The New Year always signifies predictions and change for what's to come, and it's been no different here in 2016. Multiple writers have spent time predicting what strategies and trends are going to drive digital marketing this year, but people tend to forget that not everything has to change.
There will still be marketing strategies that you used in 2015-or even earlier-that will continue to produce results here in 2016.
Let's take a look at what they are.
Email Marketing
You've probably been using email marketing for years-it may have even be the first strategy you invested in as a business. Email marketing has come a long way since the days of just Constant Contact, and the overall strategy has changed as well.
Email marketing is now smarter, and with the help of automation software like HubSpot, Marketo, and SharpSpring, email marketing is a lot more effective. Gone are the days of sending emails to people who you're not sure of where they came from or what they're interested in.
If you're using email marketing and automation the correct way, you have segmented lists based on your website visitor's interests. You're using forms that are built within your automation platform and embedding them on your website or landing page so that the data flows seamlessly into your email lists. You're then sending smarter emails based on the data, which leads to higher open rates, which leads to higher conversion rates and ROI.
Marketing automation will only continue to get smarter here in 2016, so don't let your email marketing strategies falter.
Authoritative SEO Links
Search engine optimization is an ever changing and growing tactic-especially because Google is in the driver's seat-but that doesn't mean that it's no longer important just because the calendar changed to a new year. And you didn't spend all those years learning SEO and keeping up with Google's algorithm changes just to abandon everything you know now.
SEO best practices have largely been dominated by content being king-and rightly so-but an area that a lot of people forget about is the importance of premium, authoritative links. Now, the way in which some people go about acquiring these links can be questionable and a completely separate discussion, back the fact remains that authoritative links are still an important signal to Google.
Think about what's going to hold more weight with Google: a link from Forbes or from a blog that I created yesterday (hint: it's Forbes). If you can naturally acquire these types of links, Google is going to increase your website's authority, and you're also going to see an increase in referral traffic to your site.
Keep trying to acquire those links in 2016.
Hyper-Targeted Facebook Ads
Do a quick Google search for "2015 revenue driven from Facebook ads" and you'll see the success that both Facebook and its advertisers have garnered from running ads on the social network last year, especially on mobile devices.
What I'm getting at here is that Facebook is arguably the best channel to create targeted digital marketing campaigns, and that's because of the advanced targeting capabilities that it has. Whereas Google is somewhat limiting in terms of targeting options, Facebook is a swiss army knife of opportunity.
Forget just targeting by location, gender, and age, and try building a saved audience in Facebook based on education level, income, specific devices, purchasing category behavior, life events, and more. Facebook even allows you to remarket to past website visitors right within the newsfeed by creating a custom audience based on past website visits.
And now that Facebook has changed its tracking to one pixel, it's extremely easy to set up custom conversions to measure the effectiveness of your ads.
Facebook's advertising network took a step in the right direction in 2015-with possibly the biggest addition being Instagram-and I expect only more good to come in 2016.
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