If one thing is always true in business, it’s that the market is constantly in flux. Technologies and strategies that are cutting-edge one day may be behind the times the next, and businesses must adapt to survive. This is particularly true of the Internet, where both new technologies and changing consumer trends are felt instantly and profoundly. Companies that engage in online marketing thus need to update their strategies on a regular basis. Through the following methods, you can stay ahead of the changing online landscape and continue to market your company effectively:
1. Accentuate Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing, or marketing that involves rewarding publishers for bringing customers to your site, remains highly popular and effective. But the specific strategies you must use for it are changing. In particular, videos are becoming increasingly important; you must thus find a publisher that knows how to make effective marketing videos. A great option is using influencer marketing on YouTube. Work with influencers that have like-minded subscribers and offer the influencer an incentive for getting people to your site and converting.
2. Navigate the Native
Compared to banner ads and other direct forms of marketing, native advertising is becoming much more important. This strategy involves promoting products through traditional types of content, such as articles and videos that are not ostensibly advertorial.
3. Cultivate Context
Contextual ads are ads that relate directly to the pages they’re placed on. Already important, they have only become more critical to online marketing in the last few years.
4. Market on Mobile
In the last few years, consumers have conducted more than 60 percent of their searches through mobile devices. This makes it essential for marketers to cater to mobile searches, notably by creating mobile-friendly ads and updating their SEO to reflect the different word choices consumers make on mobile.
5. Expand PPC Efforts
At present, Google is one of the dominant platforms for pay per click advertising, but other platforms are becoming more important. Thus when designing PPC ads, find social media marketing companies that know how to work on multiple networks.
6. Play Down Popups
Google Chrome, Facebook, the Washington Post, and other organizations are working to block pop up ads on their sites and search engines. You should thus rely less on this type of advertising and start leaning towards other ads that follow the Google’s new ad blocking rules.
7. Specialize in Social Media
Social media is only growing more important in the modern business landscape. You must thus make social media marketing services central to your overall marketing strategy. This means going beyond merely creating social media ads, and actively posting on major platforms and engaging with your followers. Make sure to work with a social media marketing agency that can build a unique brand for you across multiple platforms.
8. Shore Up SEO
SEO is both growing and evolving, and your company must keep up. Make sure to adapt to the growth of voice search. Customers use different vocabulary when searching with their voices than when typing, and your SEO strategy must reflect that.
9. Highlight with Hyperlinks
When publishing content online, include relevant hyperlinks to other pages on your website, as well as links to other websites that relate to yours. This will raise your SEO while helping customers learn more about your products and services.
10. Use Unicast
As of 2018, YouTube has 1.3 billion users. To tap into this traffic, create unicast ads, or ads that play at the beginning of each video.
Takeaways
To succeed in online marketing, your company must:
- Adapt to the rise of mobile and voice search
- Market on multiple platforms
- Combine video, written, and other forms of content
- Move away from banner and popup ads and toward unicast, native, and contextual ones
- Find affiliate marketers with video experience
- Include relevant hyperlinks in your content
For more information on marketing your company effectively online, contact Ballantine today.
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
