With the competition to stand out from the crowd more fierce than ever, businesses are adopting new digital marketing techniques to reach larger audiences.
Companies are investing more heavily in SEO and PPC campaigns as part of their Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategies, Influencers are being paid high amounts of money to market their products, and the likes of Ryanair and Lidl have become the kings of social media by building more personable brands.
But hold onto your hats, as things are only going to intensify in 2024, according to ROAR Digital Marketing’s Managing Director, Michael Knowles.
Michael, who founded ROAR in 2016, is highly regarded within the UK’s digital marketing sector with a background working with Google as a Digital Skills Trainer and at Newcastle University as a Senior Lecturer in Marketing.
Content is still king
“There’s long been a debate about whether written content still has a place in business’ SEO strategies and wider SEM plans following the advancement of image-led and video content. Producing helpful and expert content is more relevant and important than ever, and web content in the form of blogs for example helps boost your search engine rankings significantly and gets your business seen by more people. As highlighted in the Google Helpful Content Update, one of the most important things to realise is that text should be written more for their audience and not aimed at generating search engine traffic – content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience will be better rewarded than content littered with keywords trying to please search engines.”
More is sometimes More
“There’s no denying that short-form content is very much in vogue these days as people’s attention spans have shortened dramatically. Research from Wyzowl revealed that 73% of consumers prefer to watch a short-form video to learn about a product or service – and the same can be said for written content as audiences prefer to digest more bite size information. However, long-form content has made a rapid resurgence and there is a returning desire for more words in terms of news and information articles. In fact, readers spend more than twice as much time on articles over 1,000 words in length than they do with short articles, and there will always be the appetite for lengthier pieces of content which go into more detail or provide more points of view.”
Google’s featured snippets are evolving
“You may have noticed when you ask a question or search for something on Google, a short snippet of text answering your query can sometimes appear at the top of the results. These are called featured snippets, and appear in what is known as ‘Position 0’ – priority over all over links. The purpose of these featured snippets is to provide web users with quick, highly relevant answers to search queries so they don’t have to scroll through the long list of search results below. They are evolving rapidly and ensuring that more content relevant to people’s search queries is ranking higher on search engine results pages. To optimise your content for a featured snippet, consider the following:
- Add a ‘What is’, ‘How is’, ‘How to’, etc. heading;
- Use an ‘is’ sentence structure;
- Target question-based queries;
- Fully define the topic;
- Match the featured snippet format;
- Prioritise this strategy on content for which you rank in the top five.
Beware of rising Cost Per Clicks (CPC)
“Businesses, rightly in my view, have been investing a lot more in Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns as this is a surefire way of guaranteeing your brand is being seen by ideal, highly targetted and the golden ‘in market’ audiences. However, we have noticed that CPCs have risen over the past year, and this has caught a lot of unsuspecting businesses out. Google recently confirmed it had inflated its CPCs to 10% to meet its own financial targets, but hadn’t made the public aware of it. This means businesses no longer return the same conversion rates from their initial investments. This is where employing a clued-up, on-the-ball digital marketing agency comes in handy. We are on hand to analyse the rates and potential return on investment (ROI) from such ad campaigns. Despite this rise by Google, PPC remains a key channel to your business’ SEM campaign to get you noticed, raise brand and product awareness, generate leads and grow sales in the most competitive of marketplaces.”
User Generated Content (UGC) taking over
“We’ve seen the rise of TikTokers and influencers promoting products on behalf of businesses and, although it’s not a new method of marketing, it is now flooding the digital stratosphere. When people are browsing products to consume, seeing either a famous person speaking favourably about the product is aspirational for the ‘ordinary’ member of the public. However, one of the most effective marketing tools is UGC as watching a video of a like-minded individual explaining how good a product is instantly hits home with the consumer about how that item will similarly benefit their lives. The effectiveness of this method is confirmed by both Tik Tok and Instagram which have in feed and in post shopping options, allowing consumers to quickly and easily buy the products being used and discussed by the influencer. We predict that ‘consumer reviews’ will become the dominant form of marketing because seeing products and services in actual use from ‘real sources’ sells.”
Personality behind the brand
“Budget airline Ryanair has become famed on X for its trolling of customers complaining about their service. Some slam the company for its ‘unprofessional’ responses to consumers, but they have taken off (sorry for the pun) with many more who view their interactions as hilariously funny and refreshingly honest, giving the impression to the public that they are fully aware of what they are – a low cost alternative to other airlines where the levels of service will not be of the same quality as rivals. But will this honest approach lose them custom? It would appear not when you consider they are set to make a record £1.8bn this year – and that is despite the criticism they receive on X! We can only see more businesses following suit and displaying more personality.”
Increased personalisation of AI
“The ever-developing AI will continue to be personalised to the point where it recommends suggestions – think Netflix or Amazon – for users before they even formulate that thought in their own heads. By analysing the wealth of personal data they have on you, AI will make dramatic impacts in personalisation in ways we haven’t seen before allowing it to create more segmented, specific audiences which results in a more personalised online experience.”
