Online Marketing Is Always Changing – What You Need To Know

To success with your home based business even in 2019, you must be up to date on what’s new and what works and doesn’t work.

The trouble with online marketing is that it’s always changing, so much so that it’s hard to keep up. There’s always so much to do as well. How do you know what will really work, and what might be a waste of time and money?

Fortunately, some marketing methods have withstood the test of time and demonstrated that they can give users real results.

Email Marketing 

After more than 20 years, certain email marketing practices stand out the most successful.

And if you think email marketing is dead, you are listening to the wrong marketing gurus. Email marketing is alive and well and still converting prospects into customers like crazy – as long as you understand what your audience wants and needs.

Email marketing spending in the US is predicted to rise to more than $3 billion in 2019. Statistics show that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $38.
Email is also one of the most powerful tools for retaining customers. People access it from anywhere, including mobile phones, with more than half opening plain text emails to see what’s new. Short emails of no more than 125 words work best.

In terms of technology, some companies report high success rates with interactive emails that are similar to their actual website. Having said that, some spam filters are still sensitive about images being sent vial email, which is why plain text is more deliverable.

Personalization – Personalization can boost clicks and conversions by around 10% and improve relationships with your customers. Having said that, you need to move beyond the usual “first_name” tokens to tagging users based on their interests. Surveys can help. So can greater segmentation.

Better segmentation – If you have really large email lists, next time you prune the “dead wood”, separate them out into one or more segmented lists and tag them using your email marketing platform technology. Ask them for more information as well, such as zip code or whatever else would be useful to know your prospects to help you sell to them better. The technology is improving all the time, it’s just a case of using it.

Autoresponder – Weep out old content and add new emails to the series, for more contact points with your prospects and more links to relevant products they might be interested in.

Video Marketing

Video is booming, in both live and prerecorded forms. People love videos – not just for entertainment, but for education and marketing as well.

Live – Google Live and Facebook Live have become increasingly popular with users and media alike. the main reason for live video is to help building relationships. You can show you are a real person and give an inside look at the company. You can also interact with your target audience, accepting questions in the chat box and answering them online. It’s a great way to build relationships through your prospects feeling that you care about their needs, and that they know you.They also help position you as an authority in your niche.

These days, every smartphone can take high-quality video. A tripod to help steady things means you ca host video from almost anywhere.

How-To content – This type of content makes up about 75% of what people are searching for at YouTube. If you are a teacher, coach, consultant or information publisher, videos could be the ideal way to market your products and services. You could post excerpts from your courses and webinars, attractive marketing videos such as whiteboard videos and animations, or screen capture videos.

Screen Capture Videos – Screen Capture Videos have become increasingly popular with gamers and business people. In both cases, you are allowing viewers to look over your shoulder to see what process you are following.

If you are launching a new software program, seeing is believing. Showing it in action is an ideal way to drive demand and sales. Screen capture videos are also useful for showing a process, such as how to make a PowerPoint presentation from scratch that even beginners can follow along with.

Recorded video – There are countless marketing uses for prerecorded video. One of the uses gaining in popularity is hosted webinars.
Many people  get nervous at the idea of speaking in public or appearing on camera, but prerecorded the content takes some of the fear out of offering a webinar to your target audience. It can help you offer a superior product without any errors, ums and uhs. All you really need is a good microphone and some slides so your audience can follow along. You don’t hae to appear on camera at all f you don’t wish to.

Educational videos – Online education is booming. There are now many popular education sites where you can offer to teach paying customers certain skulls or give talks about various topics. Many of these sites prefer video content, so id you have a lot to teach, this could be a perfect opportunity to show what you know and make more money.

The main thing you will need is content. If you have quality content there is no problem at all to convert your content into some sort of video.

Social Media

Social media can give you lots of free traffic, and the number social site is Facebook. But Instagram, a highly visual site is also be an effective marketing tool for your business. Instagram is not owned by Facebook and is being transformed gradually into a site businesses can use for marketing, even as it preserves the fun of sharing pictures with family and friends.

Twitter, another social media platform, and my favorite social media site for marketing purpose, is also an affective marketing tool for your business.

Facebook, still number one

Facebook has more than two billion registered account, and more than one billion unique visitors every month. Contrary to those who say Facebook is dying and Snapshat and Instagram rule, the truth is that the latter two sites still don’t have the same level of traffic.

Facebook is a hive of marketing opportunities, and all of them are growing. There are a few of the main ones to consider when you are putting together your marketing plan.

• • Your Page/Promoted Page – Create a detailed page packed full of information about your business with content relating to your niche. A great page on Facebook gives you the chance to be discovered and to gain followers. Facebook also allows certain ads. You can turn your page into an ad in order to get followers. The more followers you have, the more people will see your content, and perhaps like it or share it.
  • Your Posts/Boosted Posts – Your posts should be useful and link to your content at your blog. Facebook allows you to turn posts into ads as well. See which of your posts have received the most engagement, and boost them.
  • Facebook Messenger – This has grown in popularity in 2018 and is continuing to be
    ◊ A convenient way for people to connect with you quickly
    ◊ A way to set up a chatbot easily
    Chatbots are also growing in popularity. They are like an autoresponder in an email. Some sends a message and they get a reply back. With chatbots, you set a trigger words and then a reply to the person that is likely to fit the topic of the trigger word, such as ‘refund’. It’s a way to automate customer service and marketing and can save a good deal of time if you set it up correctly.
  • Facebook Groups – Create a closed group about your niche or business, and invite people or offer it as a customer bonus when they buy a related product from you.
  • Remarket – Remarket allows you to tag a visitor to a product at your site. If they buy, great. If not, the tag can trigger ads to appear to them for that item for the next 30 days. The tag is called a pixel, and yu can create one on your Facebook Ads Manager.

Instagram, quick and easy marketing strategies

Instagram is a highly visual site that can be a very effective marketing tool for your business.

Instagram is now owned by Facebook and is being transformed gradually into a site businesses can use for marketing, even as it preserves the fun of sharing pictures with family and friends.

Facebook And Instagram Ads

If you run an ad through Facebook, you can save time and effort by cross promoting it on Instagram. It will be reformatted to suit the site. You can get a significant number of mobile visitors in this way.

An Inside Look
Customers and prospects love to feel they know you and are getting insider information. Photos and videos of who you are and what you do can help build relationships with your target audience.

Fresh & Fun
The content you post will only be visible for 24 hors unless you pin it to your account. This means your account can stay fresh & fun and create the perception there is always something going on.

Stories
Storytelling is a very popular marketing trend. Stories on Instagram combine photos, video and text for a unique view of a product, or your brand.

You have three inbuilt tools on Instagram that works very well to marketing your business and or brand, and to get more likes, followers and views.
These three tools are:

• • Hashtags – Create a unique hashtag around a product or service to stimulate interest and track your success.
  • Instagram Live – Businesses are having increasing success with this tool when used like a trailer for a movie, giving a sneak preview of what’s coming up.
  • Contests and Giveaways – These always work well, particularly at a visual site like Instagram, with a photo of the tempting prize.

Instagram is also experimenting with allowing users to create eCommerce stores inside Instagram. This leverage word of mouth about products people love and also emulates the trend on another visual site, Pinterest, where more than 50% of users click to buy what they see there.

Instagram will be on the rise in 2019.

Twitter marketing for business

Is Twitter still relevant for business?

Statistics show that the popularity of Twitter is plateauing, with no significant new growth as compared to other social sites. This could be due to the rise of Snapshat and Instagram, where you can basically tweet gorgeous content complete with words and hashtags, and post video as well.

Twitter has started to offer all those options too. They have also made a couple of significant updates that can help users get their message across.

Images can enhance your tweet. Twitter has also rolled their popular Vine video functionality into Twitter. You can record, import, upload and go live in a similar manner to Facebook and Instagram now. There are also video ad options. Images and videos help followers get to know you better, and they are highly sharable.

Is Twitter still relevant for businesses?

If you have spent time and effort building up followers, it would be foolish to abandon your account. The criteria for any tweet should be “What’s new?” in your business. New products, services, events, awards, projects you are working on, and surveys of your customers are just a few of the newsworthy types of items you can tweet about.

Twitter can also help raise your profile if yu use the following tools:

• • Hashtags – Hashtags can be buzzwords you create yourself, or tags already being used to promote a niche, idea or industry. Users can click on a hashtag to see the latest content published about that tag, giving you more visibility.
  • Chats – Engage in charts, and create them yourself. Invite people you think would be good at discussing the topic by using @username.
  • Use A Scheduler – Schedules for social media like Buffer.com and Hootsuite.com can help keep things ticking over, but always check your preloaded tweets to make sure nothing will cause offense. There have been huge backlash against seemingly insensitive tweets when certain news stories have hit, or when it has appeared someone was tweeting during a major event like a big sport event.
  • Sponsored Pages & Tweets – As with Facebook, you can use your page as an ad to get more followers, or boost your most successful tweets in order to spread the content more widely.

Social media advertising has impacted the world of pay-per-click, PPC, advertising.

Summing Up

In this blog post I have loaded at some of the best practices and major changes for some of the top marketing methods which have been proven effective for businesses of every size in every niche.

From email marketing, to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, there it have been significant changes in 2018 that you need to keep your eye on going forward into 2019.

One thing is for sure – online marketing is booming, so master these trends and tools and see what a difference they can make to your business.