Business owners can’t afford to ignore marketing in 2015. As competition for the attention of online consumers heats up, it’s essential that you take time to learn new strategies and skills that can help you continue to strengthen brand loyalty, engage with customers, and connect with new prospects.
Here are six marketing skills you’ll want to take the time to master in order to take your business to the next level:
It’s Time to Truly Embrace Video
If you’re not yet quite convinced of the value and potential ROI of making and sharing videos for your business, consider the following statistics:
“90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 X faster in the brain than text”.
- “188.2 million people in the US watched 52.4 billion online content videos in December 2013. The average American spent more than 19 hours watching online video.”
- “Website visitors are 64% more likely to buy a product on an online retail site after watching a video.”
Email Marketing Is Not Dead
Email marketing is another area that is sure to be big for businesses in 2015. In a recent Capterra blog post about email marketing, author Caroline Malamut included the following statistic: “Email marketing is another area that is sure to be big for businesses in 2015. Last year, more businesses than ever spent resources developing and implementing marketing strategies in an effort to connect with and retain more customers.”
“When marketed through email, consumers spend 138% more than people who don’t receive email offers.”
Email marketing can seem a bit intimidating if you’ve never used it as a tool to connect and communicate with customers in the past, but it doesn’t have to be. There are a lot of great resources being published every day that can help you learn how to get the most out of email marketing.
Automation Is Key
If you want to become a more efficient marketer, you have to be willing to invest in tools that can help automate your efforts.
Last year, more businesses than ever adopted and implemented marketing automation tools in an effort to streamline processes, understand their customers better, and make more money. In fact, according to Salesforce, “a quarter of all B2B Fortune 500 companies are already using marketing automation, along with 76% of the world’s largest SaaS companies.”
If you’re not sure what marketing automation is, how it can help your business, or where to start, spend some time listening to online webinars of the leading automation providers (Pardot, Hubspot, etc.) or subscribe to their blogs.
Hire a Great Writer
In the last few years, content marketing has become one of the primary strategies that companies use to connect with more people online. If you want to make waves online as a business, you have to take the time to regularly write and publish blog posts on your website. But publishing regularly week after week won’t do you any good unless you also take time to ensure that the content you include in every post is thoughtful, original, and helpful.
Your ability to write and share high quality content is going to be more important than ever. If you don’t consider yourself much of a writer, start by hiring the right talent.
SEO Is Difficult but Vital
Despite what some “experts” may tell you, SEO is still important when it comes to building online awareness for your brand, boosting traffic to your website, and landing new customers. SEO isn’t what it used to be though. In recent years, Google has been seriously cracking down on and penalizing companies that implement what they feel are shady tactics in an effort to “work the system.” As a result, companies can’t use the SEO strategies they used years ago. But it doesn’t mean SEO is dead. Now it’s much more content-focused.
Be Strategic When Using Social Media
Along with content marketing, social media marketing is another major opportunity that you’ll want to take advantage of this year. Like SEO, content marketing is constantly evolving, so it’s important that you stay up-to-date on trends, strategies, and best practices. You can learn more about social media for business marketing here.
Source: businessinsider.com
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Marketing Automation and Content Personalization for Successful Business Marketing – Video
Using marketing automation together with content personalization allows you to not only automate a great user experience, but to make it personal to each of your website visitors. Video by Kentico EMS.
