The digital marketing landscape is rapidly changing, which is why I have broken down the top 5 skills that you need to learn if you want your business to thrive in 2020… and beyond.
What works today may not work tomorrow,what worked last week might not be working today, and so on. This is why it’s incredibly important to make sure you stay on top of your game by consuming content like this, engaging with other people’s content, making sure that you’re putting your own strategies to the test, and analysing data to see what works to stay ahead of the curve.
Even from an agency perspective, at Osito Media what we do now is almost completely different from what we were doing just a few months ago. Attention spans are shorter. There’s new technology. The way that customers and clients engage with content online is almost completely different too. So the things that got you to this point of your business isn’t necessarily going to be the same as the things that take you forward over the next decade.
#1 MARKETING FUNDAMENTALS
If you want to succeed with digital marketing make sure you’re dedicating and allocating a sufficient amount of time to mastering the fundamentals of digital marketing. Stuff like positioning and differentiation, branding, building a likable brand, etc. This is crucial. Fortunately, once you’ve spent a good amount of time learning them, you will realise this was time well spent because human behaviour (which is essentially what marketing is) doesn’t really change that much; we’re still just people. This means by even understanding the basics of how people work and how they make buying decision, you will be able to apply this information this year, next year, and forever.
One of the things you will realise is that humans make decisions emotionally, not logically or rationally. This doesn’t mean you don’t want to include logical or rational elements in your marketing, it just means you should lead with the emotional aspects first, so you can get that sort of buy-in and get that conviction, and then follow up with logical elements of your product/service to allow them to justify their decision to buy them. The beauty is that once you understand this one simple concept, it’s really never going to change and it’s going to be able to be applied to all of your future marketing, making it all that more effective moving forward.
#2 FOCUS ON CONVERSATION GENERATION
As a die-hard proponent of direct response marketing, which is really about generating those leads and getting them to take action as soon as possible, one of the big switches I’ve seen lately is a transition between straight-up lead generation to conversation generation. This is because at the end of the day you can generate all the leads you want, but what you probably want are those conversations that will lead to bigger buying opportunities for your business.
Of course, lead generation is still very much alive and a major part of the stuff I do at my agency. But, if you really want to take your marketing to the next level, you’re going to want to focus on the next step:turning those leads into conversation. So, when creating your campaigns, you really want to think a little bit further down the funnel and concentrate on not just generating that lead but turning it into a conversation.
Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a flood of people entering the market to offer lead generation services over social media, but where you have an opportunity to shine is to think further than that, and focus on those conversations because generating traffic isn’t really that hard — it just comes down to finding the right people you’re trying to get in front of, having the right offer or message, and then choosing the right media source.
#3 FULL FUNNEL MARKETING
Essentially what you do here is be aware of the entire customer journey. When running your marketing campaigns, think about every step that a customer prospect or potential customer is going to have to take in order to become a paying client or customerwith your business. Now, obviously, this is going to involve some element of lead gen, which is the very top of the funnel (the cold traffic) — the people who don’t know who you are or what you do. But, you should take it a step further and focus on the warm traffic. You see, once you’ve generated that lead, how are you going to take that lead and turn it into a conversation? And then, how are you going to take it a step further and change the warm traffic to warm traffic? That is to say, how do you make them become a paying customer? (Learn how to create a funnel)
#4 Video Marketing
When it comes to marketing your business and building on that know, like, and trust factor, nothing really beats face-to-face communication. The ability to sit down with every potential customer or client is extremely difficult, which is where video steps in and it really is the next best thing, because it allows you to not only hear someone’s voice, but you can see their face and see if they are genuine or not. You can also build a tonne of trust very quickly and add lots of value. If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d say a video is worth a million words.
Now, here’s the funny thing with video. If you’re not doing it already, you probably know you should be doing, and even if you’re already doing it properly, you probably know you should be doing more. But, what is it that stops most people from getting involved and cranking out more videos? The answer is simple: people mistakenly believe that the videos they publish should be perfect. This is understandable, but people actually want to see unpolished content as it is more relatable and often (in our experience) performs better than professional shoots on social media.
#5 Automation
There is so much to do and so little time, so this is where automation steps in as a very valuable skill, for yourself, your business, and clients/customers. Automation is the offloading or the delegation of tasks to various tools to care of the repetitive tasksthat you don’t need to be doing in your business, but still need to be done. This allows you to get a whole lot more done, a whole lot quicker. For example, in our agency we can generate a lead using Facebook ads, then nurture them with text and email, and follow up with a very strategic set of automated follow ups, right up until we get the response we desire. And we can do this all without the client lifting a finger. That’s the power of automation.
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