessive, it may also be that it is a question of quality. There are agencies that are lowering their prices, but they are also less efficient. While others are more expensive but get better results, sometimes simply because they spend more time on the project than the less expensive ones that must still be profitable.

5) Are you ready to get involved in the project?

Creating a website, even though a web agency, takes time and asks for your inputs and some of your staff. Why? Because there will be meetings and exchanges of emails, that you will have to devote time to write or re-read the contents of the site, to check if you like the design of the site … And the implication does not stop only in the project. Digital transformation inevitably leads to changes within your company. Even when your website is online, we must continue to work on it:

It must be updated because a website with outdated information does not inspire trust and therefore cannot be effective. You have to answer the leads, the orders … that the website provides you so that the SEO of your website remains optimal, it must be constantly reviewed: it is necessary that your home page moves regularly, hence the interest of having a blog whose latest news can be found on the home page; if you have a blog, you have to keep it with short and long articles at a steady pace; depending on the competitors, you must also change your own pages a bit to stay on top; etc.
All of this requires the implementation of an internal strategy, which you must keep to ensure that your website meets the objectives you had previously set.

Conclusion

If your company wants to be as efficient as possible, neglecting the Web is a serious mistake. The Internet is now a great source for prospecting and if you don’t have a website is to risk not touching a large part of your target audience. Not only do you need to own a website but you must also make it effective. It must, therefore, fulfill specific objectives and follow a long-thought-out strategy to achieve them.

However, a website remains an investment in time and money. Before creating or using a web design company, you must ask yourself different questions that will allow you to see more clearly in your project.

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Content creation a crucial key for digital marketing?

This has not escaped you, traditional marketing is becoming a topic of digital marketing news and the marketing trend to be essentially digital is leading to new practices for companies looking to grow their business.
In my recent article, I illustrated the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing, I explained what are the new practices to implement to communicate well on the Internet. Among these practices, emerges the need for companies to become their own media. This state of affairs requires companies to produce their content in order to feed the various digital media networks (blog, website, YouTube, Instagram, etc.).

Finally, you will understand that if these contents must be produced by the companies, they can not be produced in a disorganized way or they will blur the tracks for their customers. The competition and noise on social networks force companies to develop a digital marketing strategy that targets its audience.

Some areas in which your content creation is crucial

SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

In other words, optimizing your website on the Google search engine organic results. Instead of thinking about the first page for the homepage of your site, rather think that it is the opportunity to offer great quality content (especially around your products & services) to users who are looking for a solution.

Let’s look at how Google search results are displayed. When you enter a question in google search bar, you will get results that Google finds on the question entered and displays pages with the most relevant that it has found to answer the question and showcase it. The results that Google offers on the first result page are based on multiple criteria. First, Google uses the relevance, popularity, and authority of the publishing source as pillars of the quality of ‘high value’ content.
You’ll easily understand how important it is for your business to offer high-potential content to attract prospects in search of a solution. Finally, rather than a sales pitch, demonstrating your expertise is the most direct way to persuade a prospect to become a customer, isn’t it?

SEA (Search Engine Advertising):

A must in this category is Google AdWords (very recently renamed Google Ads). Here again, the content is very important. Google gives a mark of quality to the keywords you buy. Including, this quality score is calculated based on the keyword, related ads, and landing page. This grade of quality is very important because it allows you to be more relevant at low cost.

Once again, nothing really good, but it means that content and quality are at the center of the debate. A high-quality landing page, on which a prospect is landed, is vital to convert an intention (search for a solution by a user) into business, with the help of an offer (value proposition).

Social networks: Is it still necessary to specify?

Without social media, your visibility will be reduced. They are floods and without a fine strategy of editorial choices (images, semantics, keywords, etc.) and audience targeting, you will certainly encounter the greatest difficulties in organizing a community of loyal fans around your brand.
Again, a defined content creation strategy to reach your audience is crucial. It allows bringing to your community elements of knowledge around your products & services which directs them correctly towards the consideration of your solutions.
Think about the format of your images, your ads to bring consistency between all the content elements around your brand.

Email marketing:

If the bulk of sending unsolicited emails is completely discouraged because of its very bad reputation generator, email marketing remains a very effective channel when it is used wisely. Whether it is a newsletter or transactional emails (online purchases, reservations, interaction with online services, etc.), the quality of content creation is also crucial. Indeed, given the number of newsletters to which we are all subscribed in order to make a substantial watch on our niche of activity, our attention will naturally be on ‘high added value’ content. It is, of course, your content that will allow your customers to understand your offer and your expertise. Similarly, in transactional emails, opportunities to cross-sell, for example, are important. That’s why your business strategy coupled with an effective content strategy (for comparison, a classic marketing think catalog, product list, advertising, print, etc.) will allow you to turn your prospects into customers.

In Conclusion

I would say that more than ever, thinking about your brand and value proposition will help you define a content creation strategy for your online media. This properly formatted content for digital media is the key to successful digital marketing. It is very important, in my opinion, to define this content creation strategy even before using tools. The reason is that they just risk complicating your communication processes without giving you the opportunity to provide your clients with quality information and therefore, give them the benefit of your products and services.

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