2020 has been off a rocky start for many of us, and many businesses around the world are concerned about their sales and workforces, with the quarantines and closures happening around the world. As entrepreneurs, we are always looking for new ways to maximize our growth and stay on top of innovative developments, trends, and market updates to keep up with the ever-changing world of business, especially when we face challenges like this.
To stay ahead of the curve, I’ve come up with some marketing strategies for 2020 that any small, medium, or high growth e-commerce businesses can use, and I want to share them with you. My intuition is that these strategies are practical and effective, if executed properly. Of course, everything about entrepreneurship is about acting and testing, then analyzing the results, then re-adjusting, and acting, and testing all over again. In the words of James Arthur Ray, “Act, analyze, adjust.”
One last thing to keep in mind – the business world is always shifting, growing, and changing. As we’ve seen in the last few weeks, anything could happen in the market unexpectedly, like a new app, a new marketing/sales channel, or a change in the global economy. Being open to change and adjusting for those changes is an important part of growing a business. With that being said, here are some ideas that can help you strengthen your marketing strategy now, or keep in mind to launch when the economy improves. Please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comment section below! I would love to hear your thoughts and insights.
1. Influencer Marketing
Given the maturity level of Instagram now, and the shift in the algorithm toward more organic content, influencer marketing has tremendous value and has progressed a lot in the past few years.
TechCrunch lays out some of the many advantages of influencer marketing, including but not limited to: they help to generate sales, they create content, they help to build brand awareness, influencers have authority and influence, they help build relationships, they are underpriced and therefore provide value for your marketing budget, they drive traffic, and they can also help convert leads!
You can leverage a lot of influencers for your brand in 2020 and collaborate with those that fit your company’s brand/vibe. Influencer marketing helps to add to your brand’s reputation and brand awareness in an organic way that doesn’t make people feel like they’re looking at an ad. You can also set up influencer deals where you get exposure on multiple platforms like Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok. There is an abundance of opportunity here, and it’s up to each company to reach out to influencers and build out unique influencer deals to get as much brand exposure as possible.
2. SEO
It’s still valuable to keep investing in SEO in 2020 because being on page 1 in Google’s search engine results pages is still important.
Being on page 1 of Google via organic search is still very important to help you maintain a good flow of organic traffic to your website for your most important keyword phrases. Google needs to know that you’re an expert in your industry, and ranks you accordingly. As well, you can execute Google AdWords campaigns on top of your organic efforts to further strengthen your position for keyword phrases you feel are needed.
As voice search increases, you still want to maintain your page 1 presence for your most important keyword phrases, and continue to dominate in this area. Many people today are using home devices like Google Home to ask questions, and searching online is still the first thing people do when they’re looking for a new product or service, so you should always place value in your SEO efforts to keep your brand in front of as many eyes as possible.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing still works, even in 2020, and it’s always good to keep running different types of campaigns. A/B testing is a huge positive, too.
In our industry, we’ll see an average of anywhere from 8-20% open rates. For different types of campaigns, we see a difference in these open rates. We’re always testing and learning, and the point is to keep outdoing yourself so you keep optimizing and getting better!
Email marketing is a great way to stay connected with your audience, especially those that are engaged with your content each month. You can let them know about your latest sales or discounts, update them with any new changes, and keep them in the loop in general so they don’t forget about you or lose interest in you or your product. It’s also a great way to stay connected with your new subscribers, as they become acclimated and interested in your brand.
4. Text Marketing
Text marketing is a relatively new marketing strategy, but it can be very effective for businesses. As I mentioned above, email open rates are much lower now, and more people are using text as their primary means of communication. Therefore, you can get much higher open rates and click rates via text marketing!
Almost everyone today has a smartphone. With text marketing, you can target all of your text subscribers and most will at least see your message in a way that is comfortable to them. Here are some great industry articles on text marketing that give more background into this strategy and its credibility: Neil Patel; Twilio’s 7 best practices for SMS and text marketing.
There are plenty of ways you can leverage text marketing for your business. You can raise awareness via text on your latest podcast episode or YouTube video. Additionally, you could promote your upcoming monthly newsletter, your latest blog, and even your latest sale! With sales-based text promotions, you can also track the ROI by issuing a unique coupon code in that text message. Then you can track how many times that coupon code was used and how many total sales it resulted in. Compare that with how much you spent to send out that text message, and you’ll get your ROI! Be creative and do what works for your company, market, and customers.
5. Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are still underpriced and affordable, and every business should be utilizing them to some degree.
Like many social networks, Facebook has made many changes to its algorithm over the years, making it more difficult for brands to get their content in front of their audience organically. Facebook Ads help you reach both previous customers and potential new customers who may never see your content in their news feed.
There are many options to use when it comes to Facebook Ads that you can be taking advantage of. Remarketing campaigns work great to hit those customers who haven’t quite decided on a purchase yet, or those who have purchased in the past and could be ready to buy again. Add-to-cart campaigns work great as well. These campaigns target shopping cart abandoners who weren’t quite ready to make that purchase at that time, for whatever reason, and hit them again to remind them that they still want that item. You could even offer a discount to encourage them to come back and complete their purchase. In addition you can run video campaigns for brand awareness as well!
6. Instagram Story Swipe-up Ads
Instagram Story Swipe-Up Ads are also underpriced for now and they are very effective to use as well.
They are underpriced, have a relatively higher CTR, higher impressions, and conversions too. You can also experiment with both sales-based ads vs. branding-based ads and see how they compare by looking at key metrics. You don’t have to break your budget on this, either. Even if you just allocate a little bit of budget toward these ads, you can make adjustments later on when you get results to analyze.
Like Facebook, Instagram’s algorithm for news feed content has changed, making it more difficult for marketers to reach their target audiences organically. While it’s one of the most popular social media platforms out there, it can still be difficult to reach all of those users. Instagram stories often get more views than organic posts, which means your ads have a larger reach.
7. YouTube Ads based on Google Search queries (and Google Ads too)
Use your YouTube Ads to target users whose search history and recent queries align with your ideal customer and target market, getting your message out in front of more relevant audiences.
Since a user’s Google account is shared with their YouTube account, it’s easy to have all of this information integrated to make your ads more effective. With more users than ever watching YouTube directly from mobile (over 50%!) it can be difficult for advertisers to reach the right audiences on this platform. This integration means more strategic methods to put your product in the right place at the right time.
This opens up a world of possibilities for you to collect new information about your target audience and the way that your ideal customer behaves online. Additionally, it gives you some room for opportunity when it comes to getting that message out in new and innovative ways. That means more qualified people are more likely to see your ads and content, which can lead to a higher conversion rate for you!
8. Podcasting
Podcasting has risen in popularity over the past few years. Anyone can start their own podcast these days within seconds! To give you a few ideas, you can interview a guest in your field, upload past audio content, and create other unique things tailored to your business.
Interviewing people within or outside your field is a quick and effective way to get started with podcasting. It helps you to create immediate content for your podcast, build an audience, and start developing your brand’s reputation.
In addition to interviews, another way you can create content for your podcast is you can also export the audio from your YouTube videos and post to your podcast. You can then record intros/outros on top to give it more context for your audio listeners.
Finally, if you have the skills/ability, or can use something like Trint, you can transcribe your podcast episode and post it to your website! Transcribing helps with searchability, Google indexing, and building out long-form content for your website. You can edit your transcription and further optimize it for SEO purposes by adding in introductions, conclusions, and any other additional paragraphs, or new content for your readers.
If you want to create your first podcast, sign up on Anchor.fm! It is an outstanding company/app that allows you to publish your podcast. You upload it in one place, and then they help to distribute it to ALL of the platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, Breaker, Castbox, Overcast, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, TuneIn and more! What’s better than a company handling all the distribution for you? All you need to focus on next is doing great interviews, advertising your podcast, and bringing awareness to it.
What are your favourite podcasts to listen to? I’m always open to new suggestions and encourage you to share yours here if you already have one.
9. Creating Content at Scale
Any business or individual can create content via audio, video, pictures, or written word and make it contextual to that social media platform.
It helps to build your brand. If you’re authentic and you do it well, others will follow you, embrace you, and even become your advocates/referrals.
Follow the Gary Vee Content Model on “How To Make 64 Pieces of Content In a Day,” to learn more about creating content at scale, everyday for your business or for your personal brand. You can do this yourself or hire someone for it and build out a team that includes a paid ads manager (for media buying and planning), writers, video/film editors, graphic designers, audio technicians, and any other experts you may need.
10. Monthly Long-Form Blogs (2,000-5,000+ words)
Long-form content works – if it’s good! If you’re running an e-commerce business it’s great to also invest in your monthly blog content to add value to your brand.
Writing a monthly blog of 2000+ words is a great idea because it shows that you are credible and have expertise on a certain topic or subject in your field. It also adds to your monthly SEO efforts and can increase your Google rankings for certain keyword phrases, if you plan out and write your monthly blog accordingly (i.e. researching a keyword phrase and executing it in terms of your title tag, meta description, H1 heading, H2s, alt attribute, image title, filename, etc.).
You can also include your monthly blogs in your monthly newsletter campaigns to further promote them. We also like to create Instagram Stories each month of our featured blog, with a swipe up link where people can go to read the entire thing. You can see some examples here that our social media at Homework Help Global created and saved in our Instagram Stories.
Conclusion
I hope you found some of these marketing strategies for 2020 to be of value! Each of these strategies are unique in their own right, will help strengthen your social media marketing strategy, and can be successfully executed when applied with the right context. Of course, there are other strategies you can use as well, such as billboard advertising, print ads, radio and TV ads, special “surprise and delights” for your customers/suppliers, other customized email campaigns, contests/giveaways on social media, and much more! The goal is to taste and test new things, and see what works best for your business, and then commit your advertising budget to it. Let me know how it goes and would love to hear more from you in the comments section below!
Please find my personal channels below! If anyone needs any assistance or wants to further discuss these strategies I would be happy to hop on a phone call, Zoom video, etc.
Business Website: https://www.thewrite-direction.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kinnysaral7/
Medium: https://medium.com/@kinnysaral
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kinnysaral
References:
Anand, I. (2019, June 28). How startups can make influencer marketing work on a budget. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/28/how-startups-can-make-influencer-marketing-work-on-a-budget/
How to Overcome Obstacles – Act, Analyze, Adjust – James Arthur Ray. (2015). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4Ip-09EhCc&list=LLV5pG_wlXqjUIHHuEyWspRw&index=192
Vaynerchuk, G. (2020, January 20). How To Make 64 Pieces Of Content In A Day. Retrieved from https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/how-to-create-64-pieces-of-content-in-a-day/