We are living in an internet oriented and a globally connected world. Everything is connected to every other thing. Being at the right place at the right time is though important but what’s ultimately required is that one should remain at the top of their field to generate maximum online traffic. Traffic translates to greater Return on Investment (ROI) and improved revenues. To achieve this businesses and organizations should have an updated insight regarding the latest and local online search practices to better align their digital marketing campaigns.
Customer Data – or – Scale of Data. Traditionally speaking, larger organizations have always dominated the marketing arena due to their larger revenues as compared to the small / medium businesses. However, the trend is now shifting with quality being emphasized over quantity. According to an estimate, it is said that around 50 billion smartphones (and other online devices and gadgets) will be interconnected globally by 2020. With such a huge audience, comes their unique preferences, choices and likings; all of which contribute in making a huge online customer database. Accessing this customer data to precisely target the right audience is what will define the success of future marketing campaigns.
Facebook: The Social Media Revolution. Although Google (and similar other search engines) remain the prevalent mode of online searches, Facebook has opened up a huge digital marketing arena. Due to the large amount of personalized customer data available with Facebook, their search engine algorithms (are getting better at) providing precise and extremely targeted ad suggestions. The feature of developing a customer friendly page also provides organizations with a more direct method of communication as compared to websites. Therefore, positively exploiting Facebook is now vitally important to generate better online results translatable to better in-store sales.
Search Engine Optimizations (SEO). Google and all other search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to improve their search engine results page(s) so as to provide better content for their users. Web development practices of including malicious keywords, repetitive / copied content, unnecessary / irrelevant backlinks etc. can no longer ensure consistent online traffic. Professional SEO practices are therefore necessarily required by all organizations to develop the right webpages to target the right audience in the shortest possible time with the goal of achieving high ratio of visiting – to – payee customer.
Understanding the local search radius. Not all businesses are meant to have a global reach. Particularly for small – medium businesses it is very important to understand who exactly is their target audience. Investing on general purpose digital marketing campaigns will be fruitless if no online / in-store ROI is being achieved. A
2014 study by Google revealed that ~72% online users visit a (searched) store within 5 miles of their location and another study by Access revealed that almost 93% of online users like to travel less than 15 minutes from their homes to reach any store particularly for their frequent purchases. These studies show that SEO practices should be professionally targeted towards the expected customers to achieve maximum ROI from digital marketing and online presence.
Image vs Text search. In a study by Moz it was revealed that Google Images are the most utilized search option comprising of almost the third of all types of searches and being almost 10 and 40 times more than all the combined searches carried out thru Bing or Yahoo and Facebook respectively. It is therefore extremely important that an organization gives due importance to optimization of their images. Appropriate tags, description, authenticity, supportive content etc. all play a pivotal role in getting online traffic and clicks. This in turn leads to improved SERP rankings and thus greater ROIs.
Multiple social media platforms have increased the available venues of digital marketing. It is therefore extremely important to invest in the opportune digital marketing method that is guaranteed to generate positive results for the business. Proper reflection and professional insight into the prevalent market trends is extremely important to achieve this.
