Unless you have been stranded on a deserted island, you know the past two years have seen tremendous growth in internet usage and digital marketing.
Businesses have fully embraced content marketing, SEO, Google Ads, social media, basic email marketing, and other digital marketing tactics in order to be competitive. Companies have worked to improve their websites and proactively drive more online traffic to their brand in 2021. As a result, the digital landscape is now more cluttered and noisy than ever.
What can your company do to get ahead of the curve and rise above the noise?
Here are three digital marketing areas to focus your attention on in 2022 to best take advantage of the growth trends in digital marketing and internet usage continuing in the coming year.
1. Influencer Marketing
This coming year will be the year of influencer marketing. It will make inroads into businesses beyond high-end consumer brands as companies of all sizes realize they must gain supporters online to attract people to their brand.
Major brands have partnered with influencers for years to drive awareness of their products and this has led to the growth of millions of prospective influencers for your company as people look to make a living by acquiring and speaking to a large group of dedicated followers. In B2B markets, many influencers are looking for resources and support for their followers and not necessarily looking to make money.
Influencer marketing can be effective in any industry, especially in B2B markets and in highly specialized areas where the voice of the influencer carries weight.
The bottom line is this – influencers are ready to refer people to your company.
What’s an influencer?
An influencer is anyone who can bring awareness to your products and services or directly refer qualified prospects to your company. Influencers can take many forms including popular websites, social media content writers, industry experts, writers, the media and more. The traditional influencer has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and leverages those followers by integrating brand notices in their social media posts and stories.
This can be very lucrative and a full-time career for many people. It has also resulted in the tremendous growth of micro-influencers. These influencers have fewer followers, often less than 50,000 people, and are a cost-effective and highly targeted way to reach your target market. Research and contact them for your products and services to grow your brand.
Influencer marketing is the new form of networking in the time of the pandemic.
Action Items: Build a database of key influencers and referral sources. Develop a plan for reaching out to these influencers on a regular basis and sending email follow-ups. Put energy into developing influencers just like you do to acquire new customers.
2. Email Marketing and CRM Integration
These two things go together and here’s why. Companies must find ways to integrate and align their sales teams with their marketing teams to gain a competitive advantage and drive sales results. The two teams are often adversaries, competing for resources and blaming each other when sales slow down. Aligning sales and marketing teams around a common set of goals is critical to stop this downward spiral. This is easier to accomplish when email marketing efforts are merged with the team’s sales process. Meaning the tool used by your sales team to close sales must also be used by your marketing team to email and manage the sales funnel. Combining these efforts is at the core of sales and marketing alignment.
There are excellent tools that handle this integration very well, like HubSpot. HubSpot is one of the best tools to track and report on movement through a sales and marketing funnel. HubSpot is an excellent resource for sales and marketing teams to coordinate their efforts in managing funnel movement.
Action Items: Schedule a HubSpot demo with IW, get a free trial, and if you are currently using HubSpot make sure to set up workflows and link the HubSpot CRM to your email marketing efforts and data tracking.
3. Conversion Analysis
This year is the time to go deep into digital conversions and the factors that move people through your sales funnel to a closed sale. There are three key tactics to focus on in this pursuit of maximizing conversion rates and they are content, customized landing pages, and call-to-actions (CTAs).
Content
In 2022, take your content beyond blogs and social media posts and dive into the story of your target market. Who is the hero at the center of the content you write and put online? In many cases, the hero of your content is your own company and this must change! The hero must be your prospective customer. The core of this content must be the key benefits of buying from your company and the problems you solve.
Customized Landing Pages
The key to conversions in 2022 is excellent landing pages. Those pages must relate to the intent of the person visiting the page. You will see stronger conversion rates when you use customized landing pages for the targeted visitors coming to your website. People are researching your products and services and the pages they land on must meet those researching needs or they don’t move through the buying process.
Call-To-Actions (CTAs)
Make 2022 the year of excellent mid-funnel CTAs. Get the webinars and eBooks you have been putting off started and launched because they will help you rise above the noise and bring attention to your brand by moving people through your sales funnel.
Action Items: Go deeper into website user engagement with Google Analytics 4 and set up heat mapping with CrazyEgg to see how people interact with your web pages. Review the traffic on your website and the key landing to determine if user intent is being met or if the current landings are too generic to engage visitors. Develop more effective and engaging CTAs to help people research and decide if they want to buy from your company.
Summary
A highly competitive digital marketing landscape has its upsides and downsides. The downside is the competitive crowded space and getting lost, the upside is getting found in the flood of people looking for the solutions you provide.
There are still many opportunities to attract your target market to your website and online brand. Get started with HubSpot, influencers, and in-depth conversion analysis to make a marketing impact in 2022.
Contact a specialist at Intuitive Websites to help you get these digital marketing initiatives going in 2022 and grow your leads during this exciting time for digital marketing.