February 2020

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, we’re well into the digital age, and the world of marketing will never be the same. Every business, from the most massive multinational conglomerate to the smallest mom-and-pop shop, must now consider their digital brand. Of course, this is easier said than done, since the world of digital marketing is fickle and ever-changing. Here are a few tips to help make sure you are keeping up with branding in the digital age: 

Who Is Your Ideal Customer?

One of the great advantages for smaller businesses in the digital age is the ability to target a very specific customer base, without spending millions in advertising costs. With modern SEO tactics, artificial intelligence, and the latest software, you can send tailor-made ads right to your ideal customers for a relatively low cost. However, this comes with its own challenge: who is your ideal customer? What audience are you trying to reach with your business?

To discover exactly who you should be targeting with your ads, first put yourself in the customers’ shoes. What product are you selling? Who, exactly, can benefit from this product? Why should customers choose your product over your competitors? Once you can answer these questions, you can begin to narrow it down even further. 

Where is your ideal customer located? What is their occupation? Where will they buy your product? When do they buy? How often? Once you have answered all of these questions, you’ll be able to optimize your advertising towards this prospective customer. 

Strive For Consistency!

Consistency has always been key in branding. This was true long before the digital age, but it’s especially true now. Indeed, remaining consistent is especially crucial for online advertising, because your potential customers will see your brand from multiple angles. That is to say, if a customer takes notice of an ad on Instagram, and follows a link on that ad to your Facebook, and then another link to your company website, your pages on all those sites should feel like a unified whole. Many businesses fail to do this, and this lack of consistency costs them customers. 

How, exactly, do you remain consistent? Start simple: use the same font, the same colors, and the same letter sizing across sites. You should also strive for a consistent tone; different web pages shouldn’t be tailored to completely different customers. Simplicity is also key; don’t needlessly complicate things. Just know what your message is, who it is for, and be confident in your product. 

What Is Your Brand Message? 

Creating a consistent, unified product that is perfectly tailored to your ideal customer really boils down to one thing: brand messaging. You have to have a vision for your brand, and you have to be able to communicate that to your customers. First, think of your ideal customer. Why should they choose your product over that of your competitors? Or, more specifically, what problem are you solving for your customers? If you can’t answer these questions, you may need to go back to the drawing board, because you don’t have a strong vision. 

Actually, you should be able to answer several questions about your business. What does your company believe in? What are your core ideals? What is your core mission? The answers to these questions will inform all of the content you create, and that is your brand message. 

SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is an absolutely crucial feature of marketing in the digital age. In fact, without it, your business is unlikely to ever go anywhere, regardless of how great your product is, and how strong your brand message is. Nothing else you do will matter if potential customers can’t find you, and, in the modern digital age, they will be looking for businesses like yours via search engines. 

There are several strategies you should be undertaking in order to ensure your brand appears at the top of your potential customer’s search results. Make sure that all of the content, across all of your company pages, is on-brand, and on-message. Absolutely every sentence you type, and every picture you post, should be in service of displaying your brand message to the world.

Another key to success in SEO is schema. Schema is a code that you place into your website to make your search engine results more informative for users. For example, let’s say you sell sporting goods through your website, and you find that the ideal customer in a certain area seems to be most interested in tennis. Through schema markup, you can make it so that when a prospective customer searches for “Sporting Equipment,” the result that they find includes information on “Tennis Equipment.” This will make the customer that much more likely to click on your page over that of potential competitors. 

Expand Your Reach Through Social Media

If you want to survive in the business world in the modern day, you need to have a reach on social media. We’re not simply talking about paid ads, either: those will only get you so far. You want social media that customers will share with one another, organically, and if your social media is well-crafted and engaging, they will do just that. 

If you manage to target your social media to the right place, and you target the right customers, you’ll end up expanding your reach even further as your customers share your brand with one another. Discuss how to expand your reach with your SEO professionals. 

Build Relationships With Your Customers

Of course, no amount of advertising success is going to matter if you can’t earn the loyalty of a devoted cadre of customers. In order to survive in the business world, you have to develop a relationship with your customers. How can you do this? Well, how do you develop a relationship with anyone? You engage with them. Empathize with them. Treat them with respect and courtesy. If a customer sends you a message, never ignore it. If they have a complaint, address it quickly. If they pay you a compliment, thank them. As you develop a relationship with your customer base, you will put down the roots for a long-lasting, successful business. 

Spread Awareness Of Your Brand Through Search Engine And Programmatic Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is different from Search Engine Optimization, but no less crucial to the success of your brand. While SEO seeks to place you at the top of search engine results, SEM is focused on paid, targeted ads. In some ways, this is similar to SEO – you need to ensure you are targeting the right customers, for example – but in other ways, it’s a bit different. You will need to keep track on who is clicking on your ads, how long they are spending on your pages, etc., and you will use this information to create better targeted ads in the future. 

Programmatic marketing is similar to SEM and SEO, and is becoming ever more important in the business world. Programmatic marketing creates targeted ads through automated bidding on advertising inventory. In other words, you’ll be competing with other businesses to reach the exact same customers. How much are you prepared to pay to ensure your ad can be seen? How can you ensure that utilize this as effectively as possible? Discuss this with your online marketing professionals. 

Connect With Relevant Influencers

Influencers are increasingly more important in the social media world of today, and if you can connect with the right ones, you’ll find that you are automatically in touch with a built-in customer base. For example, if you have a business that’s devoted to selling clothing to a certain demographic, you can pay an influencer to wear your brand in an Instagram post. Instantly, you’ll be connected to a wide array of people who are already interested in clothing and looking for the perfect thing to wear. This will immediately increase your brand visibility and help put your business on the map. 

Work with Professionals

Running a business means there are a million things on any given day that require your attention.  Often, overseeing your own digital branding is the type of thing that has to fall by the wayside. Working with professionals that understand your brand and your vision can be key for success. Intrix Media digs deep to understand the core of your business, and to communicate it to your target audience.  Contact us today to learn how we can work with you to supercharge your digital branding. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an industry that, since its inception, has never stopped evolving. This  should come as no surprise: any major industry that’s technology based needs to always be growing, adapting, and developing in response to the ever-changing market. 

2020 promises to be one of the most innovative years in the history of SEO. Even in a field that’s defined by its ability to track with the latest trends and technologies, recent advancements have been proceeding at a breakneck pace. 

All these advancements are exciting, of course; but they can also be a little stressful if you find that you’re not up-to-date. After all, if you’re a business owner, you should be doing everything you can to keep current with the latest developments in the world of SEO. Your competitors certainly will be! Read on to learn about what to expect with SEO in 2020: 

Voice Search

Voice searching as a technology certainly isn’t new. Actually, it’s probably older than you think: digital assistants like Siri first started to appear way back in 2011! That means we’re approaching a full decade of being able to search the web with our voices alone. 

Nevertheless, in the early years this was a technology in its infancy, and it had more value as a novelty than as a legitimate search feature that SEO companies had to take note of. Lately, though, all that is changing: more and more homes are making use of digital assistants such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. 

The newfound popularity of these digital assistants has had – and will continue to have – a profound effect on the world of SEO. After all, it has completely changed the way that people search the internet. It’s now possible to search the web while you are engaged in other activities, such as driving, cooking, or planning an event. Finding a nearby pizza place is as simple as asking your smartphone a question. 

With voice searches becoming ever more popular, search engine optimization is being tailored to match it. After all, people do not speak and type the same way: often, they’ll type only one or two words into a search, whereas a query that is spoken out loud may be much longer and more complex. This means that, in 2020, SEO companies will have to make major changes to various common keywords, as well as anticipate questions related to the businesses that hire them. 

Featured Snippets

Search engines such as Google are making every greater use of Featured Snippets. If you’ve spent any time searching for information online, you’ve most likely already seen a snippet relating to your query. It’s actually a very advanced technology, making use of algorithms to try to place the right answer to your query at the very top of the search results. 

For example, if you were to search, “Where is the Eiffel Tower?” you would get back page after page of search results, with all of the information on the Eiffel Tower you ever wanted to know. But in a box at the very top of the page, you’d receive the exact answer to your specific question: the exact address, in Paris, France, of the Eiffel Tower. That box is your Featured Snippet, and if it answers your question, you may never read any further on the page. 

The same applies to businesses. For example, if you search, “best food near the Eiffel Tower,” a very short list of restaurants will show up. The restaurants in this snippet, of course, will have far more visibility than any others searched for in the area. 

It’s for this reason that businesses are clamoring to ensure they show up on Google’s Featured Snippets. SEO companies will be working overtime in 2020 to ensure their clients utilize the right keywords and keep within the optimal word count to try and earn a spot in that coveted box. 

AI 

Each year, artificial intelligence (AI), becomes more and more advanced. And while we’re probably still a few years away from robot butlers ala C-3PO in Star Wars, AI is already having a profound effect on the world economy. The fact is that an AI can discover patterns that humans simply can’t, and in the world of Search Engine Optimization, this is a huge plus. 

Major search engines such as Google will make use of AI to read the entirety of your website as a search is happening, and utilize the information therein to decide where you should rank in a search result. You will need to be a step ahead of this in 2020. 

If you put your SEO data in the hands of the right AI software, it will be able to deliver you a huge amount of incredibly valuable information. It can discover the best recommended keywords – and other keywords related to those – as well as recommended word count, and all sorts of details pertaining to your potential customers’ preferred searches. 

Video

Here’s another feature of the Internet that has become absolutely ingrained into our daily lives: videos. People view multiple internet videos every day, and take in a good deal of their advertising from them. Online videos have replaced television and radio for millions of people all over the world. 

Despite this popularity, however, many businesses still aren’t grasping how to optimize searches so that their videos appear first. It’s simply not the same as other types of SEO, and if you want to know what to expect from SEO in 2020, you will need to start thinking about video SEO. 

If you want to take advantage of the power of online videos, you have to create a product that people will watch – remember, your videos are competing with thousands of other things for their attention – and ideally, one they will come back to. In 2020, you will have to work with your SEO company to ensure your videos rank. 

Mobile UX

The last few decades have seen more and more industries become digitized, and in 2020, everyone will be looking to their phone for nearly everything. Each year, more and more purchases happen online, and more and more people don’t even bother with a desktop compute for most of their chores. It’s all done via mobile phones. 

Despite this, some businesses remain desperately behind the times when it comes to Mobile User Experience (UX). The fact is, it doesn’t matter how great your product is; if it can’t be easily accessed on a phone, you simply won’t sell. In the world of SEO in 2020, nearly every business everywhere will have to ensure that mobile users have a positive experience when searching their products online. 

User Safety

If you have spent vast amounts of money – not to mention countless hours – to ensure that your business ranks high in search engine results, then it would certainly be devastating to lose all that in an instant. And yet, if your web security is poor, this is exactly what can happen. 

In a world where more and more things are becoming digital, cyber security is becoming more and more critical. Indeed, the security of your website has a direct affect on your SEO rankings. If your site becomes hacked, that could spell the end of your SEO rankings, but even unsuccessful attempts from hackers can slow down your traffic. 

Why are hackers targeting your site, anyway? Well, the reason is actually SEO. By putting malware onto your page, hackers can alter the links you have on your website and replace them with spam. Ultimately, this can lead to your site becoming blacklisted, which will have a profoundly negative affect on your business prospects. Despite this, only about half of businesses take the time to protect themselves from malware. In 2020, make sure that you are fully committed to user safety. 

Location Specificity 

Chances are, you’ve already put some thought into location-specific SEO. After all, most businesses operate at a local level and you will presumably be targeting a specific demographic, whoever they may be. How granular you should get with this; however, depends on the nature of your business.

In other words, let’s say you are operating an Italian restaurant in a major metropolitan area. If that’s the case, you’ll want people in that area to find you when they search “Italian Restaurant,” “Italian Food,” “Best Restaurant Near Me,” and similar queries. It’s crucially important that your SEO has a specific focus on your area, otherwise your restaurant will simply get lost among the vast amount of other search results for “Italian Food.” 

Schema Markup

One of the more recent developments in the SEO world, schema markup is currently rather under appreciated, with few business owners understanding its true value. In 2020, that will begin to change. 

Schema markup is a code that’s placed into your website that helps to organize your search results. Without it, the search engine won’t know what to focus on. So while your page may come up, as far as the search is concerned, it will just be a jumble of information. 

As an example, let’s go back to the aforementioned Italian Restaurant. If your restaurant is famous for its ravioli, you could put schema markup around the word “ravioli” on your website, rendering it more important than the thousands of other words there. That way, when local people search, “ravioli near me,” they’ll be able to see a snippet of your menu. This can be invaluable when driving traffic to your site.  

SEO Progress

Although it can feel like a lot to keep up with, these constant developments are what make SEO such a powerful and effective tool.  These changes are exciting, and having a thorough understanding allows businesses to utilize them for their advantage. That’s why it’s so important to work with professionals who live and breath SEO and digital marketing, and who can understand the possibilities for your business. 

Try Intrix Media’s free SEO Audit today, and get a thorough analysis of the SEO status of your website, as well as the improvements you can implement.