Today’s small businesses have greater marketing options than ever. Still, many small businesses said that they wouldn’t be using digital marketing in 2024.
However, 75% of small businesses & marketers think that digital marketing is a highly effective method to attract new customers and generate new leads.
Before you dive into the trending marketing ways, you might want to know some interesting statistics demonstrating the situation.
In the U.S. , 50% of SMBs spend less than $300 on online marketing. 29% of businesses believe that they understand digital marketing and can do it all by themselves.
But most SMBs reduce their content marketing efforts right before the time they might gain some momentum.
Still, the most effective marketing channel for SMBs is word of mouth with 28% over SEO with 20%.
It proves that small-scale businesses need an effective marketing strategy, ideal tools, and some patience as well.
Trending marketing ways help to boost your website traffic, increase social media engagement, and get more conversions.
Digital trends allow you to tap into the digital marketing solutions which are already working for other successful digital marketers and brands.
Not just that, the marketing industry is dynamic and constantly changing. So a specific marketing trend, tactic, strategy, or technology might not work at the time which may have worked earlier.
That’s why you need to keep updating yourself with all the leading and ongoing trends in the digital marketing arena.
Here are these trending marketing ways with detailed analyses which can help your business to expand.
Trending Ways Of SEO
97% of online buyers search online to look a for local business in 2021. That statement alone makes SEO extremely important for all kinds of businesses irrespective of whether they operate online or offline.
Businesses that have an online presence tend to grow 40% faster than businesses that do not have an online presence.
For a business, SEO is a better marketing strategy than any other alternative ones. It is a highly targeted and very affordable strategy with quantifiable ROI.
SEO results in brand awareness by reaching out to a highly-concentrated target audience and yet broad. Overall, it increases lead generation and eventually sales.
You may find numerous SEO trends but these selective three are ideal, affordable, and impactful for a small business owner.
Search Intent
Google made the search intent a priority challenging the traditional sales funnel. In simple words, all the traditional SEO methods like backlinks do work.
But when your website doesn’t stand tall on any search intent through its content, there is less likely chance of it ranking.
Search intent is those results that give a Google user what they are looking for. It is about improving the search results that match the user’s search intent. It’s about reading the minds of consumers as to what’s their actual intent behind searching this term.
Informational, transactional, commercial, and navigational are the four types of search intent. While looking at a keyword, one can classify it to be one of these four types.
If the keyword is “what is intermittent fasting” this will be an informational type of search intent. It means that the user is just looking for information here.
Google will show only those results which are targeted to inform the user about the respective search term instead to sell them related products.
So the user will only find informational and explanatory articles on ‘ intermittent fasting’ not some product based on it.
That means your website or content must be optimized according to user intent, so you get a highly active, actionable, and motivated audience. It is undoubtedly a cost-effective content marketing strategy to rank faster.
SEO Local
People do all kinds of searches to find local information related to their demographic region. Users are searching more and more such as about nearby restaurants, services, cafes, movies, and so on.
To be visible in local searches is more important for small-scale businesses. Better local SEO optimization gives your company more visibility and preference on geographical searches.
When you optimize the online presence of your company to rank it geographically, it is called Local SEO. There has been a 900% increase in searches like ‘near me’ and ‘close by’ in the last two years.
Start by creating a Google My Business profile. Feed accurate details like address, business hours, local phone number, and geo-tagged high-resolution pictures of your location and products.
You should also try to get more and more customer reviews because 93% of consumers say that reviews impact their buying decision.
Voice Search
By 2020, 30% of searches will be without mobile screens, or 50% of searches will be voice searches. Voice search emerged as the future of consumer experience on any search engine.
It allows you to command the device verbally instead of typing the search term. 4 of 10 users in the United States use voice search in a day.
You should choose longer and conversational keywords to optimize your content. Think about what you will say on voice search to find something.
There are tools like Answer the Public, StoryBase, and Question Samurai which develop questions out of a keyword.
Voice search optimization can give your business a competitive edge over others.
Video SEO
YouTube, a video-sharing platform is the 2nd largest search engine which demonstrates the significance of video SEO.
Online video in digital marketing is exploding, especially with Youtube. They have one billion active users. Due to the increase in competition, getting found in searches becomes trickier than ever.
You need to optimize your videos with proper descriptions, keywords, meta tags, title, and other factors for SEO. So, you can appear on more search result pages.
Best SEO Tools
Spyfu
Spyfu reveals the search marketing formula from your successful competitors. The tool allows you to track, and analyze the websites of your competitors.
You can find the keywords your competitors bought over time and how they had performed as well.
Apart from it, you can certainly look for organic ranking, keyword evaluations, and all ad variations.
It provides extensive tools to perform PPC competitor research, SEO competitors research, and keyword research tools as well.
Spyfu boosts your web traffic and gets you the most profitable keywords. It can be a game-changer for your website.
Google Search Console
It is a free yet highly effective tool presented by Google itself.
Google Search Console helps to track, monitor, and report on a website’s presence online on search pages.
To improve the SEO health of your website, it allows you to optimize it, so you can rank your website on Search Engine Result Pages, also known as SERPs.
Ubersuggest
Neil Patel’s free SEO tool gives all the premium SEO features you find in a paid tool. It allows you to analyze your competitors’ websites.
You can find their top searched pages, trending keywords, keyword volume, CPC, and other ranking factors as well.
Google Trends
For small businesses, you can analyze a search term or keyword for its popularity. You can get into keyword insights, queries, trends, and interests over time according to geographical regions.
Trending Ways Of Content Marketing
Content Marketing might be a long-term marketing strategy but definitely the most effective and sustainable. It is a form of marketing that uses content to build a strong relationship with your audience.
Content helps users to find you by increasing your brand visibility.
It is also great at retaining an audience for a longer time as building trust and reliability. In short, content marketing is beneficial to every stage of the sales funnel.
You can utilize any form of content such as blogs, social media posts, videos, and others. The most popular ones are social media posts, videos, illustrations, case studies, ebooks/white papers, and infographics.
For small businesses, you have to be smarter with your content marketing strategy. Because it is the most cost-effective way to build your brand. You can be as creative as you want with your content to gain more eyeballs.
Start with following these top trending ways for content marketing.
Video Content is the Fastest Growing Content Marketing Strategy
More than 50% of consumers prefer video in all kinds of formats and content forms. It
drives a 157% increase in organic traffic. Video content is an exponentially growing market that increases conversions by 80%.
87% of marketers use online video. Video content is ruling social media right now and it will continue as a popular trend in the future as well.
Every second social media trend involves video driving massive results. You can witness this boom all over on social media platforms.
Consumers Are Ready to Pay for Educational Content
Educational content allows consumers 131% more likely to buy the product or services. Even after a week, they have 48% more chances to buy from the same brand.
But more than that, consumers are ready to pay for the educational content-based products themselves. Influencers publish their ebooks and digital courses to attract new customers.
The number of ebook users is expected to be 89.5 million by 2032 where it is now 82.5 million. Also, the user penetration in the ebooks will reach 26.4% from 25.07% as of today.
Educational content has primarily two benefits :
- It builds a consistent consumer base.
- A website with educational content sells more products.
- The content itself becomes a product to sell.
Paid Distribution of Content
Content marketing requires a significant amount of investment and patience for results. Small businesses often over-rely on free traffic leads to an ineffective content marketing strategy.
For small businesses, paid advertising might sound a bit unreasonable. But it can generate high revenue in the long term by exposing your brand to a high target audience.
93 % of Facebook promotions, 79% of Twitter ads, 71% of LinkedIn ads, and 55% of Youtube ads are used by marketers.
Also, 63% of people said that they would click on Google Ads. Small businesses should focus on Facebook and Google Ads as these two are the best-paid advertisement platform.
You can customize your ad campaigns according to your budget. With trials and errors, you can learn what works for you without spending a moon on it.
Best Content Marketing Tools
Buzzsumo
Find and analyze the content which works on the internet.
Look for the content which is trending on the web in terms of traffic, social media shares, and engagement. Buzzsumo resolves your dilemma on what to publish on your blog.
ClickFunnels
Sales funnel is the backbone of any sales on a website. You want your traffic to be converted into leads and eventually sales.
This tool allows you to create custom sale funnels easily with the help of numerous templates, drag-and-drop functions, and other time-saving features.
Pingdom Website Speed Test
Your website loading speed is an ultimate consideration in its ranking factor.
Using the Pingdom tool, you can check, analyze, and track your website performance and speed as well.
It gives you detailed page analysis, performance grades, scores, and reports to improve over time.
Canva
80% of business owners or marketers give higher priority to visual assets in social media marketing and blogging.
If you are looking for a cost-effective method to create visually stunning and engaging graphics, Canva is definitely a great pick.
You do not need to invest a higher sum of money in hiring a graphic designer.
It allows you to create all kinds of visual-based content that you can possibly think of.
You can create Instagram posts, Facebook posts, Facebook page cover, blog feature image, logo, channel art, presentation and so much more.
Trending Ways Of Email Marketing
Every $1 spent on email marketing generates $44 ROI with an increase every year.. It is one of the most effective marketing channels which goes up to 4400% ROI.
As a small business owner, if you think email marketing isn’t effective enough, then you must know that 42% of small business owners in the USA use email marketing primarily.
There are some particular trending email marketing ways you need to adapt as a small-scale business.
Personalization
Personalized emails improve CTR by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. When catching a user’s attention becomes trickier in this high-competitive era, you need to be more consumer-centric.
Email personalization requires the segmentation of your emails. Marketers are supposed to personalize the emails according to the consumer’s profile, browsing behavior, email preferences, purchase history, etc.
You don’t want them to send emails about the products they don’t want to buy. 33% of customers unsubscribe because brands recommend them products that they don’t like.
Utilizing customer data and profiling, you can predict customer behavior and assure a successful campaign. If not this, trust that 75% of marketers that believe email personalization yields higher CTR.
Automation
Email automation allows you to send the relevant emails at the right time.
Automation works best with the personalization of emails. Such email marketing campaigns are triggered by the subscriber’s behavior.
For example, if a consumer abandoned the cart, an abandoned cart email campaign will automatically be initiated based on the customer’s behavior.
The consumer will receive an email where they will be notified about their checkout flow hasn’t completed and they suppose to complete it.
Such transactional emails have 8X more clicks as compared to others and that with 6x more revenue. Also, automated emails get 119% higher CTR than broadcast emails.
Automation helps the user to have a more personalized experience. When you initiate personalized communication, it tends to increase engagement at least tenfold.
Not to mention, how powerful it is in building the relationship between the brand and the subscriber, and that too in the long run.
Interactivity
Interactive emails increase the Click-to-open rate by 73%.
The emails which actively engage with the readers or the subscribers and attract them to participate or take action in the email are known as Interactive emails.
These emails offer extremely sophisticated higher-engagement participation of the readers and give them a role to play.
This interactive experience also includes tapping, reading through, swiping, rating, downloading, and more.
Small businesses can get really creative using different types of interactive emails.
It can be a GIF email or some quick buying guide. The most powerful ones are video emails featuring a short video hyperlinked to your website.
Adding video to your emails increases CTR by 300%. They are more informative, engaging, attractive, and memorable, and also encourage the viewers to interact.
You can also incorporate polls, reviews, and surveys in the emails. You can also put exciting offers, coupons, and scratch cards to get them invested in the brand.
Best Email Marketing Tools
Litmus
Litmus is a highly effective and versatile email marketing software or tool used primarily in the tracking and testing of your emails.
It allows you to test the traditional web clients as well as on various mobile platforms.
You can also do render testing for creative optimization. It also catches broken links, images, or other graphics which reduces email performance.
Mailchimp
Automate your email marketing with Mailchimp using custom newsletters.
You can also create email campaigns based on customer behavior such as cart abandonment emails. It allows you to keep things simple until or unless you want it to be advanced.
Constant Contact
This tool is primarily focused on drag and drop design for e-commerce integration. It is ideal for all kinds of e-commerce platforms or online sellers.
UTM.io
With UTM, you can create custom UTM sheets and templates where it becomes so easy to manage your campaign data.
UTM Spreadsheets are extremely easy to use and don’t have a learning curve at all. In fact, it is even way easier and better than MS Excel, Google Sheet, and its other competitors in many ways.
They are comparatively a lot less messy than usual spreadsheets.
It syncs with your other UTM members and gives them real-time access to all.
Trending Ways Of Influencer Marketing
Brands in 2020 learned that influencer marketing is one of the most powerful ways to market their product.
So, as a result, more and more brands are going to increase their influencer marketing budget this year, and in coming years as well.
With escalating figures of social media engagement, the popularity of influencer marketing also increases.
When companies partnered with influencers to increase brand awareness, lead generation, or conversions among a specific target, it is called influencer marketing.
Small-scale businesses are now finding their way in using more influencer marketing. However, still, a lot of SMBs consider it to be a ‘brand’ thing to do.
It’s not! Also, micro-influencers and nano-influencers are new favorites of small-scale businesses.
They are in majority among influencers with larger audience reach, greater variety, and more affordable as well.
Here are a few best influencer marketing trends which you should start with as a small business.
Instagram Continues to be the Key Influencer Platfor
As of now, Instagram is the most popular social network worldwide.
The incremental growth each year added to the monthly users of Instagram is just growing more and more, where it led to 1 billion active monthly users in 2020.
As per engagement, more than 500 million users use Instagram daily.
It is the 2nd most consumer-engaged platform after Facebook.
Business collaborations and influencers are mushrooming on the platform by the storm. 71% of US Businesses currently are on Instagram benefiting from this huge audience pool.
The platform will continue to be one of the decisive influencer marketing platforms in the future as well, so it is worthwhile investing in it.
You will be tapping into one of the most active audiences for the product approach.
Use tools like HypeAuditor, AspireIQ, or Neoreach to find popular Instagram influencers to market your products.
Emphasis On Micro-Influencer and Nano-Influencer
81% of active influencers on Instagram are nano and micro-influencers. Further, 39% of them have over 15,000 followers.
There are different categories of Influencers such as nano-influencers, micro-influencers, mid-tier influencers, macro-influencers, mega-influencers, and celebrities.
So, nano-influencers have 1000+ followers up to 5,000, whereas micro-influencers have up to 100,000 followers. These influencers tend to attract more consumers, engage a larger audience, and have better conversion rates than highly influential marketers.
In other words, micro-influencers outnumber macro-influencers who are just 1% of all influential users.
The popularity of IGTV & Reels Is Skyrocketing
Instagram has seen 80% more growth in the number of videos consumed on the platform and that includes the Instagram Reels and IGTV videos. The use of IGTV videos on Instagram is growing rapidly and become decisive in exposure on the platform.
Instagram itself pushes the content of the IGTV video on the platform more and more. It is also highly encouraged to the content craters to use it more to be discovered.
IGTV introduced Instagram’s version of Youtube. It only allows you to upload vertical videos which was quite a gamble there to put such limitations.
However, this comes across as the most efficient feature for influential marketing because irrespective of their scale, they can feature a video. The vertical-video feature made it more handy and quick-made content for sharing.
IGTV came just in mid-2018, so this boom is just the beginning. And as Cisco predicted, 78% of mobile traffic will be on videos by 2021.
Not to mention, the latest sensational addition, the Instagram reel which over the last two years of its introduction stormed the platform.
Instagram is attracting the most brand collaborations & influencer marketing, 78% as the matter of fact.
Best Influence Marketing Tools
ifluenze
It quite simplifies influencer marketing for small businesses.
It allows you to design and develop free campaigns to find and manage influencers easily. They have 20,000+ registered influencers worldwide.
Find the best and relevant match for publishing and promoting your campaign. Or you can also receive proposals from influencers, even choose to buy the content.
You can track your influencer marketing campaigns, all in extensive detail in real-time.
Lumanu
Lumanu is a media platform where marketers can collect and manage the portfolios of influencers all under one roof.
Marketers or business owners won’t have trouble finding the right influencer for the product or products they are marketing.
It pretty much gives them a database with higher relevancy and preference in order to pull them out for the specific types of products.
They offer a network, called SocialCert, between advertisers and creators. It allows creators to share content, permissions, audience, and rights to the advertisers.
Influence.co
It is one of the best platforms where an influencer or social media celebrity can meet small businesses or marketers.
Content creators are allowed to share their best work on the platform where you can get an authorized influencer for your marketing campaign.
It allows you to create, manage and analyze your entire influencer marketing campaign right from the beginning to the end with full control.
Conclusion
Small businesses are limited with their budgets. You can grasp the leverage against big brands by adapting these trending ways of SEO, email marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing.
All these trending ways prove to be highly effective for marketers and small-scale businesses. Most of these digital marketing trends are actually cost-effective, ideal for entrepreneurs and growing businesses.
You need to choose the right tools, platforms, and channels for a successful marketing campaign.
All the mentioned tools are either free, freemium, or budget-friendly. Don’t hesitate to invest in the right tools as they can bring massive results to the table, especially for small-scale businesses.
Concluding, marketing trends act as a catalyst in your website ranking and branding.
Readers also Love to Read:
