Digital Marketing: A Guide for Start-ups and Small Businesses

Digital marketing doesn’t have to be difficult when you know where to spend your time, energy, and resources. Use the guide below to drive your digital marketing efforts to maximize your audience reach.

Stepping into the continually changing world of digital marketing is confusing for every businessperson at first. There are lots of different paths to consider when planning a marketing strategy for a start-up, but what makes it more complicated is that each of those digital paths changes regularly with technology advancements, algorithm updates, and more. Your big priority should be ensuring that your options should be cost-effective and deliver a return on your investment right away, but it can difficult to determine that.

Where should you start when trying to launch a business with no previous digital marketing experience? This guide will introduce the best digital marketing strategies for start-ups and small businesses to help you find your starting point.

Designing the website for great user experience and optimizing for sales

Your business website is your shop and your home and should contain everything a customer would need to know about you, your services, and your products. It is essential that it makes a strong first impression and engages people who visit the site and keeps bringing them back.

Even if all other aspects of your digital marketing strategy are effective at sending visitors to your website if your website is poorly designed with slow-loading pages and confusing copy, they will not stay long, will lose trust in the brand, and probably will not make a purchase. A clear navigation bar with relevant calls to action should be the first item you consider. When you design a mockup of your website, think about how the consumer will navigate and click through. Insert relevant copy to engage readers and educate/inform/entertain them so they stay onsite longer and search through each page or item on the page.

You could also think about hiring a professional website designer or reputable branding agency to ensure your website is a valuable asset to your business. You want to make the best possible impression to all potential customers.

Search engine optimization (SEO) efforts for startups

Now you have a fantastic website that’s clean and easy to navigate, you need to ensure that your target customers can find it. A search engine like Google can interpret what a user is searching for, analyze all the website pages on the internet, and rank them in order from most relevant and useful to least relevant.

As the majority of users do not look past the first one or two pages of results, the objective of SEO is to increase the likelihood that Google will rank your website’s content on the first page (or a featured snippet) for specific keywords and keyword phrases. There are lots of elements involved in successful SEO from researching the right keywords, ensuring the proper URL structure, fast page load times, and making sure all pages are indexed properly on Google. Still, at the most basic level, it is identifying the keywords you want to rank for and creating original content around those keywords. Find out more about keyword research.

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) can be effective for startups and small businesses with larger budgets

Where content marketing is creating content for it to rank in search results organically, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is paying to place adverts in search engine results based on target keywords. In the case of Google AdWords, you choose the keywords you want to rank for and bid against competitors for them.

If you are one of the highest bidders, your advert will appear above organic search results in Google. You only pay for the advert if a user clicks on it to visit your website but keep in mind that each click can cost upwards of $100.00 without even having that visitor convert to an email subscriber or customer. There are lots of PPC management agencies like Made by Factory, which specialize in helping businesses to make the most of PPC advertising campaigns. Such an agency can help you craft the perfect SEO strategy that is within your budget.

Social media marketing can be a huge help in building an online brand

Social media platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook offer businesses the opportunity to reach different customer segments in several ways. You can create engaging content and interact with customers as well as placing cost-per-click advertisements that are targeted to your relevant demographic. Pinterest, by far, has the most affordable social media advertising options and is one of the best ways to grow an audience organically.

Content marketing to drive online growth and customer acquisition

Content marketing is the creation of content to inform, entertain, help, and engage with your customers. There are lots of different formats available, but the most commonly used are short and long blog posts, articles, infographics, case studies, interviews, and videos. Your content should be original, engaging, and should showcase your expertise in your industry. For short blog posts, they should be around 500 to 600 words, while long-form blog posts should be 2,000 words or longer. We strive to publish longer content to educate and engage with our audience.

Ideally, users will share it with others on social media, which will increase your visibility, and it will rank for target keywords. Posting regularly (at least once a week to begin) is best to ensure that you draw in new website traffic, build an email list, and maintain a line of communication with your customers.

Email marketing for business growth

Email marketing is one of the originals in terms of digital marketing dating back more than 20 years, but it can still be very effective when done the right way. You need a list of email addresses that have given explicit permission to receive those marketing communications from you. These emails are deployed via email marketing service providers such as Constant Contact or Active Campaign. Again, then you can send them information about products, newsletters, and promotions. Personalizing emails and targeting segments of the list with different campaigns can be a great way to ensure your customers feel valued.

Building an email list takes time and patience but it’s easier to do so when you have opt-in boxes placed strategically throughout your website. We encourage our clients to have a delayed pop-up on every page, one in the header and then footer, and then one in the sidebar. We emphasize how important it is to have an email list to send out regular newsletters and promotions.

3 Ways to Build Your Business's Online Presence

How is your business performing online? When it comes to online presence, there are always areas that companies can improve. If you are concerned that your company isn’t using its online presence to its full potential, you certainly aren’t alone. 97% of business owners say that their online reputation is essential. It is crucial to recognize the importance of your online presence, and it’s vital to put plans in place to help your business maximize its online presence to achieve its potential.

Businesses that do not take active steps to improve their digital presence put themselves at risk of being left behind and allow their competitors to gain a significant advantage.

With increasing numbers of consumers carrying out product research online to inform their purchase decisions, and even more people regularly shopping on the web, your online presence matters more now than ever before.

In 2020, the question is no longer ‘should I invest in digital marketing methods?’ Instead, the real question is, ‘am I using digital marketing methods effectively?’ If you are looking for ways to strengthen your online presence, and ultimately give your bottom line a boost, these digital marketing tools will help:

Get Your Website Seen 

You may be selling the best products in the world, but if your website isn’t performing, no one will see these life-changing products, let alone buy them. 

Taking steps to improve your website will help to increase the amount of traffic that it receives, and ultimately, this should increase sales. To gain increased traffic, your site needs to achieve a high ranking on the search engine results pages so that it is visible to your target audience. Improved search engine results are achieved through effective search engine optimization (SEO). Optimizing your site can be complicated and requires up to date SEO knowledge, so getting some professional help with this vital.

Be Sociable

Engaging with your customers and potential customers is vital to strengthen your online presence and is also a great way to develop brand loyalty and increased sales. Using social media platforms to your advantage is incredibly worthwhile and is the perfect way to engage with your customers, both present and future. 

To achieve social media success, consistency is vital. Your social media posts should be scheduled to go out regularly, and your page will need to be monitored so that you can respond to any comments made on your posts. You need to ensure that your posts are consistent with the image of your brand and are suitable for your followers.

Use Affiliates

Affiliate marketing is a fast-growing area and offers significant potential for businesses. Affiliate marketing has many benefits and is an ideal way to help your brand reach new audiences. Affiliate marketing may sound complicated, but software can help. You can Get launch reviews and bonuses to help you expand your knowledge and improve your affiliate marketing methods. Some of the software even picks the best influencers for your brand and does the hard work for you.

Social Media Marketing Isn't A Gimmick. It's Downright Profitable.

For years, marketing gurus have extolled the virtues of social media marketing. Reaching out to people over platforms like Twitter and Facebook seemed like one of the best ways to create deep and meaningful relationships with audiences. 

Businesses resisted the idea for a long time. Traditional marketing methods seemed so much more professional and low-risk. You could customize your marketing messages to reflect your predefined corporate image. And you could edit out anything that might impact reputation. 

Web-users - particularly millennials - however, had different ideas. They didn’t just want companies to spam them with corporate marketing messages. They wanted something more authentic. 

Social media, therefore, was the ideal platform. Here, companies had access to the entirety of their target market and could communicate with them one-on-one if they wished. What’s more, they were free to develop long-form marketing that explained more about their values. Memorable jingles and soundbites were no longer the aim of the game. 

According to data from Index and Empower, 45 percent of people used social media in 2019 globally. People are highly active on these platforms. A subset of users views social media platforms as the internet, rarely venturing outside of them. 

Firms, however, have been slow on the uptake. They’re used to one kind of marketing, but social media presents quite another. The traditional approach is to extract value from customers using advertising. Companies talk about their brands and then hope that customers listen and convert. 

Social media, though, is fundamentally changing the game. Firms now have to provide users with value if they want to stand any chance of gaining their attention. Advertising, therefore, is becoming more like outreach. It is offering customers something that enriches their lives - not just wastes their time. 

In general, this takes a couple of forms. The first is entertainment. Here the advertiser on social media attempts to get the customer to associate their brand by making them laugh or keeping their eyes glued to the screen. 

The second is through education. Marketers look for ways to teach their customers about their products and services in a way that benefits them. Therefore, a company that sells swimming pools might produce a video that helps people determine which type of pool to buy for their home. The hope is that the customer will eventually convert. 

Entertainment And Inspiration Have The Biggest Impact On The Bottom Line

Going back a few years, offering discounts through social media was the primary strategy companies used to pick up additional sales. Facebook and Instagram were a little bit like voucher websites - a place where you went for bargains. 

In the last year or so, however, there’s been a shift. Users don’t want money off or big discounts. Instead, they want entertainment and inspiration - a big turnaround from just a year earlier. 

The turnaround is probably starker than you’re imagining. Data suggests that twice the number of social media users prefer entertaining content to discount ads. It suggests that companies need to rethink the type of content they produce radically. Discounts aren’t profitable, but providing entertainment could be. 

Employee Advocacy Helps To Attract Top Talent

We’re also seeing a significant rise in the number of companies using employee advocacy to attract top talent. Here the idea is to use existing staff from the firm to talk about how great their work is so that new people will join. High-skill employees are much more likely to believe the words of the people who work for the firm already. Hiring managers just don’t have the same level of sway on their decision-making. 

In a sense, social media allows companies to offer budding candidate employees “social proof” (a bit like regular review scores). It is mimicking the insight that people can gain from services like Glassdoor, but providing your company with more control over the process. Employees are unlikely to say anything on social media that might damage your brand. 

Social Listening Helps To Understand Your Target Audience Better

Small businesses like to believe that they understand their target audiences, but rarely is that the case. Customers will hardly ever provide you with insightful, constructive feedback that allows you to push through problems. Instead, you often find yourself having to guess - and that’s not ideal. 

Using a digital marketing consultant, however, can help. The basic concept is to improve your “social listening” or your ability to interpret the needs and desires of your audience from their conversations on social media. 

Social listening isn’t as easy as it sounds. Usually, it requires using sophisticated software able to pick out sentiments. Typically, you need the help of an agency to set it up and point you in the correct direction. Once you get to grips with it, though, it can prove a massive boon to your enterprise. Being able to understand your audience's true desires provides you with a big leg up over the competition. 

How Marketers Use Social Media To Drive The Bottom Line

Social media, therefore, has turned a corner. In the past, only a small subset of companies say the outreach potential of these platforms. But, as time has worn on, more and more people are coming to terms with its benefits. 

Marketers are now developing systems that prioritize how they use social media platforms to maximize their revenues and boost their bottom lines. 

The main draw of social media is the opportunity to tap into a much larger audience. The potential reach of these platforms is genuinely staggering. Instagram and Whatsapp both have about a billion users. Facebook has two billion users. And Twitter has a lot of users who all share a particular political persuasion. 

Marketers also like social media because it allows them to sidestep the costs of paid ads. If you can create a compelling account, you can create a kind of tribe of customers and avoid spending loads of cash on attracting people from outside. Lead generation is a massive draw. 

Social media marketing, therefore, is no longer a gimmick. It’s downright profitable. 

Best Digital Marketing Tips and Trends for a Successful Year

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