Category: B2B Marketing

Demystifying the expansive world of digital advertising. 

With a powerful return on investment (ROI) opportunity — up to 200%, in fact¹ — digital advertising can play an essential role in your integrated marketing strategy. But, just where to begin? Between social media, streaming content, responsive search ads and retargeting content, it can feel overwhelming trying to navigate the digital marketing landscape.

If you’re wondering whether digital advertising is right for your business, you’re in luck. With insights from our resident digital marketing strategist, we have outlined the elements of a digital ad campaign — from clarifying goals to the pros and cons of the most popular platforms — to make it easier to understand.

Define campaign objectives.

The first step in creating a successful digital advertising strategy is defining your campaign objectives. Begin by asking yourself these two questions: What do you want to achieve with the ad campaign? And, how will this campaign fit into your overall marketing strategy? Digital ads are one piece of the marketing puzzle, and a successful strategy uses each piece to complement the others. The answer to these questions will help you determine your primary campaign objective, allowing you to build your strategy around the right objectives and conversions. The most common campaign objectives are brand awareness, website traffic, online engagement, leads and sales.

Understand your audience.

Who are you going to target with this campaign? Understanding your audience — from their online habits to the language they use — allows you to tailor your campaign to make the biggest impact. For example, are you targeting new audiences who are unfamiliar with your brand or established customers who are already familiar with your offerings? For new audiences, your content would likely need to provide an overview of your services and what sets your business apart, while you could hone in on more detailed content for users that are already in the know. You could also consider targeting audiences in a specific location — this is especially valuable for brick-and-mortar shops — or reach users who work in a specific industry, such as construction, commercial real estate or chemical engineering. Not only does defining your audience help with your content messaging, but it also helps you select the platform more likely to reach them. Understanding how the audience would interact with the brand organically helps you determine how best to reach them through a sponsored ad — ultimately, you want to meet them where they are.

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Case in point: Google vs. LinkedIn ads.

To see how distinct audiences can shape an ad campaign, let’s take a closer look at two of our clients. First up: Food Town, a locally-owned grocery store wanted to reach repeat shoppers in the Houston area. Targeting an audience already familiar with the grocery store, and locations, we developed an integrated marketing strategy using digital display ads to drive in-store traffic, and sparking sales using local search Google ads.

Surveillance system provider SentriForce wanted to reach new prospective customers in the construction industry across multiple locations. To do so, we launched a comprehensive campaign on LinkedIn showcasing how their systems address theft on construction sites that targeted decision makers in the industry by job title.

Establish a timeline.

Next up, you’ll want to consider how long the campaign will run. Evergreen campaigns are ideal for brand awareness, maintaining visibility with users long-term. On the other hand, targeted drip campaigns or seasonal campaigns can be used to drive high-impact concentrated messaging around a more time-sensitive or relevant topic.

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Case in point: Peak Season.

A dedicated ad campaign can help drive awareness leading up to and during your business’ peak season. For example, we launched a digital ad campaign for a commercial property tax company to boost brand awareness six months before tax season. This helped plant the seeds in potential clients’ minds over the months in advance, encouraging more conversions during tax season by strengthening name recall, brand awareness and authority. 

Set the budget.

Once you have clear goals, a target audience and a timeline, you’ll want to determine just how much to spend on your ads. While the specific number will depend on your goals and overall marketing strategy, your marketing spend should ideally be between 7 – 10% of your net profit.² You can use this number as a starting point and adjust your spend, as needed, as you continue to optimize your campaign overtime.

Select ad platforms.

Last, but absolutely not least, you’ll determine where to launch your campaign. Reflect on all of the previous steps, from the overarching goals to where your audience is online to the timeline and budget. These elements can help to inform the best platform to initiate an integrated digital ad strategy that best supports your business’ marketing initiatives.

Pros and cons of digital advertising platforms.

While digital ads can support all businesses, selecting the right ad platform is essential for crafting a successful campaign. Learn more about the most common examples of digital advertising platforms below — and what type of campaigns each one is best suited for.

Search engine ads.

With an average ROI of $2 for every $1 spent³, Google Ads are a powerful tool in your digital marketing kit. From dynamic graphics to location-specific ads, search engine ads on Google and Bing offer a wide range of options to choose from — each with specific benefits depending on your business’ services and campaign goals.

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Search ads.

Search ads are a great place to begin a digital campaign because of the wealth of in-depth data they provide. These sponsored text ads appear on search results pages and typically lead users to a dedicated landing page. Search ads can provide you with invaluable information such as the specific user search terms, how the user is navigating online and engaging with your content, and where they are in the sales funnel when they engage. This insight allows you to refine and optimize your campaign in real time, adapting to the language and phrases your real target audience is using.

Responsive display ads.

Display ads are dynamic, relying on native and responsive tools to create ads tailored to the platform where they are served up to your audience. These ads pull from a bank of images and headlines, pairing them together to best fit the platform or page. While these are designed to best suit the format used by your audience, there is limited control over how the various elements are combined, so you need to provide a flexible bank of images and content that can easily be mixed and matched together.

Video ads.

Video ads provide you with a lot of valuable information about users’ search behavior, making them a good choice for using at the start of a brand awareness or educational campaign. As you learn more about various behaviors and how users are engaging with your content, you can further refine your strategy across various platforms. While eye-catching, video ads can also be more time-consuming to create and maintain.

Local ads.

Local ads target users in a specific geographic area, which typically translates to a smaller, more concentrated audience. With these ads, businesses can target specific actions such as placing online orders, calling a business or getting driving directions, as well as monitoring foot traffic. Local ads are often a strong fit for established brands or familiar industries such as restaurants and retail, and can be used to generate high ROI conversions.

Remarketing.

Ever felt like an ad is following you around the internet? That’s likely a remarketing ad. These ad types use data collected during a previous campaign to remarket messaging to users who have previously engaged with your content. Remarketing ads are a visual reminder, keeping your brand top of mind for users and encouraging them to take a desired action.

Social media ads.

With 74% of shoppers researching products on social media before making a purchase⁴, social media ads are a powerful tool for direct-to-consumer and business-to-consumer brands. While these ads offer flexibility and can be relatively cost effective, they have relatively limited insights and can be difficult to target businesses through Meta. Platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube offer a variety of native tools that can be used to drive engagement with specific audiences, depending on where your target audience spends time online.

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Instagram.

Instagram, which is part of Meta’s ad suite, is a popular choice for business-to-consumer and direct-to-consumer businesses. As a visual-first platform, video, photography and graphic elements help with brand education and driving sales — especially through the use of direct product shop links. However, the demographic reach for Instagram is relatively limited, with most users being under 50 years of age.

Facebook.

On the other hand, Facebook — also part of Meta’s ad suite — has a broader demographic range that engages with ads in a variety of ways, including Messenger, Stories and the in-platform newsfeed. The ads are integrated into users’ experiences more organically, which can help build trust. However, Facebook controls the view and advertisers do not have access to specific data sets or audiences, which can make it difficult to refine audience segments.

LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s native tools are designed for targeting audiences by industry or profession, which makes this a good platform for brand awareness and engagement campaigns. However, it’s important to be flexible with audience segments, taking advantage of the platform’s built-in automation tools to guide the ads to potential customers and brand advocates.

Pinterest.

As a primarily visual platform, Pinterest is ideal for aesthetically pleasing photos and videos — especially content that can be repurposed or “pinned” for inspiration such as recipes, home décor or DIY projects. Advertising on this platform is akin to casting a wide net. While it can be difficult to zero in on the exact target audience you have in mind, there is opportunity to reach a large number of potential customers who are interested in your brand’s industry or niche.

YouTube.

Advertising on YouTube can help you better understand your target audience’s online behaviors. The platform shares a good amount of data about users’ search behavior, which provides insight into how users find your business online. The platform can also help you reach a large audience — however, on the flip side, it can also lead to ad fatigue when repeatedly served up to the same users. It can also be challenging to ensure your ads appear on content that aligns specifically with your brand’s mission or values.

Digital marketing campaigns continue to evolve over time, and you have the opportunity to continue finetuning them as you learn more about your audience members. As part of an integrated multi-channel marketing strategy, digital ads play an important role in keeping your brand top of mind, improving authority and brand recognition, and driving digital conversions. Talk to our digital marketing experts about crafting a marketing campaign designed around your business’ goals.

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Sources:

1. 46 PPC Stats to Empower Your Marketing Strategy in 2024, Techjury
2. 7 tips to create an effective digital marketing budget, Spendesk
3. Economic Impact: Methodology, Google
4. 80+ Industry Specific Social Media Marketing Statistics For 2024, Synup

Insights into how to bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams for greater impact.

Aligning your sales and marketing efforts — making sure teams are on the same page, speaking the same language and working toward shared goals — is essential for success. Not only is it important for building trust and improving efficiency, but it impacts the bottom line. It’s estimated that sales-marketing misalignment costs businesses over $1 trillion each year. Yet, as your business grows and your teams get larger, it becomes harder to keep these teams in sync.

Integrated marketing campaigns use a multi-pronged approach to raise brand awareness and connect with your target audience. But marketing campaigns don’t exist in a vacuum. Marketing can drive leads all day, but those leads need to convert to truly move the needle — and that’s where the sales team comes in. In the B2B industry, the average conversion rate is just 3.6 across all industries.² When sales and marketing are misaligned, that percentage may be even lower, and your company is likely missing out on high-value opportunities. But the good news is that the flipside is true, too. When there’s synergy between these two teams, you’re likely to see a powerful impact on your conversions and growth.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how you can bridge the gap between sales and marketing. From brainstorming to sharing milestones, here are a few actionable steps that can help your teams work together.

Speak the same language.

One of the biggest hurdles in getting on the same page? Not speaking the same language. While teams may be talking about similar topics, they may use different terminology or language to mean the same thing. For example, “flysheets” and “one-pagers” may both refer to a single- or double-sided flyer. Or, vice versa, they may use the same vocabulary words to mean different things. For example, “conversions” likely refer to different goals for each team — marketing may use this term to refer to web traffic that completes a specific action like submitting a new business form, while sales may use this term to refer to the number of prospects who sign up for your service.

To get teams to speak the same language — and to truly understand each other — it can be helpful for them to spend time meeting regularly. For example, weekly or bi-weekly huddles can be used as a time to check in and connect, and shadowing sales calls or marketing strategy sessions can provide a firsthand view into the language each team uses day to day.

Crack the corporate lingo code.

It can be easy to get swept up in corporate lingo or industry jargon. But buzzwords and acronyms can make it much more difficult to connect with cross-functional teams. Instead of speaking in what is essentially code, when team members speak plainly using accessible language and take the time to explain acronyms to colleagues who may be unfamiliar with them, it goes a long way in improving communication. Explaining any department-specific acronyms or short-hand phrases will help both teams get on the same page.

Define milestones and metrics.

Another important way to build connection between the team is to define milestones, metrics and even shared goals. Clarifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure success provides insight into how both teams contribute to the overall goals — and how they can support one another. The teams can work together to strategize ways to achieve the defined KPIs and meet project milestones on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. Not only does this support internal processes, but it has a major impact on your business’ bottom line. Companies typically see a 27% faster profit growth when sales and marketing teams work toward shared goals.³

Share customer insights.

Sales teams speak to prospective customers — so they understand the concerns and most common questions that arise. Their firsthand knowledge means that they know what terminology is being used by current and prospective customers. The marketing team can, in turn, use these valuable insights to align your company’s marketing initiatives with your ideal customers.

Marketing teams can take this information to address your customer’s specific needs — the challenges they’re encountering day to day, the benefits they’re looking for, what’s holding them back from making a purchase or signing up for your service. These factors can be addressed directly in the marketing materials, providing powerful and persuasive sales tools.

Collaborate on Campaigns.

A lot of strategy, effort and money goes into developing integrated, multi-platform marketing campaigns. But marketing is only one half of the battle. If the sales team is disconnected from the campaign goals, the potential for success diminishes. So rather than operating in silos, marketers can collaborate with the sales team to ensure they are not only informed but also connected with the company’s campaigns.

Brainstorm and idea share.

Marketers can bounce ideas off the sales team to get a better understanding of what might connect with customers. This can take many different forms — from structured meetings to freeform ideas sharing sessions — but, ultimately, the goal remains the same: to brainstorm ways to effectively communicate your value, services and products with your ideal audience.  

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Put the partnership into action.

Once your teams are on the same page, speaking the same language and working towards the same goals, it’s time to put things into motion. Here are some tools that marketers and creative teams can craft to help the sales team close more deals.

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Email marketing templates and automations.

Ideal for both cold calls and warm lead nurturing, email marketing templates and automations can be used to connect with prospective customers and keep your company fresh in people’s minds. These are great to send after events, successful sales calls or even to begin a new conversation, freeing up the sales team’s time while still keeping their leads warm.

Sales decks and presentation templates.

Branded presentations are essential for building brand recognition and conveying credibility. Creative teams can design editable templates to serve as the foundation for the sales team, providing flexibility and removing stress.

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One-pagers and fact sheets. 

By providing a snapshot of your business’ offerings and benefits, one-pagers, flyers and sales sheets are helpful tools to keep customers engaged and raise top-of-mind awareness. These materials can be created in digital or print formats depending on the team’s needs.

Embracing alignment ultimately lifts both teams up by cultivating strong communication and cross-functional development. Rather than feeling disconnected or siloed as each team works toward its own goals, bringing both teams together allows them to pool resources, gain new insights and share knowledge with each other. What’s more, the numbers show that companies whose sales and marketing teams work in sync with each other are able to increase their revenue by up to three times.³ This clearly shows the power in partnership. When teams work together to amplify each other’s strengths, great things are possible.

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Sources:

1. How Sales and Marketing Alignment Increased Revenue by 34% (Case Study), Super Office
2. B2B Conversion Rates Explained with Numbers, UpLead
3. Sales and Marketing Alignment: Stats and Trends for 2023, LXA

Email Marketing Strategy Is Not Dead — Contrary to What You Might Have Heard.

Rumor has it that email marketing is not as effective as it once was. There are too many emails, too many businesses vying for space in your inbox, and too few ways to really make emails break through the static. So, is email marketing dead? The short answer? Heck no.

Email marketing strategy is still alive and well. Strike that. It’s alive and thriving! How can you argue with statistics like, 77% of marketers saw an increase in email engagement in 2023¹; or email marketing revenue is estimated to reach just shy of 12.5 billion in 2024²; or 87% of brands say email marketing is critical to their success³?

The answer is: you can’t. So, here’s how your business can benefit from email marketing plus a few more ways your email marketing can be more effective and cut through the clutter.

Top five email marketing benefits for your business.

If you’re in the camp that says email marketing is pointless, you may want to think again. There are many ways email marketing adds value to your business, from increasing customer engagement to generating website traffic.

1. Connect with your audience.

Typically, segmented lists drive more opens and click-throughs because the content—from the subject line to the call-to-action — can be tailored to a specific audience subset. Personalized content is also highly important in 2024, as you may recall from our 2024 market trends article. Content is so important because people are absolutely inundated with information. Hyper-personalizing what you distribute and targeting to a segmented list means you can connect with your audience in a meaningful way.

2. Generate website traffic.

Sure, you can post on social media or use other means to drive traffic. But when it comes to email marketing in 2024, most are reading your communication on their phone. And what’s easier than using your fingertip to click a button or link via your inbox? For an on-the-go audience, email marketing reaches them anywhere — which means they are just one click from your website at any time.

3. Optimize marketing costs.

Traditional print or direct marketing campaigns can often be budget breakers, and digital advertising costs add up quickly when bidding against competitors. With email marketing, you have an engaged audience of potential customers who want to get information from your company. There’s no battling against the masses to get noticed. Plus, email marketing services typically base pricing on email list size, making it much more cost-effective to send multiple campaigns at a fraction of the cost of other mediums (yay frequency!).

4. Seize the moment.

Reaching people at the right time is half the battle. Email marketing platforms offer lots of features so you’re able to explore data, as well as time your emails to reach each segment (by location, open rate and so on) at exactly the right moment, making your business always top-of-mind.

5. Provide value to your customers.

When your business shares worthwhile content like industry news, promotions and deals and educational content, you begin to cultivate a loyal customer base. When they start to expect helpful, thoughtful content that resonates, your audience will be more willing to pay attention to your emails — even the salesy ones that will increase your ROI.

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2024 email marketing trends that will shape your marketing strategy.

The future of email marketing is still bright — although there are trends that are reshaping how individuals engage with email content. There is an email marketing transformation happening that prioritizes dynamic content to create a true experience for the recipient. So, how can you create a mini moment? Here are a few takeaway tips:

• Embedding features like polls and surveys to increase interaction
• Utilizing rich media to make content more visually appealing
• Gamifying content like spin-to-win adds fun elements
• Interactive call-to-actions that change or animate to be more eye-catching
  
  

Making email marketing mobile-friendly should be a priority.

As the data shows, most emails are opened from mobile devices. That means designing and programming for mobile users is key. We’ve all received an email where the margins are wonky and the text overflows or the images takeover the content we’re trying to consume. Getting on board with mobile-friendly email marketing is key to engagement. Consider these tips on your next email campaign:

• Responsive design to fit the screen of various devices
• Touch-friendly features so your audience has the ease of finger-clicking
• Content that is brief but resonates — and clicks through to a longer version

Get in with a team that can deploy solid email marketing strategy FOR your business today

We’ve got the trends down—and the experience to know what to leverage and when. Let the Design At Work team plan the right combination so your business sees the benefits of email marketing. Contact us to get started on your refreshed email marketing strategy.

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Sources:

1. The Ultimate list of Email Marketing Stats for 2023, HubSpot
2. Number of sent and received e-mails per day worldwide from 2017 to 2026, Statista
3. The 2023 State of Email Workflows Report, Litmos

Here’s why Internal Marketing matters. 

Marketing. We know it can build brand awareness, engage customers, boost sales, and grow your business overall. But what about internal marketing? How you interact with employees directly correlates to how they feel about being on your company’s team, if they support your company’s goals and objectives, and if they trust you as their employer. From simply raising morale to improving customer service, internal marketing is essential — and here’s why you should make it a priority.

So, how important is it to keep employees engaged?

According to Gallup, only 20% of employees feel engaged at work¹ — and when engagement ties to job satisfaction and satisfied employees tend to work harder, you must wonder, what is happening with the other 80%. Where are businesses dropping the ball when it comes to employee engagement?

A main culprit: thinking employee buy-in falls on the sole shoulders of HR. And yes, while HR processes are in place to keep consistent communication and ensure satisfaction with benefits, when it comes to a company’s brand (whether external or internal perception), that’s a marketer’s responsibility. Consider monthly newsletters or other forms of communication to stay in touch with your team. Mass texting is also a good way to disseminate information while fostering a team feeling.

Keeping bank employees focused and satisfied with internal marketing

Design At Work created internal marketing materials such as videos, a monthly newsletter template and social media posts to help employees engage with the bank’s brand and see the benefits of working for Central Bank. These efforts were in tangent with the bank’s HR team’s initiatives to highlight what makes Central Bank different and a great place to nurture a career.

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Internal marketing can help you build a stronger company culture.

Building an invested team starts with laying a strong foundation — and we believe that begins with company culture. What business wouldn’t want to increase productivity and provide a healthy work environment to create an invested team? Most see the correlation between a solid company culture and satisfied employees, and in turn, that satisfaction returns higher retention rates and performance. So how do you create a strong company culture?

Promoting your company’s vision, mission, services and values through internal marketing helps build and sustain a well-oiled workforce. While it used to be comprised of updates or alerts about new products or changes within a company, today, marketing to your team means making champions for your business (and fostering goodwill, comradery and happiness is key). Making employees feel a more seen and heard can have a huge impact on overall company culture. Instead of a person in a cubicle or working the floor, internal marketing can help create a strong emotional connection between the employee and their work.

When COVID-19 hit, Nexus Health Systems used internal marketing efforts to simultaneously thank their healthcare heroes while boosting morale to keep company culture strong.

Internal marketing for hospitals and other healthcare facilities

While the Nexus Cares campaign commenced at the height of COVID-19 in 2020, the initiative continues today ensuring employees are taken care of mentally, physically, and emotionally. Now quarterly, employees anticipate some sort of small gift or special event to recognize their effort and to show appreciation.

From specialty BBQ sauces to make summertime more enjoyable to health system-wide Astros games to company swag, Nexus knows how to connect with their team — and the results have been remarkable. From employees sharing photos and tagging #NexusCares on social media to an increase in scholarship nomination form submissions, Nexus has connected with their team on another level which in turn fosters more buy-in, boosts morale, and gives individuals a greater reason to help see their health system mission through.

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Marketing Your Company’s Legacy to your team can nurture greater trust.

Authenticity resonates, both with customers and your employees. From Gallup’s list of behaviors that inspire trust in their leadership research, authenticity emerged as highly important. The survey found, “Employees who trust their leaders are 61% more likely to stay with their company and not look for another job.²”

Virgin CEO Richard Branson said on X (formerly Twitter), “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” This also boils down to trust, and a big part of trusting an employer has to do with company longevity.

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Regardless of milestone, if your company is recognizing an anniversary or celebrating a special moment in company history, employees should be involved. From small gatherings to more elaborate celebrations, when you get your team involved you foster trust — and with that, your company can go anywhere.

Using internal marketing to celebrate a major company milestone

McCoy Rockford celebrated the power of 10 years recently, recognizing the merger of their Austin and Houston offices. To mark the milestone, they used internal marketing efforts to spread the word not only about the significance of the moment but the week-long events calendar. From a celebration breakfast to company-wide t-shirt day, McCoy Rockford created a memorable and positive experience for their team. Circling back to our first point, they engaged the team with ways for them to get involved in the celebrating and even asked employees to share on social media for clients and vendors to experience as well.

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Internal marketing can fail — here’s why and what you can do about it.

Whether it’s poorly executed, or not very appealing, internal marketing efforts need to be well thought out. You can’t just throw something together and hope it resonates.

At Design At Work, our team knows internal marketing needs to be inspiring and linked with what your employees care about. Once you get them on board, the possibilities are endless. Contact us if you need any help to get started on your next internal marketing campaign.

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Sources:

1. Gallup: State of the Global Workplace
2. Gallup: How to Build Trust in the Workplace

Marketing tips to help your business
be more successful in the new year. 

Five years ago, 88% of consumers¹ said they wanted to connect with, follow and make purchases from brands that push the boundaries and go beyond what is expected in traditional marketing. 

Fast forward to 2024, and those findings are truer now than ever. A recent study on customer centricity found 64% of consumers wish brands would respond faster to their changing needs². It’s important for businesses to embrace the idea that their customers are multi-dimensional with changing viewpoints (including how they see themselves) and evolving needs.

Marketing trends in 2024 will not only be about pushing traditional marketing boundaries, but also helping brands communicate with customers in a meaningful way that resonates with their needs — now and five minutes from now. Below we outline some of the latest marketing tactics your business should employ in the new year and beyond. 

There’s nothing artificial about the benefits of generative AI-based marketing. 

While artificial intelligence or AI for marketing is a relatively new approach to content creation, the writing is on the wall. Generative AI tools — like ChatGPT, Bard and DALL·E — are used to create new content, images, code, videos, you name it. And they’re changing the marketing landscape.  

Although you can easily use AI for fun (Who doesn’t want an image of Taylor Swift on the moon or an entirely unique song created about them?), it can also generate all sorts of practical content. From helping brainstorm new products, optimizing business practices and analyzing data — to compiling customer research, breaking down nuanced data, creating personalized content and outputting graphics, when used right, generative AI delivers. 

AI: disruptive in a good or bad way? 

It can be hard to get on board with a new marketing trend, let alone disruptive technology like AI. But like most marketing trends that become standard practice, it’s important to understand how something that is pushing boundaries can turn into a benefit for your business. Disruptive marketing works when executed right.

AI or not, it’s important for your business to consider questions like: Does your marketing tell a story that resonates? How can you pique your customers’ interests? How can you be innovative and make people think differently? In addition, you must ensure your marketing is original. No one wants to digest marketing that feels duplicated. Stay true and authentic to your brand.

“Disruptors don’t have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.”

Use your best voice (search optimization) to reach customers. 

How did we ever search without the hands-free option of voice assistants? Today, over 60% of Americans use voice assistant across different types of devices³. It may be time to assess your website again to determine how it stacks up when it comes to voice search rankings. Making small tweaks can really enhance your online presence when customers are using voice search queries.

When it comes to talking versus typing, there are differences. When talking, we include detail and usually complete thoughts. But when it comes to typing a query, we may only enter a few words or just start our query and select from the autogenerated options.

So how can you optimize your website for voice search? Number one, make sure your site loads quickly — Siri isn’t going to wait to serve up a result. Two, target long-tail keywords conversational phrases and question words (think: how, what, why, when and where). And three, make sure your site is mobile friendly.

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Personalized, interactive content for the win… again. 

We hate to break it to you, but content is still king. And while it can be daunting to plan and develop content that is fresh, consistent and engaging — it’s important. Hyper-personalized content experiences are what consumers demand. Don’t let the name stress you out though, this type of super-targeted content helps you align with your potential customers’ interests, directly impacting how willing they are to engage with your business. 

Influencer marketing and user-generated content. 

To be or not to be… influenced. Authenticity is key with it comes to businesses building their online communities. People want to buy from companies they trust and feel are truly bringing something useful to the table. Leveraging content from the real world does just this. But remember, it is 2024, so you need to step up your content game. Gone are the days of simply posting pictures of happy diners’ plates of food or patients at work in a physical therapy session. You must think outside the box when it comes to sharing content.

Open your ears to social listening. 

Taking a pulse of what is being said about your company, product or brand online is vital. However, just knowing what is out there isn’t enough. Social listening, sometimes referred to as social media listening, should be goal oriented. You can also look for insights when it comes to your customers, gathering information about their habits and preferences. Social listening tools can even scour the internet for certain keywords so you can have a slew of data to review and make sound decisions from.

Social listening versus social monitoring: what should your business be doing? 

It sounds like listening is more like monitoring, but it’s not. Monitoring is simply that. It’s observing what is happening online to gather information; yet, there isn’t necessarily a strategy on what to do with all that data. Social listening on the other hand implies more thought. A company will aggregate data to develop a marketing strategy.

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Set your business up for a successful new year — get on board with the 2024 marketing trends now. 

While marketing changes are often fluid, the trends mentioned above are likely sticking around. The good news is that you don’t have to be a marketing expert — or even a trendy business owner — to leverage the benefits.

At Design At Work, we have a whole team of marketing gurus who stay current on the latest methods, and more importantly, how they can impact your business and help your brand stand out. Contact us if you’re looking for outsourced marketing and need someone to guide you through the right 2024 marketing for your business.

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Sources:

1. Wunderman Study, “Wantedness”
2. Accenture: The human paradox: From customer centricity to life centricity
3. NPR & Edison Research: Smart Speaker Ownership Reaches 35% of Americans 

Want to attract more visitors to your website using search engine optimization? Here’s how.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has come a long way since the term was first coined in the mid-1990s. In the early days of search engines (remember AltaVista and Ask Jeeves?), ranking highly in search results required little more than writing sufficient content and packing it full of more keywords than your competitors — a practice known as keyword stuffing. In 2000, Google changed the game with its Toolbar PageRank update, which allowed it to rank page importance by the number of quality links pointing to it.¹

More than two decades and dozens of updates later, marketers are still scrambling to keep up with Google’s ever-evolving algorithm. The good news is that the arc of Google’s progress bends toward the user, which equates to higher-quality content. In this article, we offer tips for increasing your organic website traffic using the latest SEO best practices. 

1. Give Your Audience What They Want.

Quality content is the lifeblood of SEO strategy. Useful, interesting and readable content attracts inbound traffic to your site by answering questions, providing information or facilitating transactions. This is called organic traffic — visitors who arrive at your site via unpaid sources such as Google and Bing. To entice those visitors, you have to understand what they want and why they’re searching for it. 

Broadly speaking, there are four main types of search or keyword intent. 

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2. Conduct Thorough Keyword Research. 

Once you know what your users want, it’s time to investigate how they’re searching for it. This is what’s known as topic or keyword research — an inquiry into the language your audience is using in its search queries. If you can’t speak your users’ language, they won’t be able to find you. 

For example, let’s say you’re a residential construction company and you want to make it easier for prospective customers to locate your website through organic search. Perhaps “residential construction” is the phrase that first leaps to mind, so you decide to test the keyword “houston residential construction.” 

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The metrics above suggest that some users enter the phrase “houston residential construction,” but not many. How else might your audience describe what they’re looking for? You might test the keywords “houston house contractor” and “houston home builder” to see if they yield more promising results.

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And voilà! The phrase “houston home builder” returns a higher search volume and more competitive keyword difficulty (we’ll talk more about this shortly). The trick to keyword research is empathy. Try to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What do they know and what do they not know? What words are they likely to use to describe your product, service or related topic? Keep testing different synonyms and word combinations until you find the right keyword.

3. Target Long-Tail Keywords.

So how do you know when you’ve found the right keyword for a given piece of content? Generally, we recommend opting for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are specific phrases comprised of three to five words that allow you to target niche queries and demographics. Short-tail keywords, on the other hand, are broader, one-to-three-word phrases. 

While short-tail keywords attract higher search volumes, they’re also extremely competitive, which means it takes longer to increase your search result rankings. The short-tail phrase “home builder,” for example, has a search volume in the thousands and an extremely high keyword difficulty. While every platform has its own SEO metrics, volume usually refers to the number of people searching for a keyword within a given period, whereas difficulty refers to how much time and effort will be required to compete with other sites for the same keyword. 

Long-tail iterations of “home builder,” such as “environmentally friendly home builders” or “sustainable home builders near me,” reveal much more promising numbers. The first targets a subset of consumers interested in green building practices, and the latter takes it one step further by localizing the query. Both of these long-tail keywords have a relatively high search volume and low keyword difficulty, making them an excellent choice for your primary keyword. 

Why? Because with good traffic and low-to-medium difficulty, you have a better chance of ranking on the first page of Google — and doing so faster. 

4. Compete for Featured Snippets.

Since 2014, Google has been promoting what it considers high-quality content through featured snippets or SERP (search engine result page) features. These snippets are highly visible and helpful, making them likely to attract significant amounts of organic traffic. 

To claim one of these coveted spots, you can optimize your content by using a question-and-answer format. For example, if you want to be featured for the keyword “how to clean a cast iron skillet,” you could include the question in a header or subheader on your page, then answer the question in subsequent body copy. Even if you don’t manage to snag a featured snippet, formatting your content in this way will increase readability and improve the performance of your page. 

5. Optimize Page Titles and Meta Descriptions. 

Page titles and meta descriptions are like an SEO appetizer — they give readers a taste of what’s to come on your page. As such, it’s important that titles not only entice users with attention-grabbing phrasing, but also accurately describe your content. Make sure to include target keywords in page titles and meta descriptions, and keep character limits in mind. Only 30-to-60-character titles will appear in full on SERPs, and meta descriptions should be less than 160 characters. Portent’s SERP Preview Tool makes it easy to ensure you’re staying within your character limits and offers a preview of how your content will appear in SERPs. 

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If you’re looking for a partner to help you implement the latest and greatest SEO strategies, look no further than Design At Work. Let’s talk about how we can increase your website traffic and boost your rankings. 

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Sources:

1. Google Launches the Google Toolbar, Google