Google Ads Editor update includes support for Discovery campaigns
Version 1.2 is now available.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Marketing Trends for 2020: Here’s What Will Happen That Nobody is Talking About
The new year is right around the corner. And I know you are already prepared because you read this blog and tons of other marketing blogs, right?
But here is the thing: I also read most of the popular marketing blogs, follow all of the marketing YouTube channels, and listen to the same podcasts you do.
And I’ve noticed that very few people are talking about what’s really going to happen in 2020.
Sure, they will tell you things like voice search is going to account for over 50% of the search queries next year but all of that stuff has already been talked about.
And there are actually more interesting trends that will
affect your marketing that no one is really talking about.
So, what are these trends? What’s going to happen in 2020?
Alright, here goes…
Trend #1: Companies who rely on Google Analytics will get
beat by their competition
We all love Google Analytics.
Heck, I love it so much I log in at least 3 or 4 times a day. And here is the kicker: I get so much traffic that my Google Analytics only updates once a day.
I really need to break that habit but that’s for another day.
You are probably wondering, what’s wrong with Google Analytics?
There actually isn’t much wrong with it. It’s a great tool,
especially considering that it’s free.
But here is the thing… marketing has been changing. New channels are being constantly introduced, such as voice search.
And transactions no longer are as simple as someone coming and buying from you and that’s it.
These days there are things like upsells, down sells, repeat purchases, and even checkout bumps. On top of that, there are so many different ways you can generate revenue for your online business, such as partnerships, affiliate marketing, and even webinars.
This has caused companies to start using analytics solutions that tie into their database better, such as Amplitude. Or better yet, you are seeing a big push into business intelligence.
A central place where you can tie in all of your data and make better-informed decisions so you can optimize for your lifetime value instead of your short-term income.
In 2020, you will see more companies adopting business intelligence solutions… from paid ones to free ones like Google Data Studio.
If you haven’t checked out Data Studio, you’ll want to start now because it is easy to pass in all of your business and marketing data into one place. For example, you can pass in more granular data from your Facebook ad campaigns into Data Studio while that would be a bit difficult to do with Google Analytics.
Trend #2: Companies will optimize for voice search, but not
for revenue
According to ComScore, over 50% of the
searches in 2020 will be from voice search. But that’s not really a new
trend… everyone has been talking about that for years.
So, what’s the big deal?
Optimizing for voice search is a great way to get your brand
out more, but how is that going to convert into sales?
I haven’t seen too many solutions so far when it comes to
capitalizing on your voice search traffic, but so far there is Jetson.ai.
If you aren’t familiar with Jetson.ai, it makes it so people can buy from your site using voice search. It doesn’t matter if it is Alexa or Google Home, they work with most of the popular devices.
What’s cool about Jetson.ai is that it can learn from each customer and customize the interactions.
For example, if I keep ordering the same toothpaste from a specific store using voice search, Jetson.ai keeps track of that so you can easily keep ordering the same product over and over again with little to no friction.
Heck, it’s easier than logging into your computer or pulling
out your phone to make a purchase.
Trend #3: Your lists won’t convert as well, so you’ll
have to look for alternative communication channels
Email, it’s something we all use in the corporate world.
But here is something interesting when it comes to marketing
emails… I’m in a group with a bit over 109 email marketers across different
industries in different parts of the world.
And can you guess what we are all noticing?
Our open rates are staying roughly the same and that’s
largely because we all know how to clean and optimizing for deliverability.
But our click rates are going down.
So far as a group we have seen our click rates drop by
9.4% in 2019.
That’s crazy considering as a group we have over 146 million email addresses.
Now does this mean email is dead?
Of course not!!!
Email is here to stay and will be here for a very long time.
But what companies will have to do in 2020 is to leverage more communication channels.
Chatbots will take off drastically. Not necessarily the Intercom’s or Drift’s of the world but more so the solutions like ManyChat and MobileMonkey.
ManyChat and MobileMonkey leverage Facebook Messenger and as they connect it with Instagram and WhatsApp it will get even more popular.
In addition to chatbots, you’ll see more people leveraging
tools that allow push notifications like Subscribers.
It’s so powerful, here is the impact I’ve been able to
generate from push notifications so far using Subscribers.
You can wait till next year to lever chatbots and push
notifications, but I’d recommend you start sooner than later. 😉
Trend #4: Moats will almost be non-existent, other than
brands
You’ve probably heard the word “moat” before. If you
haven’t, just think about water around a castle.
Back in the day, they had water all around the castle and
they used a drawbridge to get in and out of the castle, so it would protect
them from invaders.
With your business, you may have a moat. It could be a feature, your cost structure, a technological advantage, or even a marketing advantage.
Over the years, moats in the online world have slowly been disappearing.
It’s easy for anyone to copy these days. So, what’s separating you from your competition?
Something could work right now, but it won’t last forever…
But do you know what will still be a strong moat in 2020 and
even a stronger one in the future?
It’s branding.
People buy Jordan shoes because they love Michael Jordan.
His brand is stronger than ever even though he hasn’t played in the NBA for
roughly 16 years.
His shoes are so popular, it’s helped him boost his net worth to over a billion dollars. Plus owning a basketball team doesn’t hurt either. 😉
But what’s interesting is he’s made more money after
retirement than he did as a basketball player.
And it’s not just Jordan who built a strong brand… so
have the Kardashians.
Kylie launched a billion-dollar company according to Forbes and it was all because of her personal brand. Her cosmetic company isn’t doing anything revolutionary. She just has a strong brand… and good for her for monetizing her brand.
The same goes for companies like Nike, Ferrari, Tesla, American Express… and the list goes on and on.
It’s why companies are spending over 10
billion dollars a year on influencer marketing.
Just look at my agency NP Digital. It’s literally one of the fastest-growing ad agencies out there. And when I look at all of my competitors’ numbers, we are growing at a much faster pace because of my brand.
Yes, we have a great team, but again, that really isn’t a moat as a lot of agencies have great teams. It’s my brand that gave us a really fast kick start and continues to hopefully push us up.
You’ll want to build a brand in 2020. Whether it is personal
or corporate, it’s the best moat you can build in marketing. Plus, it will help
you with Google’s EAT.
Trend #5: Marketing will become a more even playing
field, you’ll have no choice but to use automation
When I first started off as an entrepreneur, I turned to SEO because I couldn’t afford the big ad budgets as my competitors.
Heck, I couldn’t even afford to run any paid ads.
Over the years, the playing field has become more level.
There are credit card companies like Brex that make it easier for startups to
get approved for larger limits and you may not have to pay them back right
away.
There are financing companies that will give you cash to
spend on marketing, so non-venture funded companies can more easily compete.
There are even companies like Lighter Capital that will give you loans without all of the headaches based on your existing revenue.
And to top it off, software solutions are now starting to integrate AI to give better recommendations. From Clickflow and RankScience to Distilled ODN… everyone is trying to use AI to make SEO and other forms of marketing.
Heck, BrightEdge can even automate your SEO (or at least a large portion of it). According to them, their automated SEO solution increases page views per visit by 60% as well as provides 21% more keywords on page one.
Keep in mind their clients are really big (their software starts in the thousands of dollars per month) so they would probably see better results than most companies, but still, you will start seeing many more software companies leverage AI.
Even with Ubersuggest, I’m working on creating AI that does the SEO for you so you no longer have to spend endless hours while, at the same time, saving you thousands of dollars.
In other words, the marketing playing field is getting more
even. And if you want to do well, you are going to have to leverage AI and
automation.
If everyone else is using it and you aren’t, you are going to get crushed because it will make changes faster and more accurately than a human. Again, it’s the only option you’ll have if you want to continually compete.
But don’t worry, there will be affordable/free solutions that exist, it’s just a matter of time. 😉
If everyone is leveraging the same AI marketing technology, how can you beat your competitors?
Well, it will come down to everything else… price, customer
service, upselling, operations, sales… All of the small stuff is what’s going
to help you win.
Trend #6: There will be no more silver bullets, we will
all have to optimize for marginal gains
A lot of businesses were built off of one marketing channel.
Dropbox grew through referral marketing. Invite more
friends, get more free space.
Facebook was built off your email address book. Facebook used to tap into it and invite all of your contacts to use Facebook on your behalf.
Companies like Quora and Yelp were built off of SEO. All of those rankings really help drive their businesses.
But you no longer can build a business through just one
marketing channel. Good channels now get saturated extremely fast.
Even if they work and cause explosive growth, it will only last for a short while before your competitors jump on board and make it harder.
Marketing is now heading in the direction of being about “marginal gains.”
There’s a British cycling coach named Dave Brailsford. His
belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1
percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.
And he’s right, that’s how you win a race.
The same will be with your marketing. There will be a big shift from people focusing on one channel and trying to find the “Holy Grail of marketing” to working on slightly improving each area of your marketing.
From split testing your title tags to get a few ranking improvements to adding checkout bumps to your order page so you can spend a little bit more on your paid ads to using Google Data Studio so you can better optimize for your lifetime value…
It’s all about the little things. That’s what is going to
add up to winning.
That’s what you’ll have to shift your mindset to in order to win in 2020 and beyond.
Trend #7: Personalization is the new marketing
The problem with marketing as it exists today is that 95% of your visitors will never convert into a customer. And that’s if you are lucky.
Chances are you are more likely looking at 97% plus of your
visitors never converting.
The big reason isn’t that your marketing sucks or that all
of those visitors are junk and unqualified.
It’s that your message doesn’t fit every single one of your
visitors.
But through personalization, you can convert more of your visitors into customers.
A basic example of this is Amazon. When you go to Amazon, they know your patterns and what you typically buy so they show you what they think you want to see in order to boost their conversions.
And it works! When I log into Amazon I see tons of household supplies because that is what I buy the most often. I never buy dog food (which is smart because I don’t have a dog,) so I’ll never see ads for dog food.
Businesses are also trying to personalize each and every single experience both online and offline.
Companies like Amperity are trying to create a customer relationship engine so you can better serve each of your customers, whether it is online or offline.
Marketing is going to become a game of personalization. With
ad costs and even general marketing costs rising, you have no choice but to
figure out how to convert the 97% of your traffic that just never comes back.
You’ll see a big push for this in 2020.
Conclusion
I know a lot of the stuff I mentioned above isn’t talked about a lot and they aren’t popular marketing topics that everyone wants to hear… but it is the future.
These are trends that will come true, some already are, and
you have to adapt for them.
Here’s the beautiful part, though. You just read this, and now have a chance to act on the information before your competition. So, make sure you go and do so.
I want to see you not only succeed but I want you to beat
your competition. And I believe you can, whether you are a big company, or just
starting off with very little to no money.
So, what do you think of the trends above? Do you see any
marketing trends that will come true in 2020 that few people talk about?
The post Marketing Trends for 2020: Here’s What Will Happen That Nobody is Talking About appeared first on Neil Patel.
A Crash Course in Custom Audiences for Your Social Media Ads
When you want to get your message in front of the right people on social media, where do you turn?
More and more, brands and businesses are turning to social ads and custom audiences. You can do a lot of awesome, targeted messaging by focusing on the right audiences with your ads — whether you’re talking to a group of customers, a bunch of website visitors, or a list of subscribers
In this post, we’ll talk you through ways to build custom audiences and lookalike audiences on all the major social media platforms, plus share a couple ideas of how you can put these audiences to the best use.
Best wishes for some well-targeted, highly successful ads!
An introduction to custom audiences
There’s a huge amount to cover with social media ads.
Since this blog post focuses specifically on audiences, let’s start there. In general, an audience is going to be the bucket of people who will potentially see your ad. This group can be customized based on a variety of factors, which we’ll get to in a minute.
A custom audience is a step beyond the basic demographic and psychographic audience filters. A custom audience can be based on an outside source like a set of emails or website visitors or on the social media behavior of users.
And then you have lookalike audiences, which take one of your custom audience and expand it to a larger group based on the qualities that the custom audience has in common. For instance, if all the people in your custom audience are interested in augmented reality, use social on a tablet, and have master’s degrees, then a lookalike audience will include people who share these attributes, too.
As you can tell, there are many ways to slice and dice this information to build some really unique audiences.
So let’s get dive into some of the details, starting with the biggest and most robust social advertising networks … Facebook and Instagram.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Facebook and Instagram Ads
Advertising for both Facebook and Instagram is combined into the Facebook Ads Manager. You can run all your ads from here as well as create and manage all your audiences.
Within Facebook, there are a handful of custom audiences that you can build. This list includes:
1. A customer list — also known as a standard custom audiences.
This audience is based on a list of emails, phone numbers, or Facebook user IDs that Facebook can then take and match to its list of users. Typically you’ll find that Facebook can match between 60 and 70 percent of the contacts on your customer list.
2. You can create a website custom audience.
With this audience, instead of uploading a list of customer emails or phone numbers, you build the audience based on traffic to your website. Using Facebook Pixel tracking, you can create an audience of people who have visited any specific page on your website during a set time period.
3. You can create custom audiences based on app activity
If you happen to have a mobile app or game, you can build audiences based on the actions that people take within your product.
4. You can use offline activity to build a Facebook audience.
This could include things like conversations that happen offline in brick-and-mortar stores or information you collect on a spreadsheet.
5. Build an audience from Facebook and Instagram engagement
These can be based on who engages with your posts, videos, events, and profile. You can even set the timeframe of this engagement so that you’re building an audience of people who recently engaged, like in the last 90 days, or who engaged anytime in the past year.
Strategy Ideas for Making the Most of Your Custom Audiences
Jumping quickly into the strategy of ads and audiences, we thought this nugget from a recent Jon Loomer blog post was really interesting. In the blog post, they shared that the most popular Instagram audience strategy is lumping all audience types and time windows together into one large chunk — like, everyone who engaged with your profile in the last 365 days, for instance.
As you might guess, there is so much more you can be doing with these audiences!
Let’s take a closer look at engagement audiences for instance:
With the robust filtering of Facebook’s ads tool, you can build audiences of engagers based on a huge number of different factors like who has visited your Instagram profile, messaged you, or saved a post or an ad.
When it comes to these custom audiences, we quite liked this tip from social media today:Building “warm” audiences of people who have engaged with your content within a recent timeframe. Video in particular is a useful engagement and attention metric. So, say you create a ‘warm’ audience of people who’ve watched a certain amount of video from your page. From there, you can create a Lookalike Audience based on the warm audience, which will allow you to expand your reach to include people who share similar behaviors to that initial, warm, engaged group.
The Jon Loomer blog has a few favorite audience tips, too, specifically around building engagement-based audiences. These include:
- People who have engaged in any way with your brand on Instagram in the past seven days, the past 20 days, and the past 90 days.
- People who have visited your Instagram profile in the past 30 days but who are not customers
- and People who have viewed your Instagram Stories videos in the past seven days
Another way to work with custom audiences is through retargeting.
This gets at the custom audience type of pixel tracking and website / profile visits.
We’ve talked to lots of brands that start out with targeting anyone and everyone that visits their website in their retargeting campaigns. Needless to say that approach isn’t always the most effective.
Customers visit your website for lots of different reasons. They visit different pages. The pages they visit represent different buyer intents. Perhaps they’re not looking to buy your product at all. The key is to match your custom advertising audiences to those shoppers’ intents.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce brand and someone visits your website shopping for shoes, make sure that you segment those people into a custom audience labeled “shoe shoppers” or “footwear.”
Over the past year at Buffer we’ve created various audiences based on the subject matter our visitors are interested in learning about. We have a custom audience for traffic to all Facebook marketing pages, Instagram marketing, customer experience, case studies, etc. That allows us to be hyper-focused on what type of content we deliver, which helps to drive down costs.
We have a whole podcast about it if you want to check out.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Pinterest Ads
As you’ll find with all of these social networks, they’re not quite as robust with ads offerings as Facebook and Instagram. But that’s okay! There’s still plenty of customization you can do.For Pinterest, you have a few options for what to create when it comes to customer audiences.
You can build audiences
- Based on visitors who went to your site
- Through a customer list that you upload — like a list of emails
- Based on people who engaged with pins that link to your website
- With an actalike audience that behaves similarly to an existing custom audience that you’ve created
The visitor audience is based on a Pinterest tag, very much like the Facebook pixel. The Pinterest tag is a piece of JavaScript code you can install on your website to gather conversion insights and to build audiences that you can then target, based on actions taken on your site.
The Pinterest engagement audiences are really interesting, too. For these, all you need is to confirm your domain with Pinterest, and then Pinterest will be able to check to see which Pinterest users have engaged with pins that link back to your website. So for instance, if 1,000 people had saved a pin of Buffer blog content, we could build an engagement audience based on this.
Similar to the Facebook and Instagram engagement audiences, Pinterest gives you a handful of options to further customize this group. You can filter based on a specific URL, based on a pin category, or even based on the percentage of video that’s been viewed.
One interesting way that e-commerce brands can use this is to create audiences that are interested in particular product categories — people who click on certain links or certain Pins.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Twitter
With Twitter ads, you can build custom audiences based on
- An uploaded list of contacts or customers
- A collection of website visitors based on data you get from using a Twitter website tag
- A list of your mobile app users
- A flexible audience.
The flexible audiences feature is similar in nature to some of the engagement audiences we’ve talked about before. These audiences give Twitter advertisers a way to save combinations of audiences and subsets of audiences, based on factors like recency and frequency of interactions.
How to Create Custom Audiences for LinkedIn
You can build custom audiences on LinkedIn based on a list of contacts that you upload or you can build audiences based on website data, captured using a LinkedIn tag.
One interesting bit of audience customization that LinkedIn provides is with account-based audiences. Let’s say that you want to get a certain percentage of Fortune 500 companies using your product; well, you can upload this list of accounts to LinkedIn and build a custom audience that focused on the stakeholders of these companies.
Yes, there’s a lot of interesting things you can do on LinkedIn if you’re a business selling to other businesses. Then of course Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are all great for selling your products and services direct to consumers.
That’s right, and before we go, we’d love to leave you with just a couple more ideas for how you can use these custom audiences in unique ways.
More Tips for Getting the Most out of Your Custom Audiences
I thought this tip from AdEspresso was pretty intriguing.They boost a lot of their content to a wide audience and then create a custom audience based on people who click that content and visit the website. This custom website audience, then, is made up of people who have already shown a lot of intent and might be more primed to start a trial.
Another exciting way to use custom audiences is to think creatively about what you share with a custom audience of existing customers. Typically you might think of ads as a way to acquire more customers. But what if you used this list as a way to keep existing customers engaged? You can build a custom audience based on people who have shopped with you in the past or used your product before, but it’s been awhile since they returned — a “sleepy” audience of sorts.
And finally, there are some neat things you can do with custom audiences of newsletter subscribers. You can segment the list into audiences of engaged subscribers and disengaged subscribers and deliver unique content to each group. For the disengaged group in particular there’s a lot of value in re-engaging: MailChimp ran an analysis of 60 million e-commerce purchases and 40 million email addresses from retailers and found that a single inactive subscriber is still worth 32% of an active subscriber.
About the Science of Social Media
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ listeners each week and rock your social media channels as a result!
Measurability Over Magic? Heineken CMO Urges Marketers to Bring the Joy
PALM SPRINGS, Calif.–What ever happened to the magic, people? As the CMO of Heineken USA, Jonnie Cahill has more data about consumers and tools for how to reach them than ever before. He’s tuned into the latest developments in programmatic advertising, and he’s steeped in media mix, awareness and impressions, just like marketers across every…
How to Use LinkedIn Video to Acquire More Customers
Want to generate more leads with LinkedIn? Wondering how LinkedIn video can help? In this article, you’ll learn how to create LinkedIn videos that improve your customer acquisition efforts. Why Businesses Should Consider LinkedIn for Customer Acquisition Customer acquisition is no longer what it used to be. According to HubSpot’s research, 81% of consumers trust the […]
The post How to Use LinkedIn Video to Acquire More Customers appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.
Marketing Trends for 2020: Here’s What Will Happen That Nobody is Talking About
The new year is right around the corner. And I know you are already prepared because you read this blog and tons of other marketing blogs, right?
But here is the thing: I also read most of the popular marketing blogs, follow all of the marketing YouTube channels, and listen to the same podcasts you do.
And I’ve noticed that very few people are talking about what’s really going to happen in 2020.
Sure, they will tell you things like voice search is going to account for over 50% of the search queries next year but all of that stuff has already been talked about.
And there are actually more interesting trends that will
affect your marketing that no one is really talking about.
So, what are these trends? What’s going to happen in 2020?
Alright, here goes…
Trend #1: Companies who rely on Google Analytics will get
beat by their competition
We all love Google Analytics.
Heck, I love it so much I log in at least 3 or 4 times a day. And here is the kicker: I get so much traffic that my Google Analytics only updates once a day.
I really need to break that habit but that’s for another day.
You are probably wondering, what’s wrong with Google Analytics?
There actually isn’t much wrong with it. It’s a great tool,
especially considering that it’s free.
But here is the thing… marketing has been changing. New channels are being constantly introduced, such as voice search.
And transactions no longer are as simple as someone coming and buying from you and that’s it.
These days there are things like upsells, down sells, repeat purchases, and even checkout bumps. On top of that, there are so many different ways you can generate revenue for your online business, such as partnerships, affiliate marketing, and even webinars.
This has caused companies to start using analytics solutions that tie into their database better, such as Amplitude. Or better yet, you are seeing a big push into business intelligence.
A central place where you can tie in all of your data and make better-informed decisions so you can optimize for your lifetime value instead of your short-term income.
In 2020, you will see more companies adopting business intelligence solutions… from paid ones to free ones like Google Data Studio.
If you haven’t checked out Data Studio, you’ll want to start now because it is easy to pass in all of your business and marketing data into one place. For example, you can pass in more granular data from your Facebook ad campaigns into Data Studio while that would be a bit difficult to do with Google Analytics.
Trend #2: Companies will optimize for voice search, but not
for revenue
According to ComScore, over 50% of the
searches in 2020 will be from voice search. But that’s not really a new
trend… everyone has been talking about that for years.
So, what’s the big deal?
Optimizing for voice search is a great way to get your brand
out more, but how is that going to convert into sales?
I haven’t seen too many solutions so far when it comes to
capitalizing on your voice search traffic, but so far there is Jetson.ai.
If you aren’t familiar with Jetson.ai, it makes it so people can buy from your site using voice search. It doesn’t matter if it is Alexa or Google Home, they work with most of the popular devices.
What’s cool about Jetson.ai is that it can learn from each customer and customize the interactions.
For example, if I keep ordering the same toothpaste from a specific store using voice search, Jetson.ai keeps track of that so you can easily keep ordering the same product over and over again with little to no friction.
Heck, it’s easier than logging into your computer or pulling
out your phone to make a purchase.
Trend #3: Your lists won’t convert as well, so you’ll
have to look for alternative communication channels
Email, it’s something we all use in the corporate world.
But here is something interesting when it comes to marketing
emails… I’m in a group with a bit over 109 email marketers across different
industries in different parts of the world.
And can you guess what we are all noticing?
Our open rates are staying roughly the same and that’s
largely because we all know how to clean and optimizing for deliverability.
But our click rates are going down.
So far as a group we have seen our click rates drop by
9.4% in 2019.
That’s crazy considering as a group we have over 146 million email addresses.
Now does this mean email is dead?
Of course not!!!
Email is here to stay and will be here for a very long time.
But what companies will have to do in 2020 is to leverage more communication channels.
Chatbots will take off drastically. Not necessarily the Intercom’s or Drift’s of the world but more so the solutions like ManyChat and MobileMonkey.
ManyChat and MobileMonkey leverage Facebook Messenger and as they connect it with Instagram and WhatsApp it will get even more popular.
In addition to chatbots, you’ll see more people leveraging
tools that allow push notifications like Subscribers.
It’s so powerful, here is the impact I’ve been able to
generate from push notifications so far using Subscribers.
You can wait till next year to lever chatbots and push
notifications, but I’d recommend you start sooner than later. 😉
Trend #4: Moats will almost be non-existent, other than
brands
You’ve probably heard the word “moat” before. If you
haven’t, just think about water around a castle.
Back in the day, they had water all around the castle and
they used a drawbridge to get in and out of the castle, so it would protect
them from invaders.
With your business, you may have a moat. It could be a feature, your cost structure, a technological advantage, or even a marketing advantage.
Over the years, moats in the online world have slowly been disappearing.
It’s easy for anyone to copy these days. So, what’s separating you from your competition?
Something could work right now, but it won’t last forever…
But do you know what will still be a strong moat in 2020 and
even a stronger one in the future?
It’s branding.
People buy Jordan shoes because they love Michael Jordan.
His brand is stronger than ever even though he hasn’t played in the NBA for
roughly 16 years.
His shoes are so popular, it’s helped him boost his net worth to over a billion dollars. Plus owning a basketball team doesn’t hurt either. 😉
But what’s interesting is he’s made more money after
retirement than he did as a basketball player.
And it’s not just Jordan who built a strong brand… so
have the Kardashians.
Kylie launched a billion-dollar company according to Forbes and it was all because of her personal brand. Her cosmetic company isn’t doing anything revolutionary. She just has a strong brand… and good for her for monetizing her brand.
The same goes for companies like Nike, Ferrari, Tesla, American Express… and the list goes on and on.
It’s why companies are spending over 10
billion dollars a year on influencer marketing.
Just look at my agency NP Digital. It’s literally one of the fastest-growing ad agencies out there. And when I look at all of my competitors’ numbers, we are growing at a much faster pace because of my brand.
Yes, we have a great team, but again, that really isn’t a moat as a lot of agencies have great teams. It’s my brand that gave us a really fast kick start and continues to hopefully push us up.
You’ll want to build a brand in 2020. Whether it is personal
or corporate, it’s the best moat you can build in marketing. Plus, it will help
you with Google’s EAT.
Trend #5: Marketing will become a more even playing
field, you’ll have no choice but to use automation
When I first started off as an entrepreneur, I turned to SEO because I couldn’t afford the big ad budgets as my competitors.
Heck, I couldn’t even afford to run any paid ads.
Over the years, the playing field has become more level.
There are credit card companies like Brex that make it easier for startups to
get approved for larger limits and you may not have to pay them back right
away.
There are financing companies that will give you cash to
spend on marketing, so non-venture funded companies can more easily compete.
There are even companies like Lighter Capital that will give you loans without all of the headaches based on your existing revenue.
And to top it off, software solutions are now starting to integrate AI to give better recommendations. From Clickflow and RankScience to Distilled ODN… everyone is trying to use AI to make SEO and other forms of marketing.
Heck, BrightEdge can even automate your SEO (or at least a large portion of it). According to them, their automated SEO solution increases page views per visit by 60% as well as provides 21% more keywords on page one.
Keep in mind their clients are really big (their software starts in the thousands of dollars per month) so they would probably see better results than most companies, but still, you will start seeing many more software companies leverage AI.
Even with Ubersuggest, I’m working on creating AI that does the SEO for you so you no longer have to spend endless hours while, at the same time, saving you thousands of dollars.
In other words, the marketing playing field is getting more
even. And if you want to do well, you are going to have to leverage AI and
automation.
If everyone else is using it and you aren’t, you are going to get crushed because it will make changes faster and more accurately than a human. Again, it’s the only option you’ll have if you want to continually compete.
But don’t worry, there will be affordable/free solutions that exist, it’s just a matter of time. 😉
If everyone is leveraging the same AI marketing technology, how can you beat your competitors?
Well, it will come down to everything else… price, customer
service, upselling, operations, sales… All of the small stuff is what’s going
to help you win.
Trend #6: There will be no more silver bullets, we will
all have to optimize for marginal gains
A lot of businesses were built off of one marketing channel.
Dropbox grew through referral marketing. Invite more
friends, get more free space.
Facebook was built off your email address book. Facebook used to tap into it and invite all of your contacts to use Facebook on your behalf.
Companies like Quora and Yelp were built off of SEO. All of those rankings really help drive their businesses.
But you no longer can build a business through just one
marketing channel. Good channels now get saturated extremely fast.
Even if they work and cause explosive growth, it will only last for a short while before your competitors jump on board and make it harder.
Marketing is now heading in the direction of being about “marginal gains.”
There’s a British cycling coach named Dave Brailsford. His
belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1
percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.
And he’s right, that’s how you win a race.
The same will be with your marketing. There will be a big shift from people focusing on one channel and trying to find the “Holy Grail of marketing” to working on slightly improving each area of your marketing.
From split testing your title tags to get a few ranking improvements to adding checkout bumps to your order page so you can spend a little bit more on your paid ads to using Google Data Studio so you can better optimize for your lifetime value…
It’s all about the little things. That’s what is going to
add up to winning.
That’s what you’ll have to shift your mindset to in order to win in 2020 and beyond.
Trend #7: Personalization is the new marketing
The problem with marketing as it exists today is that 95% of your visitors will never convert into a customer. And that’s if you are lucky.
Chances are you are more likely looking at 97% plus of your
visitors never converting.
The big reason isn’t that your marketing sucks or that all
of those visitors are junk and unqualified.
It’s that your message doesn’t fit every single one of your
visitors.
But through personalization, you can convert more of your visitors into customers.
A basic example of this is Amazon. When you go to Amazon, they know your patterns and what you typically buy so they show you what they think you want to see in order to boost their conversions.
And it works! When I log into Amazon I see tons of household supplies because that is what I buy the most often. I never buy dog food (which is smart because I don’t have a dog,) so I’ll never see ads for dog food.
Businesses are also trying to personalize each and every single experience both online and offline.
Companies like Amperity are trying to create a customer relationship engine so you can better serve each of your customers, whether it is online or offline.
Marketing is going to become a game of personalization. With
ad costs and even general marketing costs rising, you have no choice but to
figure out how to convert the 97% of your traffic that just never comes back.
You’ll see a big push for this in 2020.
Conclusion
I know a lot of the stuff I mentioned above isn’t talked about a lot and they aren’t popular marketing topics that everyone wants to hear… but it is the future.
These are trends that will come true, some already are, and
you have to adapt for them.
Here’s the beautiful part, though. You just read this, and now have a chance to act on the information before your competition. So, make sure you go and do so.
I want to see you not only succeed but I want you to beat
your competition. And I believe you can, whether you are a big company, or just
starting off with very little to no money.
So, what do you think of the trends above? Do you see any
marketing trends that will come true in 2020 that few people talk about?
The post Marketing Trends for 2020: Here’s What Will Happen That Nobody is Talking About appeared first on Neil Patel.
A Crash Course in Custom Audiences for Your Social Media Ads
When you want to get your message in front of the right people on social media, where do you turn?
More and more, brands and businesses are turning to social ads and custom audiences. You can do a lot of awesome, targeted messaging by focusing on the right audiences with your ads — whether you’re talking to a group of customers, a bunch of website visitors, or a list of subscribers
In this post, we’ll talk you through ways to build custom audiences and lookalike audiences on all the major social media platforms, plus share a couple ideas of how you can put these audiences to the best use.
Best wishes for some well-targeted, highly successful ads!
An introduction to custom audiences
There’s a huge amount to cover with social media ads.
Since this blog post focuses specifically on audiences, let’s start there. In general, an audience is going to be the bucket of people who will potentially see your ad. This group can be customized based on a variety of factors, which we’ll get to in a minute.
A custom audience is a step beyond the basic demographic and psychographic audience filters. A custom audience can be based on an outside source like a set of emails or website visitors or on the social media behavior of users.
And then you have lookalike audiences, which take one of your custom audience and expand it to a larger group based on the qualities that the custom audience has in common. For instance, if all the people in your custom audience are interested in augmented reality, use social on a tablet, and have master’s degrees, then a lookalike audience will include people who share these attributes, too.
As you can tell, there are many ways to slice and dice this information to build some really unique audiences.
So let’s get dive into some of the details, starting with the biggest and most robust social advertising networks … Facebook and Instagram.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Facebook and Instagram Ads
Advertising for both Facebook and Instagram is combined into the Facebook Ads Manager. You can run all your ads from here as well as create and manage all your audiences.
Within Facebook, there are a handful of custom audiences that you can build. This list includes:
1. A customer list — also known as a standard custom audiences.
This audience is based on a list of emails, phone numbers, or Facebook user IDs that Facebook can then take and match to its list of users. Typically you’ll find that Facebook can match between 60 and 70 percent of the contacts on your customer list.
2. You can create a website custom audience.
With this audience, instead of uploading a list of customer emails or phone numbers, you build the audience based on traffic to your website. Using Facebook Pixel tracking, you can create an audience of people who have visited any specific page on your website during a set time period.
3. You can create custom audiences based on app activity
If you happen to have a mobile app or game, you can build audiences based on the actions that people take within your product.
4. You can use offline activity to build a Facebook audience.
This could include things like conversations that happen offline in brick-and-mortar stores or information you collect on a spreadsheet.
5. Build an audience from Facebook and Instagram engagement
These can be based on who engages with your posts, videos, events, and profile. You can even set the timeframe of this engagement so that you’re building an audience of people who recently engaged, like in the last 90 days, or who engaged anytime in the past year.
Strategy Ideas for Making the Most of Your Custom Audiences
Jumping quickly into the strategy of ads and audiences, we thought this nugget from a recent Jon Loomer blog post was really interesting. In the blog post, they shared that the most popular Instagram audience strategy is lumping all audience types and time windows together into one large chunk — like, everyone who engaged with your profile in the last 365 days, for instance.
As you might guess, there is so much more you can be doing with these audiences!
Let’s take a closer look at engagement audiences for instance:
With the robust filtering of Facebook’s ads tool, you can build audiences of engagers based on a huge number of different factors like who has visited your Instagram profile, messaged you, or saved a post or an ad.
When it comes to these custom audiences, we quite liked this tip from social media today:Building “warm” audiences of people who have engaged with your content within a recent timeframe. Video in particular is a useful engagement and attention metric. So, say you create a ‘warm’ audience of people who’ve watched a certain amount of video from your page. From there, you can create a Lookalike Audience based on the warm audience, which will allow you to expand your reach to include people who share similar behaviors to that initial, warm, engaged group.
The Jon Loomer blog has a few favorite audience tips, too, specifically around building engagement-based audiences. These include:
- People who have engaged in any way with your brand on Instagram in the past seven days, the past 20 days, and the past 90 days.
- People who have visited your Instagram profile in the past 30 days but who are not customers
- and People who have viewed your Instagram Stories videos in the past seven days
Another way to work with custom audiences is through retargeting.
This gets at the custom audience type of pixel tracking and website / profile visits.
We’ve talked to lots of brands that start out with targeting anyone and everyone that visits their website in their retargeting campaigns. Needless to say that approach isn’t always the most effective.
Customers visit your website for lots of different reasons. They visit different pages. The pages they visit represent different buyer intents. Perhaps they’re not looking to buy your product at all. The key is to match your custom advertising audiences to those shoppers’ intents.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce brand and someone visits your website shopping for shoes, make sure that you segment those people into a custom audience labeled “shoe shoppers” or “footwear.”
Over the past year at Buffer we’ve created various audiences based on the subject matter our visitors are interested in learning about. We have a custom audience for traffic to all Facebook marketing pages, Instagram marketing, customer experience, case studies, etc. That allows us to be hyper-focused on what type of content we deliver, which helps to drive down costs.
We have a whole podcast about it if you want to check out.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Pinterest Ads
As you’ll find with all of these social networks, they’re not quite as robust with ads offerings as Facebook and Instagram. But that’s okay! There’s still plenty of customization you can do.For Pinterest, you have a few options for what to create when it comes to customer audiences.
You can build audiences
- Based on visitors who went to your site
- Through a customer list that you upload — like a list of emails
- Based on people who engaged with pins that link to your website
- With an actalike audience that behaves similarly to an existing custom audience that you’ve created
The visitor audience is based on a Pinterest tag, very much like the Facebook pixel. The Pinterest tag is a piece of JavaScript code you can install on your website to gather conversion insights and to build audiences that you can then target, based on actions taken on your site.
The Pinterest engagement audiences are really interesting, too. For these, all you need is to confirm your domain with Pinterest, and then Pinterest will be able to check to see which Pinterest users have engaged with pins that link back to your website. So for instance, if 1,000 people had saved a pin of Buffer blog content, we could build an engagement audience based on this.
Similar to the Facebook and Instagram engagement audiences, Pinterest gives you a handful of options to further customize this group. You can filter based on a specific URL, based on a pin category, or even based on the percentage of video that’s been viewed.
One interesting way that e-commerce brands can use this is to create audiences that are interested in particular product categories — people who click on certain links or certain Pins.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Twitter
With Twitter ads, you can build custom audiences based on
- An uploaded list of contacts or customers
- A collection of website visitors based on data you get from using a Twitter website tag
- A list of your mobile app users
- A flexible audience.
The flexible audiences feature is similar in nature to some of the engagement audiences we’ve talked about before. These audiences give Twitter advertisers a way to save combinations of audiences and subsets of audiences, based on factors like recency and frequency of interactions.
How to Create Custom Audiences for LinkedIn
You can build custom audiences on LinkedIn based on a list of contacts that you upload or you can build audiences based on website data, captured using a LinkedIn tag.
One interesting bit of audience customization that LinkedIn provides is with account-based audiences. Let’s say that you want to get a certain percentage of Fortune 500 companies using your product; well, you can upload this list of accounts to LinkedIn and build a custom audience that focused on the stakeholders of these companies.
Yes, there’s a lot of interesting things you can do on LinkedIn if you’re a business selling to other businesses. Then of course Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are all great for selling your products and services direct to consumers.
That’s right, and before we go, we’d love to leave you with just a couple more ideas for how you can use these custom audiences in unique ways.
More Tips for Getting the Most out of Your Custom Audiences
I thought this tip from AdEspresso was pretty intriguing.They boost a lot of their content to a wide audience and then create a custom audience based on people who click that content and visit the website. This custom website audience, then, is made up of people who have already shown a lot of intent and might be more primed to start a trial.
Another exciting way to use custom audiences is to think creatively about what you share with a custom audience of existing customers. Typically you might think of ads as a way to acquire more customers. But what if you used this list as a way to keep existing customers engaged? You can build a custom audience based on people who have shopped with you in the past or used your product before, but it’s been awhile since they returned — a “sleepy” audience of sorts.
And finally, there are some neat things you can do with custom audiences of newsletter subscribers. You can segment the list into audiences of engaged subscribers and disengaged subscribers and deliver unique content to each group. For the disengaged group in particular there’s a lot of value in re-engaging: MailChimp ran an analysis of 60 million e-commerce purchases and 40 million email addresses from retailers and found that a single inactive subscriber is still worth 32% of an active subscriber.
About the Science of Social Media
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ listeners each week and rock your social media channels as a result!
How to Use LinkedIn Video to Acquire More Customers
Want to generate more leads with LinkedIn? Wondering how LinkedIn video can help? In this article, you’ll learn how to create LinkedIn videos that improve your customer acquisition efforts. Why Businesses Should Consider LinkedIn for Customer Acquisition Customer acquisition is no longer what it used to be. According to HubSpot’s research, 81% of consumers trust the […]
The post How to Use LinkedIn Video to Acquire More Customers appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.
A Crash Course in Custom Audiences for Your Social Media Ads
When you want to get your message in front of the right people on social media, where do you turn?
More and more, brands and businesses are turning to social ads and custom audiences. You can do a lot of awesome, targeted messaging by focusing on the right audiences with your ads — whether you’re talking to a group of customers, a bunch of website visitors, or a list of subscribers
In this post, we’ll talk you through ways to build custom audiences and lookalike audiences on all the major social media platforms, plus share a couple ideas of how you can put these audiences to the best use.
Best wishes for some well-targeted, highly successful ads!
An introduction to custom audiences
There’s a huge amount to cover with social media ads.
Since this blog post focuses specifically on audiences, let’s start there. In general, an audience is going to be the bucket of people who will potentially see your ad. This group can be customized based on a variety of factors, which we’ll get to in a minute.
A custom audience is a step beyond the basic demographic and psychographic audience filters. A custom audience can be based on an outside source like a set of emails or website visitors or on the social media behavior of users.
And then you have lookalike audiences, which take one of your custom audience and expand it to a larger group based on the qualities that the custom audience has in common. For instance, if all the people in your custom audience are interested in augmented reality, use social on a tablet, and have master’s degrees, then a lookalike audience will include people who share these attributes, too.
As you can tell, there are many ways to slice and dice this information to build some really unique audiences.
So let’s get dive into some of the details, starting with the biggest and most robust social advertising networks … Facebook and Instagram.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Facebook and Instagram Ads
Advertising for both Facebook and Instagram is combined into the Facebook Ads Manager. You can run all your ads from here as well as create and manage all your audiences.
Within Facebook, there are a handful of custom audiences that you can build. This list includes:
1. A customer list — also known as a standard custom audiences.
This audience is based on a list of emails, phone numbers, or Facebook user IDs that Facebook can then take and match to its list of users. Typically you’ll find that Facebook can match between 60 and 70 percent of the contacts on your customer list.
2. You can create a website custom audience.
With this audience, instead of uploading a list of customer emails or phone numbers, you build the audience based on traffic to your website. Using Facebook Pixel tracking, you can create an audience of people who have visited any specific page on your website during a set time period.
3. You can create custom audiences based on app activity
If you happen to have a mobile app or game, you can build audiences based on the actions that people take within your product.
4. You can use offline activity to build a Facebook audience.
This could include things like conversations that happen offline in brick-and-mortar stores or information you collect on a spreadsheet.
5. Build an audience from Facebook and Instagram engagement
These can be based on who engages with your posts, videos, events, and profile. You can even set the timeframe of this engagement so that you’re building an audience of people who recently engaged, like in the last 90 days, or who engaged anytime in the past year.
Strategy Ideas for Making the Most of Your Custom Audiences
Jumping quickly into the strategy of ads and audiences, we thought this nugget from a recent Jon Loomer blog post was really interesting. In the blog post, they shared that the most popular Instagram audience strategy is lumping all audience types and time windows together into one large chunk — like, everyone who engaged with your profile in the last 365 days, for instance.
As you might guess, there is so much more you can be doing with these audiences!
Let’s take a closer look at engagement audiences for instance:
With the robust filtering of Facebook’s ads tool, you can build audiences of engagers based on a huge number of different factors like who has visited your Instagram profile, messaged you, or saved a post or an ad.
When it comes to these custom audiences, we quite liked this tip from social media today:Building “warm” audiences of people who have engaged with your content within a recent timeframe. Video in particular is a useful engagement and attention metric. So, say you create a ‘warm’ audience of people who’ve watched a certain amount of video from your page. From there, you can create a Lookalike Audience based on the warm audience, which will allow you to expand your reach to include people who share similar behaviors to that initial, warm, engaged group.
The Jon Loomer blog has a few favorite audience tips, too, specifically around building engagement-based audiences. These include:
- People who have engaged in any way with your brand on Instagram in the past seven days, the past 20 days, and the past 90 days.
- People who have visited your Instagram profile in the past 30 days but who are not customers
- and People who have viewed your Instagram Stories videos in the past seven days
Another way to work with custom audiences is through retargeting.
This gets at the custom audience type of pixel tracking and website / profile visits.
We’ve talked to lots of brands that start out with targeting anyone and everyone that visits their website in their retargeting campaigns. Needless to say that approach isn’t always the most effective.
Customers visit your website for lots of different reasons. They visit different pages. The pages they visit represent different buyer intents. Perhaps they’re not looking to buy your product at all. The key is to match your custom advertising audiences to those shoppers’ intents.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce brand and someone visits your website shopping for shoes, make sure that you segment those people into a custom audience labeled “shoe shoppers” or “footwear.”
Over the past year at Buffer we’ve created various audiences based on the subject matter our visitors are interested in learning about. We have a custom audience for traffic to all Facebook marketing pages, Instagram marketing, customer experience, case studies, etc. That allows us to be hyper-focused on what type of content we deliver, which helps to drive down costs.
We have a whole podcast about it if you want to check out.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Pinterest Ads
As you’ll find with all of these social networks, they’re not quite as robust with ads offerings as Facebook and Instagram. But that’s okay! There’s still plenty of customization you can do.For Pinterest, you have a few options for what to create when it comes to customer audiences.
You can build audiences
- Based on visitors who went to your site
- Through a customer list that you upload — like a list of emails
- Based on people who engaged with pins that link to your website
- With an actalike audience that behaves similarly to an existing custom audience that you’ve created
The visitor audience is based on a Pinterest tag, very much like the Facebook pixel. The Pinterest tag is a piece of JavaScript code you can install on your website to gather conversion insights and to build audiences that you can then target, based on actions taken on your site.
The Pinterest engagement audiences are really interesting, too. For these, all you need is to confirm your domain with Pinterest, and then Pinterest will be able to check to see which Pinterest users have engaged with pins that link back to your website. So for instance, if 1,000 people had saved a pin of Buffer blog content, we could build an engagement audience based on this.
Similar to the Facebook and Instagram engagement audiences, Pinterest gives you a handful of options to further customize this group. You can filter based on a specific URL, based on a pin category, or even based on the percentage of video that’s been viewed.
One interesting way that e-commerce brands can use this is to create audiences that are interested in particular product categories — people who click on certain links or certain Pins.
How to Create Custom Audiences for Twitter
With Twitter ads, you can build custom audiences based on
- An uploaded list of contacts or customers
- A collection of website visitors based on data you get from using a Twitter website tag
- A list of your mobile app users
- A flexible audience.
The flexible audiences feature is similar in nature to some of the engagement audiences we’ve talked about before. These audiences give Twitter advertisers a way to save combinations of audiences and subsets of audiences, based on factors like recency and frequency of interactions.
How to Create Custom Audiences for LinkedIn
You can build custom audiences on LinkedIn based on a list of contacts that you upload or you can build audiences based on website data, captured using a LinkedIn tag.
One interesting bit of audience customization that LinkedIn provides is with account-based audiences. Let’s say that you want to get a certain percentage of Fortune 500 companies using your product; well, you can upload this list of accounts to LinkedIn and build a custom audience that focused on the stakeholders of these companies.
Yes, there’s a lot of interesting things you can do on LinkedIn if you’re a business selling to other businesses. Then of course Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are all great for selling your products and services direct to consumers.
That’s right, and before we go, we’d love to leave you with just a couple more ideas for how you can use these custom audiences in unique ways.
More Tips for Getting the Most out of Your Custom Audiences
I thought this tip from AdEspresso was pretty intriguing.They boost a lot of their content to a wide audience and then create a custom audience based on people who click that content and visit the website. This custom website audience, then, is made up of people who have already shown a lot of intent and might be more primed to start a trial.
Another exciting way to use custom audiences is to think creatively about what you share with a custom audience of existing customers. Typically you might think of ads as a way to acquire more customers. But what if you used this list as a way to keep existing customers engaged? You can build a custom audience based on people who have shopped with you in the past or used your product before, but it’s been awhile since they returned — a “sleepy” audience of sorts.
And finally, there are some neat things you can do with custom audiences of newsletter subscribers. You can segment the list into audiences of engaged subscribers and disengaged subscribers and deliver unique content to each group. For the disengaged group in particular there’s a lot of value in re-engaging: MailChimp ran an analysis of 60 million e-commerce purchases and 40 million email addresses from retailers and found that a single inactive subscriber is still worth 32% of an active subscriber.
About the Science of Social Media
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ listeners each week and rock your social media channels as a result!
Marketing Trends for 2020: Here’s What Will Happen That Nobody is Talking About
The new year is right around the corner. And I know you are already prepared because you read this blog and tons of other marketing blogs, right?
But here is the thing: I also read most of the popular marketing blogs, follow all of the marketing YouTube channels, and listen to the same podcasts you do.
And I’ve noticed that very few people are talking about what’s really going to happen in 2020.
Sure, they will tell you things like voice search is going to account for over 50% of the search queries next year but all of that stuff has already been talked about.
And there are actually more interesting trends that will
affect your marketing that no one is really talking about.
So, what are these trends? What’s going to happen in 2020?
Alright, here goes…
Trend #1: Companies who rely on Google Analytics will get
beat by their competition
We all love Google Analytics.
Heck, I love it so much I log in at least 3 or 4 times a day. And here is the kicker: I get so much traffic that my Google Analytics only updates once a day.
I really need to break that habit but that’s for another day.
You are probably wondering, what’s wrong with Google Analytics?
There actually isn’t much wrong with it. It’s a great tool,
especially considering that it’s free.
But here is the thing… marketing has been changing. New channels are being constantly introduced, such as voice search.
And transactions no longer are as simple as someone coming and buying from you and that’s it.
These days there are things like upsells, down sells, repeat purchases, and even checkout bumps. On top of that, there are so many different ways you can generate revenue for your online business, such as partnerships, affiliate marketing, and even webinars.
This has caused companies to start using analytics solutions that tie into their database better, such as Amplitude. Or better yet, you are seeing a big push into business intelligence.
A central place where you can tie in all of your data and make better-informed decisions so you can optimize for your lifetime value instead of your short-term income.
In 2020, you will see more companies adopting business intelligence solutions… from paid ones to free ones like Google Data Studio.
If you haven’t checked out Data Studio, you’ll want to start now because it is easy to pass in all of your business and marketing data into one place. For example, you can pass in more granular data from your Facebook ad campaigns into Data Studio while that would be a bit difficult to do with Google Analytics.
Trend #2: Companies will optimize for voice search, but not
for revenue
According to ComScore, over 50% of the
searches in 2020 will be from voice search. But that’s not really a new
trend… everyone has been talking about that for years.
So, what’s the big deal?
Optimizing for voice search is a great way to get your brand
out more, but how is that going to convert into sales?
I haven’t seen too many solutions so far when it comes to
capitalizing on your voice search traffic, but so far there is Jetson.ai.
If you aren’t familiar with Jetson.ai, it makes it so people can buy from your site using voice search. It doesn’t matter if it is Alexa or Google Home, they work with most of the popular devices.
What’s cool about Jetson.ai is that it can learn from each customer and customize the interactions.
For example, if I keep ordering the same toothpaste from a specific store using voice search, Jetson.ai keeps track of that so you can easily keep ordering the same product over and over again with little to no friction.
Heck, it’s easier than logging into your computer or pulling
out your phone to make a purchase.
Trend #3: Your lists won’t convert as well, so you’ll
have to look for alternative communication channels
Email, it’s something we all use in the corporate world.
But here is something interesting when it comes to marketing
emails… I’m in a group with a bit over 109 email marketers across different
industries in different parts of the world.
And can you guess what we are all noticing?
Our open rates are staying roughly the same and that’s
largely because we all know how to clean and optimizing for deliverability.
But our click rates are going down.
So far as a group we have seen our click rates drop by
9.4% in 2019.
That’s crazy considering as a group we have over 146 million email addresses.
Now does this mean email is dead?
Of course not!!!
Email is here to stay and will be here for a very long time.
But what companies will have to do in 2020 is to leverage more communication channels.
Chatbots will take off drastically. Not necessarily the Intercom’s or Drift’s of the world but more so the solutions like ManyChat and MobileMonkey.
ManyChat and MobileMonkey leverage Facebook Messenger and as they connect it with Instagram and WhatsApp it will get even more popular.
In addition to chatbots, you’ll see more people leveraging
tools that allow push notifications like Subscribers.
It’s so powerful, here is the impact I’ve been able to
generate from push notifications so far using Subscribers.
You can wait till next year to lever chatbots and push
notifications, but I’d recommend you start sooner than later. 😉
Trend #4: Moats will almost be non-existent, other than
brands
You’ve probably heard the word “moat” before. If you
haven’t, just think about water around a castle.
Back in the day, they had water all around the castle and
they used a drawbridge to get in and out of the castle, so it would protect
them from invaders.
With your business, you may have a moat. It could be a feature, your cost structure, a technological advantage, or even a marketing advantage.
Over the years, moats in the online world have slowly been disappearing.
It’s easy for anyone to copy these days. So, what’s separating you from your competition?
Something could work right now, but it won’t last forever…
But do you know what will still be a strong moat in 2020 and
even a stronger one in the future?
It’s branding.
People buy Jordan shoes because they love Michael Jordan.
His brand is stronger than ever even though he hasn’t played in the NBA for
roughly 16 years.
His shoes are so popular, it’s helped him boost his net worth to over a billion dollars. Plus owning a basketball team doesn’t hurt either. 😉
But what’s interesting is he’s made more money after
retirement than he did as a basketball player.
And it’s not just Jordan who built a strong brand… so
have the Kardashians.
Kylie launched a billion-dollar company according to Forbes and it was all because of her personal brand. Her cosmetic company isn’t doing anything revolutionary. She just has a strong brand… and good for her for monetizing her brand.
The same goes for companies like Nike, Ferrari, Tesla, American Express… and the list goes on and on.
It’s why companies are spending over 10
billion dollars a year on influencer marketing.
Just look at my agency NP Digital. It’s literally one of the fastest-growing ad agencies out there. And when I look at all of my competitors’ numbers, we are growing at a much faster pace because of my brand.
Yes, we have a great team, but again, that really isn’t a moat as a lot of agencies have great teams. It’s my brand that gave us a really fast kick start and continues to hopefully push us up.
You’ll want to build a brand in 2020. Whether it is personal
or corporate, it’s the best moat you can build in marketing. Plus, it will help
you with Google’s EAT.
Trend #5: Marketing will become a more even playing
field, you’ll have no choice but to use automation
When I first started off as an entrepreneur, I turned to SEO because I couldn’t afford the big ad budgets as my competitors.
Heck, I couldn’t even afford to run any paid ads.
Over the years, the playing field has become more level.
There are credit card companies like Brex that make it easier for startups to
get approved for larger limits and you may not have to pay them back right
away.
There are financing companies that will give you cash to
spend on marketing, so non-venture funded companies can more easily compete.
There are even companies like Lighter Capital that will give you loans without all of the headaches based on your existing revenue.
And to top it off, software solutions are now starting to integrate AI to give better recommendations. From Clickflow and RankScience to Distilled ODN… everyone is trying to use AI to make SEO and other forms of marketing.
Heck, BrightEdge can even automate your SEO (or at least a large portion of it). According to them, their automated SEO solution increases page views per visit by 60% as well as provides 21% more keywords on page one.
Keep in mind their clients are really big (their software starts in the thousands of dollars per month) so they would probably see better results than most companies, but still, you will start seeing many more software companies leverage AI.
Even with Ubersuggest, I’m working on creating AI that does the SEO for you so you no longer have to spend endless hours while, at the same time, saving you thousands of dollars.
In other words, the marketing playing field is getting more
even. And if you want to do well, you are going to have to leverage AI and
automation.
If everyone else is using it and you aren’t, you are going to get crushed because it will make changes faster and more accurately than a human. Again, it’s the only option you’ll have if you want to continually compete.
But don’t worry, there will be affordable/free solutions that exist, it’s just a matter of time. 😉
If everyone is leveraging the same AI marketing technology, how can you beat your competitors?
Well, it will come down to everything else… price, customer
service, upselling, operations, sales… All of the small stuff is what’s going
to help you win.
Trend #6: There will be no more silver bullets, we will
all have to optimize for marginal gains
A lot of businesses were built off of one marketing channel.
Dropbox grew through referral marketing. Invite more
friends, get more free space.
Facebook was built off your email address book. Facebook used to tap into it and invite all of your contacts to use Facebook on your behalf.
Companies like Quora and Yelp were built off of SEO. All of those rankings really help drive their businesses.
But you no longer can build a business through just one
marketing channel. Good channels now get saturated extremely fast.
Even if they work and cause explosive growth, it will only last for a short while before your competitors jump on board and make it harder.
Marketing is now heading in the direction of being about “marginal gains.”
There’s a British cycling coach named Dave Brailsford. His
belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just 1
percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.
And he’s right, that’s how you win a race.
The same will be with your marketing. There will be a big shift from people focusing on one channel and trying to find the “Holy Grail of marketing” to working on slightly improving each area of your marketing.
From split testing your title tags to get a few ranking improvements to adding checkout bumps to your order page so you can spend a little bit more on your paid ads to using Google Data Studio so you can better optimize for your lifetime value…
It’s all about the little things. That’s what is going to
add up to winning.
That’s what you’ll have to shift your mindset to in order to win in 2020 and beyond.
Trend #7: Personalization is the new marketing
The problem with marketing as it exists today is that 95% of your visitors will never convert into a customer. And that’s if you are lucky.
Chances are you are more likely looking at 97% plus of your
visitors never converting.
The big reason isn’t that your marketing sucks or that all
of those visitors are junk and unqualified.
It’s that your message doesn’t fit every single one of your
visitors.
But through personalization, you can convert more of your visitors into customers.
A basic example of this is Amazon. When you go to Amazon, they know your patterns and what you typically buy so they show you what they think you want to see in order to boost their conversions.
And it works! When I log into Amazon I see tons of household supplies because that is what I buy the most often. I never buy dog food (which is smart because I don’t have a dog,) so I’ll never see ads for dog food.
Businesses are also trying to personalize each and every single experience both online and offline.
Companies like Amperity are trying to create a customer relationship engine so you can better serve each of your customers, whether it is online or offline.
Marketing is going to become a game of personalization. With
ad costs and even general marketing costs rising, you have no choice but to
figure out how to convert the 97% of your traffic that just never comes back.
You’ll see a big push for this in 2020.
Conclusion
I know a lot of the stuff I mentioned above isn’t talked about a lot and they aren’t popular marketing topics that everyone wants to hear… but it is the future.
These are trends that will come true, some already are, and
you have to adapt for them.
Here’s the beautiful part, though. You just read this, and now have a chance to act on the information before your competition. So, make sure you go and do so.
I want to see you not only succeed but I want you to beat
your competition. And I believe you can, whether you are a big company, or just
starting off with very little to no money.
So, what do you think of the trends above? Do you see any
marketing trends that will come true in 2020 that few people talk about?
The post Marketing Trends for 2020: Here’s What Will Happen That Nobody is Talking About appeared first on Neil Patel.