Digital Marketing Will Evolve in 2019. Here's How.

Keeping up with the latest trends in all areas of digital marketing including search engine optimization, social media marketing, web design, and user experience, is naturally essential for small businesses and large brands alike to reach consumers who are glued to their devices. But just because you’ve conquered digital marketing in 2018 doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re positioned for automatic success this year.

Digital marketing is in a constant state of flux; changing and evolving, shaped by new technologies and the habits of users. With this in mind, marketers need to be masters of adaptation.

By integrating these six strategies into your digital marketing plans this year, you’ll gain optimal traction with your customers while your competitors flounder in your wake.

Prepare for Google’s “micro moments”

We live in a fast-paced environment where we predominantly access digital content through mobile devices in short bursts on the train, waiting in line to get coffee, or (let’s face it) in the bathroom. The changing nature of our interactions with digital content is not making attention spans any longer. Today’s users don’t want, but demand instant gratification. They’re less likely than ever to take the time to scroll deeply or make dozens of clicks to navigate through your content.

Google understands this and its “micro moments” is a mental model for marketing that’s already changing the rules. This model distills user behavior into three distinct micro moments including:

• “I want to go” moments

• “I want to do” moments

• “I want to buy” moments

These are the moments in which a user will now instinctively turn to a device. They will do so out of a desire to “go” and learn something through a specific piece of content, to “do” something like signup or registration, or to make a purchase and “buy” a product or service. These are fleeting but critical moments which are ripe for opportunity. How will you capitalize on them in 2019?

Users have been conditioned to expect brands to deliver exactly what they want when they want it. It’s incumbent upon businesses to be able to meet users’ needs faster with fewer clicks. This means producing more content, prompt and responsive user assistance, real-time communication and a range of options for a more personalized user experience.

Embrace video marketing

It may have killed the radio star, but video can also be a kingmaker. In a time where users’ attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, long form written content still has its place. However, video is fast becoming the preferred medium for the kinds of time-strapped users upon whom you have your sights set. Video communicates ideas quickly, making them more effective than text and even infographics.

Video marketing grows more important with each passing year and it is expected to reach new heights of importance in 2019. Consider this: brands that use video get 41-percent more search engine traffic than their counterparts that don’t. Businesses with a wealth of competitors who need every inch of inside track they can get in terms of SEO are tempting fate if they don’t embrace video marketing.

Content is still king

 It’s as true today as it was when Bill Gates first said it in 1996. However, in a “mobile first” era, it stands to reason that the way in which your users consume said content will be different to how it was when the only way you could access the internet was from a desktop computer with a dial-up modem (go ahead and remember the sound of an old dial-up with fond nostalgia).

Mobile use has been the primary means by which users consume digital content since 2016, and as such it behoves marketers to consider how your content looks, how it feels, and how it is navigated through, on a mobile device.

Sure, this means that your web design will need to be responsive, but you must also consider how your content is laid out, how easy it is to navigate via touchscreen, and how long your content takes to load through a 4G or even a 3G connection. Remember that a page load time of just 7 seconds can increase your bounce rate by over 30-percent! 

What’s more, in the wake of Google’s “mobile-first” index, failing to keep mobile optimization at the heart of your content is SEO kryptonite.

Tell more social stories

In an era where brands are stepping over one another to get the attention of their audiences, a little authenticity goes a long way. Authenticity helps users to establish a personal connection to your brand and allows them to invest in it emotionally. It adds to the value your brand provides and ensures that users will consider you before your competitors.

Let users peek behind the curtain with behind-the-scenes content. Allow them to get to know your employees a little better. Use polls to provide a degree of interactivity and ensure that your users feel that they have a voice. Use instagram stories to give users a flavor of daily life in your business. While it’s understandable that you may want to save time and resources by outsourcing much of your content, make sure that you leave plenty of space for some User Generated Content to give your content marketing strategy the personal touch.

Social stories are quick, fun, and easy to consume, and they also help to add that much-needed human dimension to your brand.

Champion user-centered design

Gone are the days when web design was all about aesthetics. No longer is it enough to merely have a website that looks beautiful and professional. Everyone has that now! In 2019 the future of web design is about User Experience (UX). UX is especially important in the “mobile-first” era as your content must be easy and intuitive to navigate through.

Today’s users are web savvier than they would have been 15, 10 or even 5 years ago. They have been conditioned to expect polished and seamless UX, and failing to provide it could be damaging to your brand. In an era where 55-percent of users spend less than 15 seconds on a website, brands can’t afford to send their bounce rates through the roof with an impenetrable UX.

Think about natural language

Digital assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant continue to evolve, and as they become more sophisticated users are entrusting them more and more. Needless to say this is bound to impact the way in which people seek answers to questions, make purchases, and otherwise interact with brands.

With this in mind it, marketers should think about the natural language used via voice searches and how it differs from a traditional typed search engine query. Today 39 million people in the US alone own a voice operated smart speaker. As they grow more sophisticated and reliable, that number is likely to rise proportionately. With more and more users turning to voice search, it is increasingly considered to be the next SEO frontier.

These machines derive user intent from conversational voice commands as well as previous search queries, and the better you’re able to understand how they work the more luck you’ll have tapping into the vast and growing market of voice search users in 2019.

Closing thoughts

The year ahead offers some exciting opportunities and new challenges for brands of all shapes and sizes. However, when you keep this digital marketing checklist in mind, you’ll be perfectly positioned to respond to user demand in 2019 and beyond.

How Mobile is Changing the Customer Journey

The Zero Moment of Truth is a term coined by Google that refers to online research performed by a consumer before they purchase a product or service. According Google, 88% of customers in the U.S. do online research on a product before they buy. This Zero Moment, or ZMOT, is changing the way marketers think about branding and online commerce.

Marketing used to revolve around the 3 to 5 seconds a consumer would spend deciding on a product while at the store shelf. It was the moment where all of a brand’s incessant advertising would payoff, in what Proctor & Gamble called the "First Moment of Truth", or FMOT. But technology has completely altered the way consumers decide on a product to buy.

Today, FMOT isn’t the only brand interaction that counts. Marketers have to consider ZMOT as much as they do traditional advertising. Consumers have infinite means available to research products: comparison-shopping websites, user-generated ratings & reviews, social media posts, and the list goes on. More importantly, they can perform their research anywhere — at home, at work, or while waiting in line at Starbucks — and it can be done in real-time.

No longer are consumers at the mercy of messages being pushed to them. The consumer is now largely in control, seeking out the information they need to decide on the product that will satisfy their specific wants and desires.

ZMOT poses new challenges for brands, but there are ways to optimize for these new interactions.

• Start by thinking about the customer’s journey, especially the specific customer that you’re trying to reach. Research the types of questions they may ask at the start of their journey. This should lend insights into what content and messaging a brand should be communicating across ads, websites, and other touch points.

• Consumers are using more than just a desktop computer. They’re also increasingly on the go and highly mobile, so brands need to make sure they have mobile-friendly content that consumers can consume on any device. Responsive design and other mobile-centric marketing are now essential.

• It’s also important to understand that consumers are not waiting for a single advertisement to tell them what to do. They’re empowered and ready to do their research, so help them out by developing high-quality content around a product, such as blog posts, buying guides, comparison charts, and videos -- not just ads. Remember that engaging content is critical for establishing an emotional connection with consumers, and that emotional bond is fundamentally what ZMOT is all about.

• Provide good customer service. Reviews matter at ZMOT. So, make sure your customers are happy, especially after the sale is complete. Find ways to encourage reviews and place positive ones front and center whenever possible.

Don’t forget to target people who have already shown interest in your brand. With remarketing, you can help establish brand loyalty and retention.These are just some of the high-level ways that brands can optimize for ZMOT.

SEO is Dead. Are You Ready for Search Experience Optimization?

Search engine optimization has always been an exciting space full of changes and ever-evolving algorithms. Figuring out how to exploit those algorithms has been the main objective of countless SEOs.

These exploits have really given SEO a bad name in the process. Scaling the development of low-quality content, purchasing links, getting meaningless directory inclusions, and many other offenses that were focusing on optimizing for search engines, once made a difference.

That was then. Today, Google is much smarter and has refined its algorithm to better understand what makes a great website. In short, a great website — one that Google will rank higher — is one that can provide a great user experience. A website that is optimized for people, not just search engines.

What Changed?

Over the last few years, experienced SEOs have been calling for a rebranding for what we do. Many have settled on Search Experience Optimization (often abbreviated SXO).

The term search experience optimization better marries together a few disciplines, including search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, and user experience. In addition to SEOs becoming more focused on optimizing for the user, search engines have made significant changes to how they evaluate content. Among the most crucial updates to Google's search algorithm was Panda, a series of updates that that includes real human evaluations (along with algorithmic assessments that mimic these human evaluations). These changes help Google gauge the quality of a website more efficiently.

While Google doesn't explicitly divulge much when it comes to their ranking factors, it's advised that SEOs and all web professionals adhere to Google's prescribed best practices to avoid any ranking penalties.

How to Optimize for Experience

Good SEO has always been about upholding a great user experience. Unfortunately, some unethical marketers have given the field a bad name, seeking to game Google’s algorithm while failing to consider the user.

Focusing on search experience optimization is really about legitimizing what good SEOs have been doing all along. This includes improving all aspects of the searcher’s experience, including:

• Building content that meets of expectations of the searcher.

• Ensuring that content loads quickly.

• Making content that speaks directly to its intended audience.

• Aligning on-page SEO elements with the topic so that Google and users alike know exactly what you’re setting out to communicate.

These are just some of the basic tenets of optimizing content to provide a search engine friendly website. But the evolving demands of good SEOs now incorporate aspects of user experience (UX) as well. These include:

• Making sure content is accessible across all browsers and all devices, ideally through a responsive design.

• Building a clear information architecture (IA) so that users can easily perform their task or goal with little friction.

• Taking a more active role in wireframing and prototyping processes to ensure the IA informs the content strategy throughout the website.

• Upholding the accessibility of your website, ensuring that all of your potential users, including people with disabilities, have a decent user experience.

User Experience and SEO

SEO still manages to play a significant role in search engine results and influences how websites get found online. But SEO has become much more than simply trying to stay ahead of Google and their algorithm tweaks.

These days, it's important to have a broader perspective. To better satisfy a user's needs, marketers might have to turn to focus groups, web analytics data, keyword research, field interviews, and usability tests. It's no longer enough to gather search data alone. Data on interactions, as well as finding insights direct from users, will be paramount.

Truth is, the search experience is just one part of the larger overall user experience, and SEOs need to adjust their thinking and processes to better address UX. Ultimately, introducing new designs, features, and structures will likely keep users more engaged. This in turn, will have lasting results on your rankings.

What You Need to Know About Google's Mobile-Friendly Update

Mobile-friendly design has been touted for quite some time -- that's nothing new. But while it had been an optional path to take in order to improve user experience on smartphones, it's now a must for launching any website.

On April 21, 2015 Google rolled out a critical new algorithm that will boost the rankings of websites that are accessible and readable on mobile devices. This update has substantial risks for brands and publishers that don't have have a mobile app, a responsive website design, or any method for delivering mobile-friendly content.

Google noted that the update affected rankings on mobile devices only, and shouldn't effect searchers performed on tablets and desktop computers. But with wider adoption of smartphones, that's not much of a consolation for anyone who hasn't adopted a mobile-first strategy. According to the Pew Research Center, 64% of American adults now own a smartphone of some kind, up from 35% in the spring of 2011.If your content is already mobile-friendly through the use of a dynamic serving website, separate URLs, or responsive design, you're ahead of the curve. If you're still in need of a mobile solution, don't fret. Here are a few steps you might want to consider:

• First, verify whether your site is mobile-friendly or not by using Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool. You can also use the Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools to test every page of your website.

• If you're using WordPress and a non-responsive theme, head over to the Update page inside the dashboard and grab the latest version (Version 4.2.1). This will automatically apply needed security upgrades and may make your site mobile-friendly. Other content management systems may offer similar, built-in mobile solutions, so check to see that you're always running the latest software.

• Contact your hosting provider to see if they have a mobile solution available. Many hosts like Dreamhost include a mobile site builder tool, which will create a mobile version of your site automatically within minutes.

• Look into revamping your site with a responsive framework. Frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, Gumby, Skeleton, and many others, provide grid-based layouts with pre-defined base code, helping deliver beautiful, modern responsive websites with less complicated and time-consuming development.

• Lastly, you can also seek the help of a developer or agency to help you rebuild your website or build a mobile app from scratch. Most developers and agencies are savvy with taking a mobile-first approach, but make sure they provide samples of their recent responsive or mobile work.

It's important to keep in mind that responsive design has really become the new standard. Even Google is now recommending this approach for a number of reasons. For starters, responsive design makes it easier for users to share and link to your content with a single URL. It's also optimized to every device, without the need for redirects or additional load time. A responsive website is also easier to crawl, so it can help Google index your content much more efficiently.

Because the update affects searches performed on mobile devices only and impacts individual pages rather that entire websites, "Mobilegeddon" has so far been less dramatic than some of Google's other algorithm updates. However, the update underscores the growing use of mobile devices by consumers. It also shows that Google is making mobile user experience a top priority, which means that brands would be wise to do same.

How Site Speed Impacts SEO and User Experience

When you're looking for something online and you come across a webpage that loads at the blink of an eye – or faster – how does that make you feel? Does it enhance your experience or detract from it?Obviously, everyone loves to have their information served up at ludicrous speed. And not only is page speed important for enhancing user experience, it’s a critical yet sometimes overlooked variable when it comes to search engine optimization as well.

Site Speed Matters to Users

Users love it when a page loads in their browser quickly. Users are fickle and they know that if they don’t find what they’re looking for on your website, they’ll easily find it on another site. If it takes more than three or four seconds for a page to load, users have a tendency to get antsy and and click away, resulting in high bounce rates, lower conversions, and lost revenue.Fact is, a simple Google search yields a plethora of information on any given query. And your website isn’t the only game in town. When a user clicks on your listing, you should be ready to serve your content up to them as quickly as possible.

Speed Matters to Google Too

Google’s primary mission is to help its users find the best quality information as quickly as possible. That’s precisely why site speed has become a major ranking factor for Google. While having quality content has always been key, the overall user experience is also hugely important.Google wants to provide its own users with the best quality results possible. That's why a site with mediocre content may very well rank higher than your site if its pages load in half the time. The content itself isn't enough to provide the best experience for users.Site speed also makes it easier for Google to index your content. While users should always be the top priority, it's important to also consider the time required for search engines to crawl all the pages within your site. The faster your site loads, the faster the search engine can crawl your site, decipher its content, and rank it accordingly.

Mobile User Experience is Critical

Take a look at your Google Analytics account and check out the devices being used to view your site. More and more users are probably using a tablet or smartphone to access your content.While the rise in mobile usage adds many challenges surrounding the design of your site and the flexibility of your user interface, it’s also important to think how users behave on their mobile devices compared to desktop users. Desktop users may be a little fickle and antsy, but mobile users are downright impatient. They're on the go and demand information to be served up quickly.Optimizing your site’s loading speed is increasingly critical for any site that has a large percentage of mobile visits. In fact, the mobile user experience is becoming more important that the desktop experience as consumers in general are replacing traditional desktop computers with tablets and larger smartphones.

A Faster Site Equals More Revenue

A faster website can translate into a better user experience, higher rankings in search engines, and lower bounce rates. For ecommerce sites in particular, pages that load faster translate into the ability to sell products to customers more efficiently with higher conversion rates.Numerous case studies have been written on the importance of speediness in ecommerce. Companies like Walmart have noticed that site speed had a huge impact on its business. In 2012, the retail giant confirmed that conversion rates were at their highest when pages took just one or two seconds to load, but greatly decreased as page loading time increased.Walmart even went on to buy site-speed optimization startup Torbit soon after the aforementioned case study was published, further signaling the critical correlation between the time it takes for a website to load and their core business metrics.

Tools and Resources

Here is a list of tools and resources that will help you test and resolve speed issues on your site:

Google PageSpeed Insights – This is one of the best tools to analyze the speed of your website. Not only does it break down how your website is loading on both mobile and desktop platforms, but it also provides specific details on what you should fix to improve speediness.

Pingdom Speed Test – This tool will breakdown all the individual requests done to load a page. It will also show how the page is loading in other parts of the world.

WP Super Cache – If you’re running a site on WordPress, this is one of the best caching plugins out there. Basically, when someone visits your site, it will serve them a static html file from your dynamic WordPress site, instead of serving up WordPress PHP scripts.

W3 Total Cache – This is another great caching plug-in for WordPress. While I personally haven’t used this one, it has received great reviews and appears to be more robust and feature-rich than many other caching plug-ins.

CloudFlare – This is a great service that acts as a proxy between your visitors and your website’s servers. According to CloudFlare, the average website or blog will load nearly twice as fast when the service has been activated, so its definitely worth a look.

Closing Thoughts

While sites like Amazon and Walmart have made great case studies on site speed, all websites stand to benefit from speedier loading. Here are a few additional tips to help speed things up:

• Reduce the amount of JavaScript on pages.

• Compress images to keep file size around 100 kb or less.

• Avoid adding plugins whenever possible.

• Utilize browser caching.

• Splurge on quality web hosting.

And if you’re using WordPress:

• WP Super Cache and CloudFlare will be especially useful to give your site a boost.

• You should also remove unneeded plugins from time to time. The more plugins you have installed, the more they will affect your site’s performance.

• Using a good theme with your WordPress installation will also help speed things up. The more bells and whistles, the more likely it will take longer to load.

Users expect to get what they need at faster and faster speeds. To ensure they have the best experience, and to boost traffic from search and reduce bounce rates, make sure to pay attention to load times. Your users – and search engines – will be glad you did.