In this blog, Matthew Creswick, Group Head of Marketing at Huble Digital, highlights the seven most effective digital marketing strategies in 2019, as well as how these strategies can help businesses to increase brand awareness, sentiment and lead generation.
What marketing trends drive business growth in 2019?
Digital, Inbound, content and growth marketing are constantly changing. There’s no guarantee what works today will work in a few months’ time.
For marketing managers, this means keeping up to date with the latest news, trends and developments on a regular basis to determine what actually works.
To get ahead of the competition in 2019 (and the future) marketing managers must understand what strategies work right now and how to implement them into their marketing campaigns.
But what are the most effective digital marketing strategies in 2019?
1. Content marketing
According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound report, more than half (55%) of the marketers interviewed said that content creation is their top Inbound Marketing priority.
High-quality, search engine optimised content remains one of the most effective ways for businesses to attract interested parties online, demonstrate their expertise and convert website visitors into leads.
Not only does it serve to increase brand awareness and traffic to your website, creating high-quality blogs that are search engine optimised will help to increase your website’s domain authority and ranking on Google overall.
2. Video marketing
According to Engadget, More than one billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each day – and almost half the population (45%) watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week, statistics from WordStream reveal.
What this means is that more and more of your prospects are watching videos as a means to find the information they are looking for. However, this isn’t anything new, we’ve been told by the leading marketing bodies for years that ‘video is a must’. What has changed is that video has become much more accessible. With smartphones today, you don’t even need to buy a high-quality camera. You can just use your phone to get started with and see how it goes from there!
3. Inbound Marketing
At every point of the buyer’s journey marketers and salespeople should be asking themselves: “How can we best help our potential customers?”.
Inbound Marketing is all about helping people. It’s all about creating high-quality, prospect-orientated and search engine optimised content that can be found online via search engines and social media.
As interested parties find their way back to your website via organic search or social media to read your content, you include calls-to-action (CTAs) to direct those readers to another relevant piece of content or a landing page where they can potentially convert.
Inbound Marketing enables interested parties to qualify themselves – and provides you with a cost-effective and prospect-orientated method of lead generation.
4. Topic clusters
In the past search queries would be fragmented keyword terms – but now we ask complex questions and expect accurate results.
As a result, search engines now place more emphasis on topic-based content rather than content optimised for individual keywords and value web pages and websites that answer questions.
The best way to approach this change is by using topic clusters. A topic cluster is where a single ‘pillar’ page acts as the main hub of content for a specific topic and multiple sub pages (cluster content) related to that topic link to and from the pillar page. Think of a topic cluster as an eBook laid out as a web page with links to and from each section.
This approach will help you to answer the different questions prospects have on a particular topic – as well as improve the rank of your content on Google.
5. Chatbots
Research from HubSpot states that customers expect a response to an enquiry from marketing, sales or customer service within 10 minutes.
Even though these departments can be tremendously busy, it’s important to respond to every customer enquiry (It will also do wonders for brand sentiment).
Using a chatbot customer service teams can automatically answer simple questions and direct visitors to the right web pages. For more detailed queries, a chatbot can direct the website visitor to the most appropriate person to follow up with in more detail.
This allows marketing, sales and customer service teams to preserve resource, improve engagement and quickly respond to high-priority enquiries.
6. Customers as marketers
Your customers are your best marketers and salespeople. What they say about your business has a tremendous impact on how you are viewed by potential prospects.
Happy customers are the best customers – and businesses that grasp the fact that marketing and sales is a continuous process of delivering value will quickly improve brand sentiment and generate more referrals (often the best kind of leads).
Put more time into your referral-based marketing and ensure you help your customers even after the point of sale.
7. All-in-one marketing, sales and customer service tools
As marketing, sales and customer service teams expand and use their own tools – it becomes incredibly difficult to manage and get those tools to communicate with each other.
There’s also the issue of understanding how marketing, sales and customer service activities work together and contribute to the business’ bottom line.
Fortunately, more and more companies are developing their software infrastructure with the mindset of connectivity and visibility. This means that they are deploying all-in-one solutions to bring everything together under one roof.
Tools like HubSpot, for example, are leading the charge. HubSpot enables businesses to manage all aspects of their marketing, sales and customer service in one platform.
These are the seven most effective digital marketing strategies and trends in 2019. If you want to find out more about them and how they can help drive your business’ growth, check out more of our helpful blog content here which dives into all the industry trends in more details.
