Growing your brand with social media contests

Increasing brand awareness, getting customers to engage with your brand, increasing traffic to social media pages – there are many benefits to hosting a social media contest. It gives you a chance to grow a loyal following that can translate into increased leads and sales. 

Let us have a look at some tips and strategies to help you make the most of your contest -

•  Choose the purpose of the contest (increasing website traffic, increasing brand engagement, increasing followers and so on) so that you can better optimize your strategy

• Build your email list by requesting people to sign up for entering the contest. This will help you stay in touch with them even after the contest is over

• Choose the format of the contest such as video contest, photo contest or giveaways based on your end goal

•  Promote your contest far and wide on social media for maximum participation and online visibility. You can use online tools or a digital marketing company for effective promotion

Use a custom hashtag for your contest so that it can extend your online reach and generate more engagement

How to Build Your Personal Brand on Instagram

Instagram is rapidly becoming the golden goose for businesses looking to strengthen their social media presence. With numbers of active users in billions, it is one of the best platforms to build your personal brand, humanize your interactions with your followers and gain new ones.

Let us see some actionable tips that will help you define and set apart your personal brand on Instagram -

Set your goals and objectives

Like with any other strategy, you need to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve from your Instagram account. Analyze your competitors for how they are interacting with their followers, the hashtags they are using and the kind of content they are posting. This will give you an idea of what is working well, what your audience is and isn't responding to, and what you can do to differentiate yourself from them.

Set a voice or theme for your brand personality

Having a unique voice or theme will help your brand become more memorable for your followers. Pick a theme or voice and keep everything from the brand colors and logos to fonts consistent, so that your followers can easily identify you and know that you are staying true to your personality.

Get your hashtags in order

Hashtags are the best and most effective ways for brands to get discovered on Instagram. Luckily for you, the platform allows up to 30 hashtags for a single post. Thus, you have plenty of options to reach new audience by using hashtags that are relevant to your niche.

Leverage the power of Stories

Millions of people watch Instagram Stories everyday. In fact, businesses claim the credit for one-third of the most viewed Stories. You can use this feature to post a behind-the-screen video of your company or host a live event to capture your followers' attention and generate more engagement.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inboundmarketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

How to Become a Social Selling Specialist

The concept of social selling is not new, however, marketers tend to forget that it is not about selling your product or service at all. Rather, the ultimate goal of social selling is to engage your customers and develop long-lasting relationships with them.

The correct social selling practices give a humanized touch to your brands so that your customers and target audience can relate to you, encouraging more engagement and lead generation and overall brand awareness.

Let us have a look at some tips to help you excel at social selling and successfully practice it as a part of your B2B digitalmarketing strategy -

Update your professional profiles

As social selling focuses on brand and customer communication, it is natural that they will visit your business profile to know more about you as a brand. In such cases, incomplete or outdated profiles will contribute to a negative first impression.

Thus, the first step for successful social selling is to dust up your profiles from top to bottom. Include a professional photo, and update your bio to include things that will be useful for your target audience such as who you help, what problem are you solving and how.

It would also be useful to include case studies or testimonials from your previous clients so that new prospects will find it easier to trust you.

Share useful content

Of course, any social media strategy is incomplete without content. Create and share useful content that adds to the knowledge of your target audience, engages their attention, and above all provides business value. Such content will generate more encouragement in terms of likes and shares, leading to increased brand awareness and visibility.

Encourage communication to drive engagement

You cannot rely solely on sharing content to generate engagement. Participating in relevant group discussions and forums, responding to or leaving your own comments will give you the opportunity to directly engage and communicate with your target audience in a meaningful conversation.

Don't push for sales right from the start

Remember, as we mentioned before, social selling is not about selling. Do not try to make them purchase when you are just starting to converse with a new prospect. Instead, exert yourself to understand their business challenges and helping them find the right solution. This way, the prospect will be more likely to remember and turn to you when they are finally ready to purchase.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Content vs Backlinks: Which One is Better For Your Website?

There are many different strategies and techniques available for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of a website, each of them effective in their own way. While it is neither practical nor possible to implement all of them, content and back-links have always been counted among the most important strategies for any website. Ideally, both of them should be exercised, but if it comes to prioritizing one of them, content will always gain the upper hand.

Let us see the reasons for this preference -

The purpose of back-links and content

Back-links from a high-authority website increase your brand awareness, as well as act as a vote of confidence for your own website.

Now, imagine that a user sees such back-link and decides to visit your website. There, if he finds that the content is not useful or relevant to him at all. It does not provide him any new information or does not convey how your solution can help them overcome a particular business challenge.

This will lead him to abandon your website. Therein lies the difference between the purpose of content and backlinks. Backlinks will merely serve to bring people to your website. Thereafter, it depends on the content to engage the visitors and encourage them to convert into leads which you can nurture into revenue-generating customers.

As a matter of fact, if your website does not already have high-quality content, you will find it nearly impossible to get a backlink from a reputed source. On the other hand, keyword-optimized and value-rich content has fairly high chances of ranking.

Content for site structure

Content is also integral for building your site structure. It enables your visitors easily traverse your website and access the information they want. Not only this, but this also helps search engine spiders to discover the most important topics your website is covering.

To conclude, backlinks are important for SEO and do help you rank, but only when the efforts for them are backed up by strong content. If you have to make a choice between the two, your best bet will always be to go for content. You can engage a digital marketing company if you need help to strategize and create quality content for your business.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Debunking the prevalent B2B social media myths

Myth 1 – My target audience/customers do not use social media

Billions of people worldwide use social media actively. There is a very high chance that your customers are looking for more information on your brand on at least one social media platform.

                                                  

Myth 2 – Social media only gives vanity metrics

Yes, publishing a random bunch of posts will only get you likes and comments. However, campaigns tailored to business goals like increasing website traffic and generating leads will allow you to track the correct metrics and engagement rate to test your strategy efficacy.

Myth 3 – Social media will not help you make a sale

Of course, posts that directly push for a sale will not help you much. However, posting useful content such as white papers and ebooks, or engaging in meaningful conversations with your prospects will help them move further along the sales funnel.

Myth 4 – Pinterest isn't useful for B2B marketing companies

Pinterest is a great platform to share visually engaging content such as infographics and short product videos. This will help you increase brand awareness and drive more traffic to your website.

How to Plan an Effective Digital Marketing Campaign for Your Customers

Planning a digital marketing campaign involves a lot of careful considerations and requires a tremendous amount of skill, especially when you are doing so for a third party.

How effectively you plan and execute a campaign for your customers will form the crux of customer satisfaction and your future relationships with them. 

Let us see the best practices you can adopt while crafting a digital marketing campaign that will maximize the ROI for your customers -

Define the marketing objectives

Naturally, the first step for any campaign will be to define the ultimate objectives. This will help you gain a clear sight of the steps you need to take to achieve these objectives. It is best to limit the number to two or three, as working towards too many objectives can scatter your efforts in different directions. Along with objectives, you will also need to set a timeframe and budget for the campaign.

Some possible objectives for a digital marketing campaign are -

•  Increase brand awareness

•  Improve SEO to increase online visibility and traffic

•  Generate quality leads or enquiries

•  Engage customers on social media

Define the target audience

The next step will be to determine who you will be speaking to, their business needs, pain points and how your customer's solution can help them overcome their problems. You can further segment your audience into smaller groups according to factors such as demographics, geographical location, job titles and so on. This will enable you to hyper-personalize your messaging for generating a better response and engagement.

Choose your digital channels

Once you have identified the personas you want to target, you need to decide how you are going to reach them. The selection of channels will be based on your marketing objectives, behavior of target audience and your budget.

Some of the most effective and popular digital channels are -

• Website and landing pages

•   Emails

•   Social media

•   Content marketing

•  Paid advertisements

Set the right KPIs to measure the campaign performance

Once you start implementing, measurable KPIs will let you know whether or not your digital marketing campaign is working as expected. You can adjust your strategy based on the results of the execution metrics. 

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Tips and tricks for social media advertising

Advertising on social media is an integral part of any B2B digital marketing strategy. It helps you to reach or target a large base of target audience in a short amount of time. 

Let us have a look at some important tips to optimize your social media advertising campaigns -

• Set an objective for each type of social media ad you create, so that you choose the right advertising platform and come up with better content

• Set your budget based on the objective more important to you – impressions or engagement

• Create a customized landing page to match the intent of every type of ad, so that your audience can directly access the information they want without the confusion of going through your entire website

• Use short, engaging video ads in your advertising strategy for better engagement and conversion

• Use advanced features like Facebook lookalike audience to enhance your targeting

• Regularly monitor the performance of your ads to adjust your strategy and budget based on the results

Combine paid and organic ads for optimum results.

5 Ways to Get Your Brand Noticed on Instagram

With more than one billion monthly active users, Instagram has come a long way from being a social service for sharing images and videos. It has become one of the most popular and effective hubs for eCommerce.

                          

In fact, 62% of people state that they have become more interested in a brand or a product after becoming aware of it through Instagram stories. And with 90% of accounts following at least one brand on Instagram, the platform is being rapidly populated with business profiles vying for user attention.

Let us see some effective ways to improve your brand visibility in this dynamic and competitive social environment -

Invest in your brand's aesthetic appeal

Naturally, visuals are the bread and butter of Instagram. Grainy photos and videos will get buried beneath the high-quality visuals that dominate the platform. Spend some time in polishing your photos or videos before you post them. You can even come up with a particular theme for your visuals, so that your followers can easily remember and associate it with your brand.

Use hashtags the right way

Hashtags are the way to go to put your content in front of a wide audience. With Instagram allowing you to use 30 hashtags for a single post, you have plenty of options to use relevant hashtags. It is advisable to avoid or limit the use of the most popular hashtags like #instadaily, as they are very competitive to rank for. Instead, it will be more effective to use the hashtags that are absolutely relevant to the post and customize them every time.

Avoid posting too frequently

Doing so may get you noticed, but in a negative light. Posting too often will only annoy your audience and you might even be seen as a spammer. Instead of posting multiple times a day, you can limit your posting to one image or video per day, for getting noticed without being intrusive.

Leverage Instagram stories

As can be seen in the statistic mentioned previously, Instagram stories are massively effective in generating user interest. You can launch a fun, live event for your followers or showcase the human side of your brand through short videos to increase your visibility.

Pay attention to viral trends and memes

Taking the core subject of a viral trend or meme and putting your own twist to it is a great way to boost your brand's visibility, engagement and set yourself apart from your competitors.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

4 Effective Ways to Engage Organic Traffic on Social Media

Painstakingly optimizing your website for search engine optimization to increase ranking and organic traffic is a rewarding, but slow, process. Rather than waiting for your target audience to search for a relevant query to land on your website, you can actively engage your organic traffic on social media platforms.

                                                

Let us have a look at some of the most effective ways for B2B marketing companies to increase their organic reach on social media -

Create and share content that matters

When you perform keyword research for creating content, do not only select keywords that you want to rank for. They would not help you much if your audience is not searching for them. Sharing content created around keywords that are more preferred by your audience will help increase engagement on their part.

Employ social listening

Knowing what your target audience or even existing customers are saying about industry-relevant challenges or their business requirements will give you an idea about the kind of posts you need to publish to catch their attention.

Actively engage your audience through messages

Publishing relevant content is not the only activity you can perform on social media platforms. They are essentially avenues of meaningful communication. Join forums or discussion threads that deal with a topic relevant to your brand or the solution you are offering. You can even directly send messages to a highly relevant prospects and strike up a conversation to understand their pain points before introducing your solution.

Use Facebook lookalike audiences

Facebook allows you to create lookalike audience, i.e., create a set of people that have very similar business interests to your existing customer base. You can serve this lookalike audiene relevant paid advertisements, to that you have a greater chance of engagement and subsequent conversion.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Google Ads vs Social Ads: Which is Better for Your Business?

When it comes to paid social advertisements, most of our thoughts will immediately land on the Google Ads. While they are super effective, it cannot be forgotten that running paid advertisements on social platforms such as Facebook can be just as effective.

Let us see how you can make the right choice for your business -

Customer reach

With majority of people being armed with smartphones and desktops, it has become second nature for them to turn to Google whenever they need any product or service. Thus, Google's reach is unquestionable.

However, major social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn also boast of users in billions, and the time spent on these platforms is ever-increasing.

Therefore, both Google ads and social ads can help you reach out to a wide target audience.

Ad visibility

Google ads often face the challenge of a phenomenon called banner blindness. As users have become accustomed to seeing ads immediately below search results, many of them actively avoid looking at this area.

On the other hand, social ads are often formatted in such a way that they seem to be a part of users' social feed, thus being more visible.

However, Google too, has dealt with the problem of banner blindness with ads that seem like in-text content.

Ad intent

Usually, when users turn to Google, they will search with the intent of making a purchase or look for a specific solution for their needs. Here, Google Ads will immediately lead them to the desired step if the intent of your ads is to induce a purchase.

However, when they are on social media, they will generally not be looking for a particular solution. They will be enjoying some downtime or looking to converse with their friends. However, that does not mean your ads are not welcome. While making a sale is still possible with social ads, they will work even better if your intent is to increase brand awareness, generate leads or increase engagement.

To conclude, both Google and social ads are tremendously effective. Depending upon your budget and marketing goals, you can select either or even both of them for running paid advertisements. You can contact a digital marketing company to help you run optimized paid campaigns for generating maximum ROI.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Debunking 5 Common Myths of Digital Marketing

As with any other industry, digital marketing too is rife with prevalent myths that can lead you astray, especially if you are new to the discipline.

Let us have a look at some of the most common myths, misconceptions, and the truth behind them.

Myth 1 – Traffic equals conversion

Getting a huge amount of traffic on your website or social media certainly feels good, but don't be surprised if your conversion rate isn't just as stellar. While a large amount of visitors indicate a certain level of interest in your product or service, it is upto you to further nurture these visitors into leads and ultimately convert them into paying customers.

Myth 2 - Your job is done once your website is up and running

You may have built a great website which is attracting a lot of visitors, but you cannot leave it as it is for long. With search engine algorithms constantly updating to further enrich user search, a dated website can quickly found itself demoted in the ranks in the favor of fresh and updated results. It is a good practice to periodically update the design and content from time to time, and keep an eye on Google algorithm updates to maintain your ranking and traffic.

Myth 3 - SEO is dead or outdated

Nothing could be farther than the truth. SEO is very much important for increasing your online brand visibility and bringing in relevant traffic. When marketing gurus talk about SEO being dead, they refer to the outdated and ineffective practices like keyword stuffing. Consistently practicing ethical SEO techniques is imperative for your online success.

Myth 4 – Negative comments on social media are harmful

It is not the negative comments, but your reaction to them that plays the deciding rule in determining whether the comments will prove harmful or beneficial for you. Ignoring or deleting them will only add fuel to the fire and lead the injured party to be more vocal about their grievances on third-party review sites.

Consider the negative comments as a learning opportunity to improve your product and service. Responding with empathy to the commenter, and taking the necessary steps to remedy the percieved wrong can turn the negative comment into a positive one, and also work to increase your brand credibility.

Myth 5 – The more content you produce, the more successful you will be

An ambivalent statement, we know. The statement will prove true only if you are creating and publishing quality content that is original, SEO-optimized as well as absolutely relevant and useful for your target audience. If this is not the case, no amount of content you publish will help you increase brand awareness, attract leads, or meet any other marketing goal you have in mind.

You can get in touch with a digital marketing company that can help you strategize and execute a comprehensive digital campaign according to your marketing goals and budget.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

4 social media marketing mistakes to avoid

Social media marketing is no doubt effective for increasing your brand awareness and customer engagement, but it can also be very tricky. One seemingly small misstep can serve to sully your brand's reputation.

Let us have a look at some of the common social media mistakes you should avoid at all costs -

Posting too frequently

If you post too frequently to increase your visibility, you risk your followers getting annoyed by the constant interruptions.

Posting controversial news or opinions

Your followers might get offended if they do not share the same viewpoint as you.

Not responding to the comment section

Comments are great way to engage with your customers and understanding their pain points for a more focused nurturing.

Ignoring or deleting reviews and comments

Doing so will add to the dissatisfaction of the concerned customers and prompt them to voice their concerns on third-party review sites.

Tips for social media storytelling

Using storytelling in your social media marketing strategy lets you form a human connection with your customers, and generate engagement far more than any cold advertisements and facts you might otherwise throw at them.

Here are some tips to help you make the most of this powerful technique -

Share your own personal experiences
Your own personal experience, from which you can deliver an inspring takeaway, will both entertain and educate your followers.

Leverage User Generated Content (UGC)
UGC is a powerful way to get customers to tell their own stories and making them feel involved with your brand, while simultaneously increasing your credibility.

Use visual content
Using videos or a series of images will uplift your story more than just using plain text. The combination of imagery, music and speech will truly keep your followers immersed in your story.

You can get in touch with a digital marketing company for effectively executing storytelling as a part of your social media strategy.

Avoiding information overload in content marketing

Digital marketing or content marketing entails reaching out to your target audience on multiple digital channels and educating them through content. However, the constant barrage of information from all channels such as emails, social media posts, blogs and newsletters can confuse and overwhelm the person at the receiving end, thus leading to information overload. 

This renders the person unable to take an informed decision, leading them to abandon your brand altogether.

Here are some tips to help you avoid information overload -

•                     Keep the content absolutely relevant to your audience's business requirements

•                     Break it down into easily consumable pieces and use visual content for easy comprehension

•                     Create non-screen content such as podcasts, so that users can consume information while mullti-tasking

A digital marketing company can help you strategize and create content in a way that engages and educates your target audience, without overwhelming them with information.

Creating a Facebook group for your business

Groups on Facebook are popular for the simple reason that they unite a lot of like-minded people for meaningful discussions. 

Creating your own business group gives you an opportunity to bring a large part of your audience under one roof. Keep the following points in mind to reap the maximum benefits from your group -

•  Set a clear purpose of the group, i.e., decide whether you want to create the group to sell, to increase brand awareness, or simply to engage your existing customers. This will help you narrow down the members from target audience you want to be a part of the group.

• When you are inviting members, make sure you send a personalized message to them, to increase chances of a positive response.

• Keep your group public or private based on social media marketing goals. If you want it to be exclusive, keep it private.

Make sure that the content you post is aimed at helping them solve their business challenges, and encourages open communication with you and other team members.

3 Simple Tips to Improve Your Social Media Activities

Social media marketing is one of the most favoured digital marketing channels for business owners; indeed, increasing your digital outreach would not be possible without social media platforms in today's interconnected world.

With nearly every business wanting to establish a firm footing on social media, it is essential for you to stay on the top of the game.

Let us have a look at some tips that will help you improve your social media campaigns -

Do not just use social media for promotion

Social media, at its core, is a way for people to connect and communicate with each other. Instead of just using social media for promoting your products or services, use it to actually talk to your customers, take their concerns and needs into account and improve your customer service. This will greatly help you increase social media engagement and strengthen customer relationships.

Shake up your content and posts

Publishing only similar types of content will quickly become monotonous. Keep your customers on their toes by adopting different types of content formats such as videos, infographics, slideshows, etc.

Involve your customers as much as possible

As we mentioned earlier, social media marketing has to involve a two-way communication between you and your consumers. This does not mean that you only have to limit your interactions to the comment section. Create and share posts such as polls, surveys and quizzes, and engage in live QA sessions. Engaging in open communication with your customers will increase your credibility and help promote brand awareness.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

Why is Inbound Marketing Important for Your Brand in 2020 and Beyond

Unlike outbound marketing, the inbound marketing strategy takes the path of presenting your product or service to potential consumers only when they find themselves in need of it.

There has been a long-standing debate on the effectiveness of both these strategies. Many marketers believe the somewhat traditional approach of cold calls and emails, followed by outbound marketing, to be obsolete and even intrusive to some extent.

While both these techniques have their own merits and fetch desirable results when used correctly, inbound marketing can bring you a lot of benefits, especially in the new decade.


Content marketing, SEO, social media marketing form an integral part of an inbound marketing strategy. Until a few years ago, certain keywords in your content would suffice to bring it to the top of SERP results. Now, however, Google prioritizes content that is of high-quality, actually provides some value and is relevant for the user, and comes from an expert and trusted source.


So, how will this benefit your inbound marketing efforts? If you are following Google guidelines and publishing quality content, you will find yourselves higher in the search results; making it easier for consumers to find you when they are searching for the service or product provided by you. Thus, the increased traffic can give you more chances of successful conversions.


Content creation is a top priority in the inbound approach. Thus, you can focus on churning out content that will build your brand awareness and establish you as an authority in your service domain, especially through LinkedIn marketing. This can go a long way in building credibility and trust in the eyes of your consumers.


Also, with the online nature of the inbound strategy, you have more chances of reaching new markets and a wider audience. Not only does this strategy can bring you more leads and conversions, but with a focus on customers service and engagement, it also helps you build long lasting relationships with your existing customers.


Conclusion
Inbound marketing deals with attracting and converting leads by informing and educating them. By creating great content and offering a superior customer experience, you can make your brand stand out and bring in quality leads that are more ready for conversion.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

The three exciting Social Media trends in the year 2020

Any time is a good time to re-assess your Social media strategy. With an ever evolving technology landscape; the smallest changes in the market can create an impact on overall business performance and decision-making in the IT B2B Marketing realm. Social media and its strategy is one of the important aspects of your overall marketing strategy. In such as a scenario, keeping yourself updated about the latest trends is the best possible way to help you stay ahead in the competition.

Let us see some of the key trends of Social media in the year 2020.

Content Authenticity-

Raw stories, customer stories and experiences that directly talk about brands will dominate the trends this year. Stories that intend to create transparent, meaningful and interactive content are predicted to make waves in social media this year. Better storytelling will define the parameters of the authentic content that is required. Sharing moments too can dominate the social media landscape this year.

Video marketing-

Video may not be the latest entrant in B2B Digital marketing and social media trends, but it is proving to be one of the most effective ones. And to further augment its effectiveness; marketers will now need to have a video-strategy and this could be the major differentiator this year in social media marketing.  Live videos, interactive videos and strategies such as video re-marketing will be remarkably popular. To get maximum output through video marketing would require you to set your goals, to create short videos for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and the re-purposing of content wherever possible.

Innovative Chatbots -

Just like videos; chatbots have also been trending and marketers are excited about the value that they are capable of bringing to organizations in order to gain the trust and loyalty of customers. It is one of the most effective ways to reach and enhance engagement with your audiences. Chat-blasting like email-blasting is a trend that marketers would want to consider this year. Some of the good practices when it comes to chatbots may be to strategize delivering content through messenger, to build a Facebook Messenger chatbots and build more contacts on Facebook for effective interaction via these chatbots.

Trends come and go, but the best practices never become redundant. Some of these trends only get enhanced in time to create more positive results, adding value to your marketing strategies and activities. If applied effectively you could get the best possible results that can change the face of your business.

3 trends in digital marketing, that you may not have yet adopted in 2020

While we are ready to almost pave halfway through 2020; it is never too late to know what it is that is trending in the digital marketing world. With change being the only constant and more so with technology and customer awareness changing the way we do business today; one should be in sync with what works today and now! Here are a few trends of Digital marketing in 2020 that is catching up fast and that may help your business in more ways than one.

AI (Artificial Intelligence)-

Going by the trends in AI; all our simpler jobs, at least, in the near future will be taken over by AI. This path-breaking technology can analyse consumer behaviour; while utilizing data from social media. It creates new search patterns to build better understanding between the marketers and consumers. Chatbots are a great example of simplifying the complex needs of customers, like-wise, providing them with what they want. AI is already playing a crucial role in moulding the way B2B Digital Marketing works.

Programmatic Advertising-

In IT B2B Marketing, this can also be termed as refined advertising; one that is done with the help of technology; as, through programmatic advertising, you now get to automate your Ad- buying for a specific target audience. Simplifying the process of identifying the audience and not fully knowing what would appeal to them; programmatic advertising brings in the ease of knowing and delivering what the customer wants without any guess-work. According to sources (www.emarketer.com) almost 90% of digital display ads in the U.S will be made programmatic by the year 2020. With systematic programmatic advertising; you can expect higher conversions and ROI.

Video Marketing-

Video marketing has already made its entry and has been here for some time now as the next big thing in the digital realm.

Going by the statistics, it is about to make a bigger wave in the digital world-

•  Almost 72% of businesses are saying that video marketing has improved their conversion rate
• 70% of consumers say that they share brand videos
•  52% of consumers say watching videos help them make online buying decisions more confidently
• 65% of executives say that they visit a marketers website after watching a video

(source- www.impactbnd.com)

The good thing about change is that, there is always something new that is trending and can help augment your business. The skill is to know how much of it you really need, and how much of it you have to adopt right away so that you don’t lose out on the potential chances of enhancing your business today.

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing- which one should you choose?

In the world of marketing, some frequently used words such as inbound marketing, outbound marketing, and digital marketing may appear like jargons, but they are not. They have distinctive characteristics that define the way you do marketing and they are designed with independent objectives in mind to derive the expected results. Let us see what differentiates them and which method should you use in today’s technology and B2B landscape.

Outbound Marketing-

These are the age-old marketing techniques that are raw and use interruptive and push-methodologies such as tele-ads, advertisements, billboards, newspapers, magazine ads and so on. Typically, these techniques lack personalization and a lack of customization of services and not catering. Tagged as expensive and overrated; these techniques are now not as effective and are giving way to inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing-

Based on the methods that pull-in customers; inbound marketing is one of the most popular forms of marketing techniques that involve usage of blog posts, emailers, landing pages, case studies, and many more tools that are built using rich, relevant and shareable content pieces. With content at its center, inbound marketing is a very effective method of marketing that attracts, engages and converts the prospects with compelling content and strategically designed campaigns.

Here are some major differences between Inbound and Outbound marketing-

B2B Outbound marketing techniques any outbound marketing techniques usually use pull-methodologies to attract customers that are more inert and one-way; the ones that try to sell in a hard-sales-y way, regardless of what customers want or are looking for. It is based more on what the marketers want to sell, as against what the customer wants. On the other hand, inbound marketing strategies use customization and offer tailor-made solutions, wherein the aim is to pull-in the customers by giving them what they want.

Inbound marketing is less expensive than outbound; however the effectiveness of inbound is difficult to measure as it is more intangible. Since one cannot directly quantify brand awareness, adding value to business etc. it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of inbound marketing. Also, the effectiveness of B2B inbound, as opposed to B2B outbound marketing, is slow, but steady, and if built around intelligent strategies; one can obtain long-term results.

More and more marketers are using inbound marketing over outbound marketing techniques and the numbers tell why-

- Inbound marketing costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing

- Content marketing generates 3x as many leads per dollar than traditional marketing

-57% of online users view content at least once per month and the average user spends 20% of their online time viewing content

- High quality, relevant and valuable information makes prospects more likely to take action

(Source- www.demandmetric.com)

Whether it is outbound marketing or inbound marketing, in the B2B landscape each business has different needs. Doing what’s best for ‘your business’ is the wise thing to do. You could also use an effective mix of outbound and inbound for better results. Regularly analyzing data, reassessing the business needs and keeping a tab on the changing demands of the customers will help you use the right marketing mix at the right time.