The digital world is changing every second. If we don’t keep up and try to adapt by integrating innovative marketing strategies, we’ll leave money on the table and will be left behind.
If you don’t want to let that happen, you should make sure you do something about the key aspects of marketing every next year.
With the latest technologies that could change the way we advertise forever, and so much competition, it might not always be easy to do more and embrace novelty. However, you can do that the smart way.
All it takes it to create a site and start blogging to build an audience and monetize it. If you’re interested in starting your own blog, I created a quick tutorial showing you the right steps. Check out How to Start a Profitable Blog.
As long as you set up your site soon (takes less than 20 minutes), you’ll be able to start creating content and monetizing it. Once that’s set up, you can think through your marketing strategies.
4 Innovative Marketing Strategies to Implement This Year
Start by taking into consideration these 4 areas of your overall marketing and branding strategy.
1. Step up your analytics game.
Okay, you need analytics in order to know what exactly is going on, instead of relying on guessing. But that type of data isn’t enough anymore. What’s more, it’s not relevant.
Because so much goes on online at any moment, you need to keep up. For instance, it matters who exactly is on your website right now and what they are clicking on, who’s engaging with your social media posts, and how your latest videos are performing.
As suggested by Kissmetrics, the 4 key reasons why you need real-time analytics for your online business are:
- The ability to fix errors the moment they arise;
- To see how first users adopt a new product, and what exactly they are doing right now;
- To do A/B testing;
- And for targeted marketing (Amazon uses this data to give customers real-time recommendations).
2. Using CRM software.
Customer relationship marketing (CRM) is still a neglected marketing aspect. It’s about managing the relationships with your clients (and the data connected to them) effectively.
But knowing the definition of CRM isn’t enough. It must be understood, implemented, and even automated. Which means using a CRM software is a must.
Luckily there are enough and quality products made for that part of your marketing.
Make sure you’re using one made specifically for your niche by the experts that know exactly what you’re dealing with.
If you’re a real estate broker, for instance, you’d want to work with a company like REthink. It’s specializing in offering brokers the latest and best technology platform for managing client relationships, listings, properties, deals, and commissions. If that’s your industry, then you can check out their commercial real estate software on mobile.
3. Ditch the old way of doing SEO.
To have a profitable blog that’s the foundation of your online business, you will need to optimize your site and blog posts well.
You might be optimizing your content for keywords, but there are many other factors Google now takes into consideration when ranking websites. Plus, some of the things that worked in the last few years aren’t a smart move anymore.
Backlinko analyzed 1 million Google search results, to see what’s working in the world of SEO and what should not be part of your practices anymore.
Here are some of their findings:
- In-depth posts rank much better than general ones.
- Schema markups don’t actually affect rankings.
- Make your URLs shorter (up to 5 words).
- It’s important to have low bounce rate.
- A piece of content with 1 image inside it (aside from the featured one) ranks better than without adding an additional one.
- Surprisingly, using an exact keyword in the title tag has a small correlation with rankings, so don’t worry about that.
Make sure you tackle these when paying attention to the innovative marketing strategies.
4. Have a live video strategy.
I’m not even gonna mention that you should be everywhere on social media where your audience is, engage people and post content daily, and also be producing videos already. While it may sound time-consuming, this is a must for every brand and online business.
The next thing on the list of innovative marketing strategies, though, is live video.
With engagement being the most important metric these days, we want to not just grab people’s attention online, but keep it and encourage them to take action.
Live video leads to 80% higher conversion rate when placed on a landing page. 64% of users are more likely to buy a product after seeing a video about it. And 82% of social media users prefer to see live video in the social media posts of brands.
Bonus Tip: Don’t neglect affiliate marketing this year either.
Many bloggers and online influencers skip over affiliate marketing. They either think it’s too hard, that it’s a waste of time, that they will turn followers away, or that their followers just won’t be interested.
However, if you’re not earning money through affiliate marketing, you are leaving money on the table.
Although the basic concept is easy (link to other people’s products and services and earn a commission each time you make a sale), it’s actually all about creating systems, building trust, writing a ton of content and doing a lot of work.
So I decided to purchase an online course from one of the best in the niche – Michelle from Making Sense of Cents. She built a 6-figure blog without millions of visitors or selling her soul. She’s now earning $50K/month solely through affiliate marketing so she shows what she’s doing. And she has created a course about it sharing her best tips.
Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing is a step-by-step affiliate marketing strategy course that shows you how to increase your affiliate income and make more money blogging. It’s also the first online course I ever purchased and totally worth the investment.
In it, she covers:
- What affiliate marketing is and how it works
- Why affiliate marketing is great
- The exact steps she’s taken to earn over $300,000 from a single blog post
- How to pick the right affiliate products to promote
- How to increase conversions
- How to build trust and not lose followers
- Required disclosures that you need to know about
- The one major tool you need for affiliate marketing
- Different strategies to use to promote your affiliate products
- How to use Pinterest to succeed at affiliate marketing.
If you too want to start a blog to make money and want to monetize through affiliate marketing, check out Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing.
While these 4 innovative marketing strategies don’t cover all that you need to be doing this year, they are a good start if you want to level up.