Here are the best tips and newest digital marketing trends from the industry’s top experts.

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or an established brand, we’ve rounded up some of the best digital marketing tips and trends that will help make your business stand out in these uncertain times. 

Podcasting: 

“One of the hottest trends the past month or three is podcasting/audio branding. Podcasting listenership grew 33% in March (last month) alone. COVID-19 quarantine/isolation was a key factor, but the momentum has been building for years and I see it as an affordable way for SMBs to generate awareness in their marketplace affordably in a time of tight budgets and uncertainty.”

Kent Lewis, President & Founder, Anvil https://www.anvilmediainc.com/

Blogging: 

“As a small business owner, I have limited time and resources to put towards my blog, so I focus on making every post count. I use keyword research tools like Long Tail Pro and Ahrefs to find keywords that my site can rank for without extra promotion (such as link building, which is time consuming). Then, I aim to make each post the most comprehensive resource there is on a given topic: Some of my posts are 3000+ words and incorporate related keywords and themes, helping them rank for additional relevant search phrases. I used to write about whatever I felt like without giving much thought to keywords, and my posts drove almost no traffic. Now, I'm blogging much less frequently and seeing better results from my efforts.” 

Chloe Brittain, Owner, Opal Transcription Services, https://www.opaltranscriptionservices.com/

Increasing Content Spend: 

“In this down economy, one of the things I’m taking advantage of at the moment is content creation. I am increasing content spend because many others are slowing down. Also, writers have a greater capacity to get new topics completed. It helps me plan out the entire years’ worth of content and get it at a cheaper rate. Additionally, It feels great to give work to people who are really in need right now and allows me to feed money back into the freelance writing economy that can use it. My typical monthly content budget for The Word Counter is $2,000/month and I am doubling it to $4,000/month during this time. I monetize my content with Google Adsense and the Grammarly affiliate program. The Grammarly affiliate program pays .20 cents for a free sign up and $20 for a paid sign up.

We are publishing one new post per day and will continue to do so in perpetuity! This will help to grow our business and then we will layer on affiliate marketing, email marketing, and potentially paid Facebook ads and Google Adwords.”

Kevin Miller is the founder and CEO of The Word Counter https://thewordcounter.com

SEO:

“SEO strategy for 2020 is to add a structured table of contents to every new piece of content. Having a structure like this in the post benefits user-experience and helps search engines more effectively crawl the page. I've seen the structure allow pages to have extension snippets in Google search which makes them bigger in the search results and increases organic CTR and traffic.”

Stacy Caprio, Founder, Growth Marketing, www.acceleratedgrowthmarketing.co

Messaging: 

“The message--if you don't get your messaging right, you won't persuade anybody and you won't be able to build a brand. The message is crucial so that you can communicate your irresistible offer to the right market and do it the right way. (This is where copywriters come in hand.)”

Momchil, CMO at Codegiant, https://codegiant.io/home

Facebook Ads: 

“If you advertise on Facebook, make use of the ‘Audience Insights’ segmentation feature. This allows you to tailor your ads to demographics, interests, and more. This information is key to proper segmentation, and will ensure your ads are only shown to the right people. Your Click-Through-Rate will thank you!”

Konstantinos Tsilkos, CEO of PharMed, https://www.pharmed.com/

Website Security:

“A secure website is a must-have in today’s digital landscape. If you have not implemented this security protocol on your site, users will be much less likely to stay on your site, or click on it in the first place. Apart from your own personal troubles, not securing your website exposes the user to risk. You have an obligation as a site owner to keep your users safe, so securing your connection is a matter of social responsibility.”

Ryan Anderson, Founder of Bead the Change, https://beadthechange.eco/

Audience Definition:

“Know your audience. A lot of digital marketers nowadays do not spend their time doing the necessary research. The number one key component in a successful digital marketing campaign is research. Therefore, do your research, know your audience, and it will become much more easy to build up strategies from there on out.”

Anjana Wickramaratne, Co-owner and Digital Marketing Specialist, https://activedigisolutions.com/

DMs:

“I've been seeing DM's used in a pretty clever way using Instagram stories. Especially popular among those who don't have the swipe up feature yet for links, you can encourage your followers to swipe up on your stories to DM you instead! You may prompt them to DM you if they want a freebie you are offering, to get the link to an article or YouTube video that you mention, or to join your Facebook group or email list. From there, you can naturally lead into a conversation with them and begin to nurture that relationship.”

Kiara Martilla, Founder of Kiara Jennifer & Co, https://kiarajennifer.co/

Content Marketing:

“Content marketing is one of the most inexpensive ways to get your name out there, build links, and attract new customers. However, a good strategy must be in place to be successful, especially with the ever-growing number of blog posts that are being shared - 5.8 million every day. Roundup posts provide the answer.

Remember that the main thing to keep in mind is that your roundup has to stand out. No matter how great your marketing campaign is, it won’t retain the interest of the reader if the roundup isn’t informative and of high quality. Include data and graphs, which can be important to the reader, as well as actionable tips that can be implemented right away.”

Alexandra Zamolo, Head of Content Marketing for Beekeeper, https://www.beekeeper.io

User Journey:

“My biggest tip would be to plan the user journey throughout your site content. Too often I see well prepared web pages and blog posts that provide great information, but do little to retain visitors and do even less to try and capture their contact information. If you want to improve conversion rates, think about what the user would like to see after reading your page, and then provide them with easy access to that content within the current page. This keeps visitors on your site for longer, educates them more on your product or offerings, and will boost the number of conversions on your site.”

John Butterworth, Digital Marketing Manager for CRCC Asia, www.crccasia.com 

Personalization:

“Ensure to personalize your content for your audience and focus on the longevity of your campaigns to maximize return on investment. Differentiation is crucial in the marketing sphere as it is so saturated. Make sure to try new things but keep it relevant to the audience so that they keep coming back for more.”

Umarah Hussain, PR & Outreach Executive at Colewood, https://www.colewood.net/

Contests and Giveaways:

“One great tip for companies to promote themselves on the internet is to simply run regular online contests that include a giveaway of their own products. Unlike regular giveaways where the winner is completely chosen at random, the participants in a contest can boost their chances of winning by sharing it through social media and other online means. People love giveaways where they could get free stuff and they will perform every action possible that will improve their probability to win including to share the competition with others. You can easily create and hold giveaway contests online to market your business using a tool like Gleam or Rafflecopter.”

Hassan Alnassir, Founder & Owner of Premium Joy, Premiumjoy.com

Chatbots:

“A new tool that every digital marketer must harvest is AI chatbots, which interact with visitors and answer common queries. There are many service providers like IBM Watson studio, which help in building amazing chatbots, without writing a single piece of code.”

Ketan Pande, Goodvitae, https://www.goodvitae.com/

Website Performance: 

“My best digital marketing tip is to focus on creating a high-performing website. As marketers, we spend a lot of time trialling various strategies to find the best one for our business, but we spend little time on the destination of our ads--the website.

You could spend all the time in the world creating the perfect marketing campaign, but if your website doesn't perform well, the results will not be as good as they could be.

Subsequently, I recommend spending significant time working alongside your developer to create a website that loads quickly, performs well on all devices and is easy to navigate. That way, you can maximize the results of your digital marketing campaigns and get the best possible ROI.”

Jason Scott, Digital Marketing Specialist at JCS Digital, https://www.jcsdigital.co.uk

Push Notifications:

“Push notifications still hold a lot of promise: Website push notifications are easy to implement and require a really simple ‘opt in' from people who visit your site. You can then alert people to new content directly in their browser. Click through rates, in my experience at least, are comparable to or better than average email open rates. It’s well worth giving push notifications a go, especially with free or cheap ways to implement them.”

Ben Taylor, Entrepreneur & founder of http://www.homeworkingclub.com/

Social Media Story Features: 

“There's been a surge in businesses adopting social media stories as part of their marketing efforts. We love this trend and have put it into action at Magic Freebies. Posting regular stories on Instagram and Facebook, in particular, are ideal for subtly interacting with your followers. Stories give you the chance to build up your brand image and personality. Consumers are slowly becoming familiar with and disheartened by the concept of influencer marketing, which is essentially paying someone to appear to authentically support your brand. Social media stories directly from you, are a much cheaper and more authentic way of connecting with your audience.”

Alice Gerwat, Magic Freebies, https://www.magicfreebiesuk.co.uk

Strategic Partnerships: 

“Strategic partnerships [are] companies working together towards a common goal. This could be anything from pooling resources to create a new product to sharing ideas on an Instagram live. Lockdown situations will force us to collaborate digitally and seek out new ways to share expertise and resources.”

Ruth Douglas, Imp Ideas, http://imp-ideas.com/

Ads in Messaging Apps:

“There’s a noticeable increase in the use of social messaging apps due to the current pandemic and the mass, worldwide quarantine. The global situation will cement the trend of running ads and content in messaging apps.

According to statistics about Facebook Messenger, there are 1.3 billion active users worldwide. Ads on Messenger get up to 70% more of the open rate, compared to email marketing. Interactive and video content will become a norm in the years to follow, following the trend of increased messaging apps use.

It's a good time to invest in creating the content for the format of messaging apps, as well as testing out the conversions by placing them in Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp!”

Jovan Milenkovic, Co-founder of KommandoTech https://kommandotech.com/

Google Trends: 

“Make sure you're checking Google Trends on a regular basis for your client to make sure you stay on top of any newer trends relating to your client industry. I've seen some massive surges for topics that would otherwise have had quite a steady stream due to Covid-19 and nearly everyone being in a quarantine state. Obviously the challenge as a marketer is finding the topics that can be relevant for your client to be talking about, and to craft content in a way so that it helps capture part of that search volume. This doesn't mean focusing directly on Covid-19 terms like how to make a surgical mask but discovering other specific sectors where they're seeing a crazy growth. One interesting one I found recently was a surge for vegetable seeds—people are keen to grow their own food now, perhaps part out of fear (what if the shops run out?) or part for convenience/something to keep them occupied.”

Matt Tutt, Matt Tutt Digital Marketing, https://matttutt.me

Marketing Automation:

“The success of any business today is determined by how it engages with its customers. When there are only a few of them, you may manage easily. But certainly, you don’t wish to limit the number of your clients to only a few. Marketing Automation tools reduce the manual effort and also maintain the history of all marketing campaigns in an organized way.

Few AI-based digital marketing automation tools make businesses rely on them for extracting relevant data. This data helps marketers understand and analyze metrics about genuine reach. Today, digital marketing automation could be a business, and it helps marketers not only to reach but also to optimize their marketing efforts using relevant tools.”

Boni Satani, Head of Marketing at Zestard Technologies, https://www.zestard.com/

Analytics: 

“I'd say that my #1 tip for those in digital marketing is that you absolutely MUST use analytics to steer your decision making process. I feel that it's very common for most individuals starting out to rely on their gut feelings as opposed to data to guide their decisions and content strategy. This is a huge mistake. When someone has an established website, the best thing they can do is use data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console to decide what direction to take with their Business.”

Ron Stefanski, Entrepreneur, Your House Needs This,  https://www.YourHouseNeedsThis.com

TikTok:

“Don't be quick to underestimate Tiktok. I thought it wasn't for me because, well, I'm not 12. I'm seeing how easy TikTok makes it easier than any other platform to go viral and gain a new following. The key is then to direct traffic to my existing social media platforms where I already have a presence.”

Joya Dass, Founder of LadyDrinks, https://ladydrinks.com/

Regular PPC Audits:

“No matter your industry, we recommend that all businesses conduct at the very least an annual (but you can and should do more) PPC audit. Audits are one of the best tools we have for making small, sustainable improvements.” 

John Atkins, Tuff Growth, https://tuffgrowth.com/

User Experience Optimization:

“One of the most forgotten ways of attracting free traffic nowadays is through User Experience Optimization. Having pages optimized for the user experience is one of the strongest factors that search engines take into account for SEO positioning: Google for example measures the rate of users who enter your website and end up returning to the search engine to click on the next result. Normally users do that because your site didn't met their needs. This negative effect is called pogosticking and it will hurt your Google ranking position. To decrease pogosticking, and interesting content your website should be well optimized for search engines for user experience.

Google has a good tool for this purpose called Google Optimize. Google Optimize is a great feature for improving user experience and so bringing more traffic for free. When doing your next page optimization an important tip is that you need to choose a goal that generates a lot of data over time or you will have to run the experiment for months. For example, if you are not a very large company and you are running an e-commerce that makes 5 sales a day, using these transactions as a goal may not be a good idea due to the low volume. So is better to choose for example the goal of adding to cart that will have more data as a goal, so that the experiment in Google Optimize will have a winner sooner.

But in case you are running a blog, a good goal for optimization is the time the user stays on your page. So you will always optimize for users that engages with your content, avoiding them rejecting your website.

Optimizing your website for user experience will improve your SEO over time, so it will bring a log of free traffic to your website.”

Erico Franco, Inbound Marketing Manager, Agencia de Marketing Digital, lp.gravity.com.br/agencia-de-marketing

Content Development:

“I’m a true believer in the adage ‘content is king.’ One tip for improving your digital marketing game is to deliver more interactive content. Data shows this is what consumers want, so you'd like to receive more leads and traffic by utilizing content pieces like polls, quizzes, AR/VR, 360-video, and shoppable posts. Not only will it increase engagement, it’s something users will want to share.”

Barbara Nevers, Founder of NeoLittle, Neolittle.com

User Generated Content:

“[UGC] is going to make a resurgence in a big way. More and more products are looking for that little thread that can help them go viral. Online challenges, products that greatly suggest sharing, content that is made to be taken out of context on purpose. A lot of this content might come from YouTube or TikTok communities, since covering the same topics, putting your own spin on an ad, announcement or image is the big thing for content consumption right now.”

Domantas Gudeliauskas, Marketing Manager at Zyro, https://zyro.com

Paid Ads vs. Content Marketing:

“It's very important for businesses to understand the relative benefits of paid search ads and content marketing. This understanding will help companies establish an effective online marketing strategy.

Paid search is a surefire way to bring traffic and customers to your website. You can set up search ads in an hour or two and capture more traffic within 24 hours. However, today paid search ads are very competitive, and as a result, it's difficult to sustain a high ROI over time. If companies want a short-term boost in their online traffic, or have the budget to invest, paid search ads are a highly effective option.

In contrast, content marketing and SEO takes time to generate results. Businesses have to optimize their websites, produce high-quality unique content, and obtain backlinks to capture a significant amount of organic search traffic. However, once a page ranks well in Google's search results, it is likely to continue generating organic search traffic for a prolonged period of time. Since it is an upfront investment, this traffic will have a very high ROI and help the business become more profitable.

Overall, it's ideal for businesses to invest in both paid and organic search. Understanding the relative benefits of each will help companies be successful in their online marketing journey.”

BruceHogan, CEO of SoftwarePundit, Softwarepundit.com

Importance of Evergreen Content:

“One thing that we’re currently seeing a lot of in the digital marketing space—specifically in social media, email newsletters, and blogs—is content focused on COVID-19, whether it’s from B2C businesses discussing how they’re adapting to better serve their customers or B2B businesses sharing resources for other businesses to utilize. To stand out amongst the noise that this pandemic has caused, it’s important to continue creating evergreen content that has a ‘shelf life’ longer than the next few months. People are craving a sense of normalcy and have come to expect certain content topics/themes from the companies they follow and support, and by creating evergreen content, companies can reach their audience and continue to provide the content they want to see.”

Cheyenne Knight, Business Development Manager, Cosmitto, https://www.cosmitto.digital/

Long Form Content:

“As far as trends go, I'm seeing more and more long-form content. Long-form content is nothing new, but people are getting more and more experimental with how they use it. Conventional wisdom says shorter content is more versatile, but a single piece of quality long-form content can produce shorter blog entries, get turned into social media posts, even generate a resource for an email campaign. Get some good long-form content, and a number of digital marketing avenues open up.”

Kevin Miller, Founder and CEO, The Word Counter, https://thewordcounter.com/

Guest Posting:

“When you do a guest post, try to get a backlink in the main content rather than in the footer. The link in the main content is considered more useful by Google and given a higher weightage. Also try to guest post on websites which have content on similar topics as your own website to establish a relevance for the incoming link(s).”

Saurabh Jindal, Founder, Talk Travel https://talktravelapp.com/

Optimize for Local SEO:

“When someone is searching in Atlanta for ‘Best BBQ near me’, Google isn’t going to show them results for restaurants in Miami. Therefore, it’s essential that the search engines know where you are located. Be sure your site includes physical addresses and individual Location Pages if you have more than one location. This also applies to businesses with multiple locations within the same metro-area.”

Alex Membrillo, CEO, Cardinal Digital Marketing, www.cardinaldigitalmarketing.com