Digital Marketing New Year’s Resolutions: Outlining Best Practices for 2020

Bernard May, CEO of National Positions lists the best marketing practices for 2020.

Ecommerce – Direct to Consumer

The fact is that most ecommerce brands are getting their margins squeezed and going direct to consumer is going to continue to be a huge focus. Shifting to direct to consumer essentially cuts out costs that are incurred from wholesaling and retail markups. While some of these costs are going to be transferred to marketing campaigns (at first), in the long run, a brand’s reliance on other parties to properly represent them shrinks. Brands looking to make a bigger ecommerce splash in 2020 will need to lock down their direct marketing plans in order to shine the spotlight on themselves in a big way.

The Rise of Visual Search

Technology continues to disrupt how customers will find products – and this will not slow down in 2020. One area that is both a challenge and an opportunity surrounds visual search technology. This involves customers taking a picture of a product to get reviews and even pricing, as well as where items can be purchased. Many apps including Amazon already use this type of technology. So brands need to be sure that pictures of their products are plentiful and are tagged appropriately to benefit from those using visual search technology from their mobile devices.

ADA Compliance in 2020

Websites need to be accessible for everyone regardless of ability or disability. Users with visual impairments, hearing disabilities, or even limited physical motor functions must be able to navigate and gain the value your site has to offer. This goes beyond brand ethics and dips into “brand protection.” Many brands are violating ADA website compliance standards not with general disregard but rather a lack of knowledge. While this may be an oversight by the website owner, sites that are not adhering to ADA standards are targets for lawsuits for ADA compliance law practices. At the end of the day, getting sites ADA ready will need to be a focus for all brands in 2020.

Beyond Social in Social Media

Marketing on social media will continue to make strides in 2020. Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms will continue to provide better audience targeting, testing capabilities, and overall costs when compared to other direct digital marketing tactics. Almost any brand can find its audience on social media, and with the ability to use images, GIFs, video, and a wide variety of other creatives, the flexibility is almost unmatched. Beyond the ability to target is the tremendous opportunity brands have to sell their products directly from Facebook and Instagram. While brands used to have to send users to a landing page – or a website – now customers can tap and purchase without ever leaving their favorite social platform. We have seen incredible results with everything from wine brands to home services when it comes to Facebook and Instagram marketing, so if you haven’t tested this ads platform, we highly recommend that you start testing now.

Context Is the New King

We all know the key to getting your message to take hold in the search engines is content. If you have no content (or little content) you will be buried against the competition and will likely never show up on the coveted first page of Google. However, a more important concept (known to SEO experts) is holding much more importance than ever before – and that is the valuable context of your content. What value does your content provide? Is it answering the questions people are asking? Is the context rich enough to keep users on your site long enough to alert Google that users are finding your content valuable? The true king when it comes to content is the context. So brands will really need to place the context within their content as the top priority. Google has even released recent updates (BERT) that layers contextual AI onto searches to provide more contextually rich results. And if Google is changing algorithms to better understand the context, then brands need to make this a priority in their SEO approach for 2020.

National Positions (www.nationalpositions.com) is a fully-integrated digital marketing powerhouse, delivering customized programs for clients that encompass SEO, Pay-Per-Click management, content marketing, web design, video marketing, social media, conversion rate optimization and online reputation management.  Founded in 2004, National Positions is a 5-time Inc 500 company and a Google Premier Partner.  A pioneering force in the SEO industry, National Positions offers end-to-end digital marketing services to SMB’s and white label services to numerous agencies throughout the United States.