Not only are social networks used for entertainment and connection, but for conducting business as well. Businesses have established their entire setups on social networks rather than making their websites. Just a single Instagram profile can do wonders for you as can a Facebook page.

Hence, it’s just as well that social media marketing has grown and changed through the last decade. As social media platforms have multiplied, so have the tactics and methods of various companies. Let’s take a look into how social media marketing has changed in the last ten years.

How Social Media Has Changed in the Past Decade

Social media has changed more than just in terms of the number of platforms. Of course, that has been a huge influence as well. Today, there are possibly hundreds of social media networks around the world. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Tiktok are the major players.

These apps all have either billions or hundreds of millions of active monthly users. Hence, companies can market their products and services to customers on platforms primed for engagement.

Evolution of Social Media Marketing

1.    Social Media is Everywhere

The number of people on social media has grown exponentially. In 2010, Facebook had about 500 million users. Today, they have over 2.7 billion. Instagram had 1 million registered users in 2010. Today, they have over 1 billion. That is phenomenal growth.  

Today, Twitter feeds are used on news channels, YouTube promotes music worldwide, and every celebrity has an Instagram account. It’s been an astonishing and exponential growth cycle. However, social media is now everywhere. Hence, social media marketing is no longer optional. 

1.    Social Networks Have Their Own Marketing Platforms

Social media giants have realised that companies can very easily market their products and services on their platforms. Hence, several major social networks have made it easier for them. Facebook, for example, charges to promote a post. They also allow companies to set up a store on their Facebook page so customers can shop directly.

As far as communication is concerned, Facebook also allows companies to set up automated responses to questions. This, along with CTA buttons, options to pay through Facebook, etc. have made it a great marketing tool.

The same can be said of Instagram. The social network has a “Shop” tab where users can buy anything from clothes to electronics to makeup. Hence, social networks have made it much easier for companies to push their products online. This wasn’t the case a decade ago. At most, companies could set up their pages on social media and post about products. However, with social media becoming the centre of most people’s online experience, this was bound to happen. 

1.    Video is Now a Huge Part of Social Media

Video is perhaps the most engaging part of media. Hence, it’s a huge part of social media. Whether on YouTube, Instagram, or Snapchat, video is at the centre of the evolution of social media marketing. Video is used in so many different ways to market for companies.

First, there are the typical ads that are now run on social media networks. However, they don’t tend to be the most effective. Influencer marketing (read more below) allows content creators to create sponsored videos to promote different products and services.

Then there are stories. Stories is a feature that is now universally adopted by nearly all social media networks. They allow users to post content which will vanish in 24 hours. Companies use this to put up posts for flash sales or 24-hour discounts or contests. It creates a sense of immediacy amongst users that aren’t as apparent with long videos.

While stores aren’t as popular on platforms like YouTube; they’re very dominant on Instagram and Snapchat. Stories have even been baked into the UI of Messenger and WhatsApp.

2.    Hashtags are Now Social Network Agnostic

At one time, hashtags were confined to Twitter. However, now they’re everywhere. They’re used to create trends and focus on hot topics. They’re used on Instagram for tags and SEO, and on Facebook for the same reason.

Due to this, companies can promote their products on specific holidays or sales days. This gives their posts a greater reach than if they promoted it without them.

3.    Social Media Ad Spending has Increased

According to research, there has been a noticeable uptick in social media ad spending over the decade. In 2016, more than 20% of total digital ad spending for brands was invested in social media. While growth is slowing, it’s because there has been such a saturation on platforms like Facebook.

4.    Communicating with the Customer is Much Easier

Modern social media networks nearly all have a direct message feature. There is no longer a communication barrier from Facebook Messenger to Instagram Chats to Twitter DMs and more. Customers can reach out to companies any time they want and get their questions answered.

This has removed the waiting time that customers used to go through on the helplines of various companies. It has also allowed companies to answer customers better by communicating with them more readily. If a company is selling a product or a service and a customer is on the fence, they can now communicate freely. Changing that may be into a yes has never been easier before.

Also, social media allows people to share posts, comment, and react to everything. Companies can use this to their advantage and readily respond to customers if they have worthwhile feedback. For example, if a customer has had a bad experience, they may post it on the network and resolve everything. If a customer has questions about an ordering procedure, they can learn how to do it from the company’s page.

Finally, certain brands have taken advantage of social media practices and imbued their pages and personality profiles. For instance, Wendy’s Twitter page has acquired a reputation for “roasting” different users. It made up a National Roast Day on January 4. That day sees massive engagement for the brand since users request the restaurant chain to roast them.  

The last decade has seen social media marketing go to the next level because of easier communication. Customers feel much more at ease, asking questions online and then making choices. It also allows brands to interact with their customers in ways that weren’t possible before.

5.    The Rise of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has probably been the largest shift in marketing that has been seen in the last decade. While influencers are seen as the new celebrities, they’re far more than that. Today, several millions of people have accounts on social media from Instagram and Twitter to Snapchat and Tiktok. Influencers have followers that number in the millions and can often send a targeted message more effectively than ads.

Even YouTubers are now expected to have sponsors on their channels, no matter how big they are. Look at the vlogger and celebrity David Dobrik. He has over 45 million subscribers on YouTube, and SeatGeek officially sponsors him. Philip DeFranco, another major YouTuber with over 6 million subscribers, is sponsored by a variety of companies including NordVPN, and Ring.

You can see much the same trend on Instagram with influencers promoting makeup, jewellery, clothing brands, etc. Kendall Jenner also famously promoted the ride-sharing company Lyft on Snapchat.

While influencer sponsorships are most often conflated with celebrity endorsements, they’re bigger than that. Of course, they may not be able to get you as much promotion as an athlete or movie star. However, for smaller brands that can’t afford big movie stars, this is a big change. For a fraction of that cost, they can push their product or service to a niche audience. That audience can range from thousands to millions of people, which can be immensely profitable for them. 

Social networks have become the centre of marketing. Social media marketing has evolved tremendously over the last decade to take advantage of this. Greater change may come in the future, and with it, greater marketing opportunities.

The post Social Media Marketing: 7 Ways It Has Evolved in the Past Decade appeared first on The SEO Platform.

The two most profitable sales days on Earth are Amazon’s Prime Day in the US and Alibaba’s Single’s Day in China. They bring in billions in sales in 24 hours. The latter goes out of its way to make people think of it as a holiday. Mere blog posts and web pages can’t generate that kind of excitement.

Hence, what does content marketing entail today? What will it have to evolve to, to survive?

How Has Content Marketing Evolved in the 2010s?

In 2011, Google came out with a study called the Zero Moment of Truth. It found that 88% of shoppers use the Zero Moment of Truth. That’s the discovery and awareness stage in a cycle to buy anything from a phone to a blanket. This is where the consumer researchers the product by themselves. Here, word of mouth and personal research plays a huge part in whether the product is bought or not.

The study became the basis of content marketing for companies throughout the 2010s. It pushed companies to focus on SEO and to create rich content for their products and services.

That was followed by Google’s algorithms’ evolution to track genuine content and separate it from the noise out there. Soon keyword stuffing, white fonting, and other tricks to fool algorithms were out. In 2018, Google dropped a final update that would do away with most content marketing’s ugly sides. It was called Google E-A-T. It emphasised content with expertise, authority, and trust. Hence, the most useful content and the most actionable and authoritative material would win out.

Throughout the 2010s, this is what changed the most. However, as with anything else, content is still evolving. Now video, influencer marketing, and social media are at the centre of content marketing. Whichever company is not using these tools is falling behind. The newest and most successful businesses are using these tools above all to boost sales.

So is content marketing dead? Well, in the traditional sense, yes. However, it has gone through various changes to survive.

6 Reasons Content Marketing Has to Evolve

1.    Video Has Become Very Powerful

Today, the most powerful content marketing tool is probably video. It allows companies to reach a far larger market than text ever did. YouTube, which is the king of video online, gets billions of views every single day. Marketers have used this incredible traffic to push their products on to people. They use shippable and non-shippable ads before videos as well as giveaways, sponsorships, and influencer marketing. Video has also become a great tool on other websites like Instagram and Facebook. Brands can push their products online through either traditional videos or stories.

In any form, videos are becoming an incredible way for companies to interact with their customers in very short periods.

2.    Influencer Marketing is Taking Over

Influencer marketing is the new celebrity endorsement. Influencers on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook are becoming big celebrities. For example, some of the biggest celebrities today are YouTubers like David Dobrik and Liza Koshy. They make far more of an impact online than do other minor celebrities on television shows. People like Charlie D’Amelio on TikTok generate millions of dollars every year through brand deals and sponsorships.

Since they have audiences that hang by their every word and take their word as gospel, they’re great marketing pools. Companies can get them to endorse or shout out a product, and a very specialised audience will respond.

Tech YouTubers do this as well. People like Linus and Marques Brownlee leverage their success to do massive giveaways. These are all from tech companies that are more often than not, sponsored.

You can get into other niches like beauty vloggers who promote makeup and grooming products. You can also isolate different niches like video game reviewers that sponsor video game services or even consoles. Hence, influencer marketing is a huge pool of untapped potential that can’t be ignored.

3.    MultiChannel Marketing Has Become a Necessity

Today, if you’re not using all the marketing channels at your disposal, you’re not using marketing’s full potential. What change content marketing has gone through has had more to do with different channels opening up than anything else. Channels like social media, video, influencers, and others have all opened up possibilities. Using them all allows you to improve your chances of boosting sales.

Sales like Single’s day use all of the marketing channels to generate massive sales. Amazon also uses various deals with influencers, promotions on social media, and their enormous site. It’s only through this multi-pronged approach that the most massive success can be achieved.

4.    Social Media Has Become the New Blogging Platform

Social media networks like Facebook and Instagram have become less about interacting with people and more about interacting with brands and companies. Companies have taken advantage of these platforms to generate more engagement with their products and services than ever before.

Posts on Facebook about a specific package, or a photo on Instagram about a sale, are now pretty standard.

5.    Value and Storytelling Win Over Clickbait

Clickbait has universally become annoying. People have become used to exciting headlines being misleading. That’s why it’s called by another name now; spamming. People hate the fact that they have to deal with these ads which signify nothing but a survey or a scheme.

Hence, marketing your content needs to be much more intuitive. You need to win over people with storytelling and an interesting journey. Instead of just using a flashy headline, try telling people what they stand to gain from your product or service. Tell them a story about how a customer benefitted from your product or service in real life. Tell them how you are benefitting people every single day with your services.

In terms of pure impressions and engagement, this is likely to get people talking for longer.

Even if you take a look at searches, they’re becoming more conversational. People are using their voice assistants to search for results as well as their mobile devices. They want more direct and specific answers rather than content that wastes their time. In reality, most content out there does this. It wastes people’s time with stupid headlines and over-promising things.

Hence, allowing people to experience something genuine is the way to go. This is why influencer marketing is considered the future. Influencers all market the same types of products. However, they do it in their genuine way that coincides with their personalities. They joke about the products they endorse and don’t take it too seriously. All in all that results in better sales. 

6.    Giveaways and Contests Generate More Interest

There’s a lot of talks today about growth hacking. At times, the audience is left out of the equation entirely. When the customer is the most important part, this type of thinking doesn’t seem logical. Take a hint from growth hackers that are offering tangible advice to the readers. The best way to involve the audience is to do giveaways.

Social media is the best area for this. You can create your own rules for social media giveaways, and that will generate more engagement. You can encourage people to post photos without a product or while using your service. You can ask them to create stories or to use hashtags in their comments. All of this helps to generate impressions and engagement online. 

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, are all rife with this activity. You can use the massive presence of potential customers there to improve your engagement. You can also involve people’s friends in the giveaway. However, make sure that your giveaways are incredibly enticing. People should be very interested in giveaways to invite their friends. It shouldn’t be anything small or insignificant, not to be worth it. Try bundling different things to give away. That’ll be the best strategy.

While content marketing isn’t dead, it needs to evolve to survive. These 6 reasons are just the tip of the iceberg.

The post Is Content Marketing Dead? 6 Reasons Why It has to Evolve appeared first on The SEO Platform.

Online marketing is now dependent on more than just keywords, of course. However, inserting the right keywords on your web page is still a great way to attract new customers. If you’re a business just starting, here is the 411 on how to choose the right keywords for your online business. 

Keywords are a Huge Part of the Buyer’s Journey

Keywords are now a huge part of content marketing. Choosing them has to be focused on how you can get someone to buy your product or subscribe to your service. The typical journey a buyer takes is from potential customer to the actual customer. To sell them something, you have to think like them. Hence, to choose the right keywords, you have to think like a customer.

The buyer’s journey is usually broken into a few basic steps:

Awareness

When a potential customer realises that a company or business can satisfy a want or need; that’s called realisation. When they begin to research and browse around a website or look up a company on Google, it could also be just to check out how a competitor stacks up against their current favourite.

Consideration

This is when a potential customer begins to consider switching to a competitor business seriously. They may also consider just buying a product or getting a service from a new company. This involves researching the price, the subscription fees, the discounts, and other details.

Decision

The decision stage is when the customer chooses from a long list of considerations. As marketers, you may hope to hook the customer right here. However, you need to know what they value most over other factors. Most customers choose what’s recommended to them by friends and family. However, some do their research and decide what’s important to them. You need to serve both these customers.

So when planning the right keywords, you need to consider the buyer’s journey.

How to Choose the Right Keywords

Choosing keywords for online marketing is a much different process than it was ten years ago. Apart from considering the buyer’s journey, you have to correct for different devices and preferences. Today, even social media is a huge factor in determining keywords.

Here is a basic guide on how you can choose the right keywords to help you on this journey.

What Are Your Goals?

Before you begin keyword research, make sure you know what you’re aiming for. You want greater traffic and higher sales. However, which niche do you want to attract? Which geographical area do you want to target with your marketing? Which age or gender do you want to cater? All these things will be relevant when you choose your keyword.

Analyse the Competition

You’ve heard the adage, keep your friends close, but your enemies closer? This is almost the same thing. Learning from your competitors is very important. Don’t just think of your closest competitors in terms of your rivals. Think of whoever is competing with you on search engines for a single keyword.

Search for the keywords you’ve chosen and look up the top results. Click on those links and check out their titles, tags, descriptions, etc. Also check out their headings, sub-headings, etc.

Do Basic Keyword Research

Doing basic keyword research is extremely important. It’ll give you a list of options to choose from. Not just that, but it’ll give you a starting point. Most of the time, scraping the closest keyword to your best guess is a bad idea. Starting from scratch will give you different expectations and set you on a path to a greater ROI.

Identify the Right Topics

Choosing keywords for marketing online businesses includes segmentation by topic. Make sure whichever keywords you’re inserting in your blogs or web pages are relevant to it. Keyword topics need to conform exactly with the topic of the post or webpage. That’s why it’s encouraged to create specific landing pages for different geographical locations.

Go Over the SERPs

Try entering the keywords you’ve chosen on to Google. This will show you which links are competing for the same keywords. Manually looking at keywords will show you which competitors you have to beat and whether there’s many to compete with.

If you’re finding search results that don’t align with your strategy, it’s better to rethink your strategy. This is very true for organic results. They can be pushed very far below the fold on desktop and phone browsers.

Keep Track of Performance

After choosing your keywords, keep track of the traffic those pages are bringing in. If there is no change or a drop in traffic, reevaluate your strategy and choose again. No use crying over bad keywords. However, bad keywords should be changed as soon as possible. They may hurt your overall SEO in the long run.

Embed Keywords in the Right Place

It’s not enough to choose the right keywords but to put them in the right place. Keywords need to be placed in headings, sub-headings, titles, or the body. They need to be precise in their placement to attract the most traffic.

The best way to input keywords is to decide when planning a blog post or a web page. They should be in the most relevant place to match a query. For instance, if someone wants to find the best pet food in Oregon, that keyword should be in a heading or sub-heading. However, if someone is searching for tips to grow vegetables, it’s better to pepper that keyword throughout a blog post.

It’s also great to use multiple keywords in different paragraphs and subsections of a page. This will make it easier for search engines to zero in on differently worded queries on the same page.

Using these tips, you can choose some great keywords for your web pages and posts.

Understand Longtail Keywords

Longtail keywords are a combination of three or more words or phrases. Longtail keywords often boast lower search volumes, yet they can direct more relevant traffic. This can lead to a greater ROI, making the longtail keywords easier to rank for and more effectively attracting traffic.

Longtail SEO accounts for 70% of searches and yields an average of 36% of conversion rate.

Identify Keyword Types

There are several different keyword types. You can’t group them all into one. You need to choose those that are most relevant to your topic.

For instance, head keywords are usually just one or two words long. They have a high search volume and thus a lot of competition.

Body keywords are usually 2 to 3-word phrases which have good search volume.

However, longtail keywords are more skewed towards specific topics and can be longer than even 10 words. They have a much lesser search volume than the previous two types. Yet, they help skew very specific queries your way. Hence, you can get customers who want to stay on your website for a long period. This will not only increase your chance of sales but your SEO and authority.

There are other types of keywords, including head modifier and tail keywords, short and medium keywords, etc. The thing to watch out for here is specifics. Make sure that your keyword is right for the query that you’re aiming to fulfil.  

Employ Latent Semantic Indexing

Semantic keywords, which are related to latent semantic indexing, are pretty useful for SEO. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a bit like what search engines do to associate words. For instance, if you misspell a word, they offer an alternative.

LSI helps search engines provide more relevant results to your queries. That’s a huge part of good keyword placement and selection. The greatest example of LSI in action is the autocomplete results on Google. The way they rapidly change as you type out your query is LSI magic.

A great tool to help you take advantage of this is LSIGraph. It gives you keywords which are longer than eight words. That’s how large queries can be on Google’s search bar. Other keywords may provide an aha moment for you for content creation. Using these semantic keywords can give your content an edge and more potential relevance.

The post How to Choose the Right Keywords to Market Your Online Business? appeared first on The SEO Platform.

Users were not happy since the allure of WhatsApp was the end-to-end encryption and the apparent privacy. However, since Facebook had acquired the company in 2014, this was bound to happen at some point. What’s worse is that the App was probably already sharing users’ information with Facebook since 2016. An update in August of that year began sharing metadata and user information with Facebook. You could’ve chosen to opt-out of the feature at the time, but that option is no longer there.

While certain users are now migrating to alternatives like Telegram and Signal, WhatsApp has over 1 billion users. A mass exodus of that size isn’t possible in a few days. Users will have to choose between the privacy policy and the fact that most of their social circle is on WhatsApp.

Social media networks have grown so big that it’s become impossible to boycott them completely, and this is where the problem lies.

How Does Social Media Exploit Its Users?

Social media is an indispensable and essential part of life now. Even people that don’t have social media profiles use messaging apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. They’re not just platforms to contact one’s friends and relatives, but also to communicate with co-workers. Social networks offer convenience like never before, including access to businesses and customer reps. They provide platforms to buy, order, and perform transactions as well.

Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter have hundreds of millions, if not billions of active users. They affect popular culture and have become the source of news for many people. The fact that they’re free means they take our data as payment.

In the recent past, scandals have broken including the Cambridge Analytica episode which exposed Facebook. The social network quite literally gave away data that allowed Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election. However, it’s much bigger than that. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, Netflix, Spotify, the streaming services, and Amazon have benefitted from Facebook’s massive data haul.

Facebook has argued that data collection and sales have been part of “helping people”. The data helps companies cater to their customers more. However, it also exposes private information to companies.

As an example, take Tim Stobierski. He was essentially outed by a Facebook ad for a gay cruise in 2014. That kind of information can be damning both professionally and personally. If a person isn’t comfortable sharing parts of their lives with others, they shouldn’t be circumvented like that.

However, it’s not just Facebook that is guilty of violating privacy. Take a look at the new kid on the block; TikTok. The App, formerly known as Musical.ly, has now amassed over 800 million active users. That makes it among the largest social networks on the planet.

Yet, there are huge privacy flaws in the App. It’s connection to China means that a lot of data is being harvested by the Chinese government. The App is currently under investigation by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission of the United States. It has also been banned in India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.

The list of social media privacy offenders includes Twitter as well. It officially disclosed its serious violations of privacy in 2019. The information of its users had been shared with companies for advertising campaigns and targeted ads.

Finally, let’s come to Google. While not a social network. It has perhaps the largest pool of data in the world. In 2018, an internal video from the tech giant leaked. It elaborated on the concept of how data could be used to manipulate users. The most far-reaching implications of the video were that data could be used to manipulate entire populations. This was not just implied for advertising’s sake, but to change the narrative around certain topics. To whose benefit? The person pressing the button, of course.

Social media can shape our choices already. Social media addiction has been recognised as a problem for many people. Yet, for those that want to leave, or let go, there’s very little choice. Is there a way to prevent social media from exploiting its users?

How Can We Prevent Social Media Exploiting its Users

While no perfect solution has been suggested yet, there are certain ways to stop social media users’ exploitation. Over the last few years, several suggestions to curb social media networks’ power and increase privacy have emerged.

1.    Balkin’s Fiduciary Rule

During Mark Zuckerberg’s hearings with the US Congress, he expressed approval of this rule. Jack Balkin is a law professor at Yale who came up with the term, “Information Fiduciary”. He calls, “The First Amendment in the Second Gilded Age”, the Information Fiduciary would safeguard a user’s privacy. It would reclassify social networks. They would effectively have legal and professional relationships with their users instead of treating them like ‘users’.

Balkin outlines the relationship is similar to that of a patient and a therapist or a lawyer and client. Hence, giving up information about a social media user would be equivalent to breaking privilege. The information fiduciary’s three basic duties would be a duty of care, confidentiality and loyalty.  The first two encompass keeping data secure and not using in negligent ways to hurt you. Loyalty would prevent the company from using your data in ways that would benefit the company while hurting you.

Hence, a contractual relationship would come about between each user and the social network. This way, the platforms would be subject to legal repercussions in case they violate these duties.

2.    Employing Multi-Factor Authentication as a Standard

While Multi-Factor authentication is available on most social networks and messaging apps, it’s not the standard. You have to set it up by looking through the security settings. It’s not mandatory like creating a username or password.

However, it should be mandatory, since it’s the only secure way of preventing intrusions due to credential theft. Multi-factor authentication in the form of biometric verification or device verification is the best option. It requires that you use a second device that you carry to authorise entry into your account. This is far more secure than message-based multi-factor authentication, which sends a text to your phone. That method is easily hackable since traffic can be intercepted between your phone and a social media server. All a hacker would need is your phone number.

Making device-based or biometric-based authentication the standard on social networks should happen quickly. That way, stealing account information won’t be as easy as it is now.

3.    Enacting More GDPR-like Laws

The introduction of the GDPR in 2018 sent ripple effects throughout the world. You may remember that time in 2018 when every single App that you used revised its privacy policy. Well, that affected the world’s attitude towards privacy.

Today, more than ten countries have enacted similar laws or are in the process of enacting them. These include Brazil’s LGPD, and Australia’s Privacy Amendment, as well as Japan’s Act on Protection of Personal Information. Even China has begun work on its data privacy law.

Due to the GDPR, the EU is now ahead in every single data privacy metric worldwide. Citizens now have the right to request deletion of their records at any social media company if they want to. Even the new WhatsApp privacy policy, which shares more data with Facebook isn’t being implemented in the EU.

4.    Blocking Apps that Track User Activity

Most social media apps are notorious for tracking user activity even when you’re not on the site. Facebook’s infamous tool, Pixel, tracks your activity outside its domain. There are even browser extensions to stop it.

There should be a way for that practice to be blocked. Apple has begun working on a solution. It has announced that it will block apps from tracking user activity. Apple has warned developers that if they don’t comply with the new “Tracking Transparency” framework, their apps will be removed. Certain companies, including Facebook, have criticised this approach.

Other companies should adopt this approach of blocking apps from tracking user activity. This is especially true for OS makers like Windows, Google, Samsung, and Huawei. 

5.    Educating More People About Social Media Dangers

Finally, educating people about the dangers of social media should be a priority. If we educate more people about limiting their digital footprint, that would be a good start. It would allow people to understand just how they are being exploited and limit that exploitation.

Social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. We should learn to adapt to its invasive tactics and to limit that intrusion further.

The post Are Social Media Users Exploited? 6 Ways We Can Change All That appeared first on The SEO Platform.

Not only that, but cloud computing also allows businesses to save huge sums of money on infrastructure, maintenance, security, and overall capital costs. By switching to an OpEx structure, cloud computing allows businesses to operate as efficiently as possible. Overall, cloud computing for smallbusinesses allows them to compete with larger businesses by granting access to previously unavailable infrastructure.

Let’s take a look at exactly how that all happens.

Most Common Applications of Cloud Computing for Small Businesses

According to a survey, there has been an 83% increase in cloud computing adoption in the UK since 2010. According to Statista, the UK government spent almost GBP 1.32 billion on cloud computing services in 2019.

Here are just some of the services that cloud computing provides to companies to make it so essential.

1.    Infrastructure-as-a-Service/Platform-as-a-Service(IaaS/PaaS)

IaaS grants access to storage, compute, and network resources to companies on a pay-as-you-go basis. These third-party vendors use their infrastructure to lend storage space or processing power. Plans can be both monthly, or annual depending on the payments made. Vendors offer standard plans as well as advanced packages for those that want to pay for more.

2.    Multi-Clouds and Hybrid Clouds

While cloud computing is more popular as a service for most companies, some still have their cloud servers. Hence, the term hybrid cloud refers to an environment constructed to connect a company’s on-premises cloud and any other third-party cloud service. The hybrid cloud serves multiple purposes like running applications, providing testing and development environments, etc.

This provides companies choices to run certain processes on one cloud or the other. By dividing workloads, they can save on resources, get faster results, and choose as per the circumstance. Not only is this efficient but cost-effective.

Multi-Cloud takes this a little further. It allows companies to use more than two clouds from different cloud providers. Thus, you can run certain applications for productivity through one service, and customer-centric processes on the other. This way, companies can avoid vendor-lock in and take advantage of the best of both worlds.

3.    Storage Data Backup

This is probably the most common use of cloud computing on the planet. Storing data and data backups is what people usually think of cloud computing is built for. Companies were responsible for their data backups with huge storage facilities for tapes and drives. This was more of a chore for smaller businesses since it involved setting up their data backup facilities.

However, today, with the power of fast internet and storage drives, the process is much easier. Data can be saved and backed up as soon as it’s created. It can be edited on the go, and changes can be incorporated within seconds.

Any location worldwide can be used as a backup facility for your data, and data can be dispatched immediately. Any device from a smartphone to a smartwatch to a laptop or desktop computer can be connected. Thus, any business can take advantage of this technology to backup any data and access it without restrictions. 

4.    Big Data Analytics

Big data is a phrase that is used excessively today. Every organisation that wants to compete for the top spot in its niche or field is leveraging big data for products and services. However, its analysis wouldn’t be possible without cloud storage. As a whole, the UK data centre market size will cross GBP 6.26 billion.

Organisations dealing with zettabytes of data in structured and unstructured forms need to store it reliably. Analysis requires pulling data from anywhere and anytime required to harness its benefits.

The cloud is the perfect repository to store real-time data from different sensors and devices. Like social media and private networks, other sources are all relevant when it comes to data analysis. With so much data collection going on 24/7, businesses need the cloud to keep up.  

5.    Testing and Developing New Products

Clouds can provide an environment for certain companies to build and test their products and services. While the obvious candidate for this environment is software, other industries can take advantage of this as well. For example, cloud computing environments can provide a testing ground for different web pages and online contests.

With cloud computing, several testing and development environments have already been tailored to various needs. Often, this entails the provisioning of physical and virtualised resources for companies.

Without cloud computing, companies would have to resort to creating these environments themselves. It would require significant infrastructure and IT prowess to construct them and operate them. Installing and configuration, as well as optimisation, would require huge sums of money. With cloud computing, small businesses can take advantage of this technology as well.

6.    Disaster Recovery

A great benefit of cloud computing is the ability of disaster recovery. This provides faster recovery of data from a lot of different locations at a lower cost. Say your data has been damaged, stolen, compromised, or corrupted in one location. It can still be recovered in the several other locations it was backed up in. This is a far cry from the single point failure that was usually a company’s backup system.

For Online Businesses Cloud Computing is Essential

Shifting from CapEx to OpEx

In essence, cloud computing allows every company to shift from a CapEx (capital expenses) to an OpEx (operational expenses) billing cycle. Instead of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure, platforms, and services yourself, you pay to use them.

That’s worked for businesses quite well since they can access millions of dollars’ worth of equipment for pennies in comparison.

A great benefit for smaller companies is that it allows them to scale up by spending a fraction of the money. Several smaller companies that couldn’t have competed with their larger counterparts stand a chance due to this.

Leaving Maintenance to the Vendors

Cloud computing allows you to experience all the benefits at the front end while not worrying about anything at the back-end. You don’t have to update the software or maintain the hardware or make additions to the infrastructure. The IT teams are all taking care of the equipment at the back-end, and you’re just reaping the rewards.

To set that up, on-premises would require a massive undertaking worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Upkeep costs would eat into the budget and paying the IT and maintenance teams would make further financial dents.

Cloud computing has provided an alternative that is infinitely preferable to everyone.

Getting Regular Updates without Gaps in Workflow

Remember the time when you had to restart your computer every time you got an update? Those delays are extremely costly for companies. Hence, with cloud computing, they’re able to side step that process completely. Cloud vendors update software and add new features all the time. You don’t notice it since it’s happening at the back end.

Not only does this save a lot of time, but a lot of money as well.

Getting Maximum Uptime Throughout the Year

While not all cloud vendors can provide 99.999% uptime throughout the year, they come pretty close. The major vendors like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and SalesForce, offer maximum uptime for companies. This allows companies to function throughout the year without losing out on customer business. They can access their data throughout the year at any place and time and provide services or products. It’s what allows e-businesses to function 24/7.

Benefitting from Superior Security

Cloud computing vendors provide more than just storage, app suites, and analysis for companies. They also provide high-tier security to ensure that your data isn’t stolen or compromised. A small percentage has even begun providing end-to-end encryption for your data. 

However, for most online businesses, cloud computing provides for several tiers of security. These include disaster recovery and multi-factor authentication. Access restriction and critical data protection are also part of it. The latter refers to categorising certain data as critical so that it’s protected in the event of a hack. 

Cloud computing is an asset that has helped several companies scale up and scale out and compete. It is an innovation that has catapulted online businesses to the top and allowed them to innovate and thrive.

The post What Is the Importance of Cloud Computing for Online Businesses? appeared first on The SEO Platform.

5G will ensure faster internet download and upload speeds for sure. However, what will it do beyond that? 3G and 4G have done wonders for marketing opportunities around the world. What will 5G do to improve that further? To understand that, first, let’s see what base advantages the technology brings.

What Will 5G Do for Connectivity?

5G runs on a higher frequency than 4G. In essence, it can carry much more information than 4G, yet its short-wavelength ensures that it doesn’t have a lot of range. That is one of its limitations. However, with time, this will get better anyway. As for its advantages, they far outweigh the drawbacks.

Faster Speeds

This is a no-brainer. Of course, 5G will be faster than 4G. Transmission speeds right now are peaking at 15-20 Gbps in ideal scenarios. That means orders of magnitude faster uploads and downloads. A study by RootMetrics has shown the performance of three UK mobile operators in different cities.

EE has speeds of up to 388.4 Mbps in London, while Three, has speeds of up to 478.1 Mbps in Liverpool. Vodafone clocks in at 402.2 Mpbs in London as well. A fourth member, O2, clocks in at 287.2 Mbps in Edinburgh, Scotland. The availability of 5G is sparse at the moment, peaking at 40.2% in Birmingham, with Belfast in second place at 37.4%.

Low Latency

At the moment, 4G has a latency of about 5-20ms. That corresponds to the delay in receiving information. 5G will get that latency down to 1ms. This means the near-instant transmission of information resulting in remote software activation with virtually no lag.

5G will allow controlling sophisticated equipment like surgical tools and robotic arms, etc. virtually. Instruments that require the utmost precision could be controlled without needing to account for missed information.

It will also mean that lag experienced in video calls and streams will be down to a minimum.

Network Slicing

Virtual networks are also a feature of 5G. You can create subnets to provide connectivity to more adjusted speeds. This will allow for throttling or boosting speeds in certain parts of a network. It will enable the prioritisation of connections. It’ll be great to adjust the speeds in case of emergencies.

Greater Volume of Connected Devices

At the moment, 4G offers support for 4000 connected devices per square kilometre. 5G will bump that number up to a million. That’s a jump in the connectivity of a factor of a thousand.

Hence, marketers will technically have access to a thousand times more people within any area than they did before. In terms of reach and advertising, that is an enormous jump; in fact, it’s the greatest in history. 5G digital marketing will bring this into the mainstream.

The applications for this range from basic IoT to the dream of smart cities that connect every single device. While that dream is far off, it’s being built right now.

What is 5G Digital Marketing?

The effect of 5G is multi-layered, and one of the many fields that will feel the impact is the marketing industry.

Faster E-Commerce

Mobile E-Commerce is growing at an accelerated rate. Every year, E-commerce sales shoot through the roof. In 2020, the UK’s E-Commerce industry was predicted to reach up to £7.89 billion. That’s up from  £66.3bn in 2019. That’s a total growth of 19% in just a single year. This is bound to continue and get faster due to the introduction of 5G.

As networks speed up, zero-latency will result in a better shopping experience. Especially during flash sales, the biggest problem is customers failing to buy products fast enough. Stocks run out before they’re able to complete their transactions. This is made worse by the barrage of requests that overwhelm servers during these sales days.

Better Personalisation

The faster internet connections we will see as a result of 5G will result in a growing number of users. With greater accommodations for users per unit area, this is a certainty. Thus, more remote connections and more data will mean greater personalisation. With more data about a single person or a single group of people being connected, personalisation will become more efficient.

Marketers will be able to gather more information about their target niches than before. This will result in more personalised ads, email marketing campaigns, and notifications. 

More Efficient Targeted Marketing

As connectivity speeds get faster, the number of wireless users around the world will increase. That means, greater data will be available for marketing. In essence, this means niche marketing or targeted marketing will become more specific.

There will be greater opportunities for marketers to push products and services to customers based on their needs. It will lead to hyper-personalised experiences using video, AR, VR, and other technologies. Greater hardware usage will be incorporated into targeted marketing like facial recognition and biometric data. More behavioural data will also become part of marketing strategies.

Greater Segmented Video Advertising

Mobile video advertising is one the rise. 5 second-30 second ads before a video on YouTube are now normal. Most of these video ads are topical. For instance, a tech ad will be shown on a tech channel. A makeup ad will be shown on a beauty vlog channel. Hence, segmentation will apply further and further to video ads.

Due to the increased processing of data and increased segmenting, video ads will continue to be segmented. Also, greater quality videos will be processed with 5G so that better quality ads may be available for each video.

Enhanced Customer Experiences through AR and VR

AR and VR are nearly as much in their infancy as 5G is. However, there are already AR, and VR enabled ads in the wild today. People can use AR and VR to see how different pieces of furniture will look in their rooms. They can also map clothes on to their bodies to get accurate measurements.

This is just the start for AR and VR. More complex ads will be possible with faster 5G speeds. 5G digital marketing will allow people to take advantage of 3D modelled imagery, holograms, etc., everywhere.

Certain retailers are already experimenting with mobile apps. You can measure things with VR technology and provide VR experiences for ads. For example, Diesel’s fragrance “Only the Brave” simulated a VR experience. Through it, you could experience crawling out on a high rise ledge to reach through an open window. 

More Interactive Advertising

When ad load times become nearly instant, marketers will employ more creative techniques for ad design. This means more engagement from customers and greater leeway to create more heavy ads. In essence, websites will be able to handle larger ads without a dip in performance. Ensuring websites are easier to navigate with the increased load will make ads more complex and more interactive.

This may slow the growth of ad blockers and reduce bounce rates. However, 5G will impact more than normal website ads. It will impact ads on mobile screens and mobile apps. With data about who’s in the vicinity of where you are, businesses will target users with specific ads. Product placement and ads could also change in real-time on different devices. Depending on the person watching and how they’re feeling even, more and more ads will be personalised. 

Lower Ad-Blocker Usage

According to PageFair’s 2017 report, nearly 615 million devices had ad blockers installed. That’s completely fathomable judging by the number of ads that people are bombarded with every day. However, with 5G, the possibility of ad blocker usage dropping is growing. Slow loading speeds is a major gripe with ads that people have. With blazing fast internet download speeds, 5G may solve that completely.

Marketers will be able to get more ads out much faster than before. Also, since 5G allows for greater advertising segmentation based on real-time analysis, fewer ads will have to go out. Since more targeted advertising will be chosen for specific customers, ad blockers will need to block much fewer ads.

Customers may think of ads as less intrusive in the future. It also may mean that they will think of blocking them as less of a concern. The overtly negative sentiment that ads have gathered over the years may be reduced.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that ad blocking will go away altogether. However, it will mean that more personalised ads and targeted marketing will result in a much lesser need for it in the first place.

Real-Time Analytics

Due to the lower latency that 5G provides, devices will be able to process and analyse what is considered real-time data. For example, customer Tweets about a brand can be processed much faster than before. A brand can be alerted about a barrage of negative or positive tweets about their new products or services. They can be alerted about issues with their services and glitches in their programming much faster.

This is strongly linked to the hyper-personalisation mentioned earlier. Companies will be able to cater to specific problems in certain regions and countries.  This will improve greater segmentation of marketing materials and better targeting of specific types of customers.

Truly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many applications of 5G digital marketing that we may not be aware of yet. The applications will come with greater proliferation. 

The post How Will 5G Change Digital Marketing Forever? appeared first on The SEO Platform.

The Popularity of Voice Search Has Surged

The popularity of voice search is undeniable. Ever since the introduction of voice assistants on smartphones, nearly every smartphone, smart wearable, and smart speaker use voice search. In 2020, it estimated that 4.2 billion voice-enabled devices were being used. According to forecasts, 2024 will see the number of voice-enabled devices grow to 8.4 billion.

At the moment, there are myriad voice assistants and smart devices that allow you to voice search. However, the dominant voice search devices are still smartphones. Nevertheless, using voice search as a medium and voice as output is on the rise. So here are 10 strategies that businesses can use to optimise their websites for voice search.

10 Strategies to Optimise Your Website for Voice Search

1.    Use Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are the backbone of SEO. You already know that long keywords tend to be more effective when it comes to attracting new users. However, for voice search SEO, you will need to double down on this.

Voice-based queries have a conversational tone. Hence, they tend to be longer than normal, condensed, text-based queries. Incorporating the keywords in these queries would help your SEO tremendously. 

2.    Use Questions, Not Queries

Remember that people are usually asking questions when they use voice search. Hence, your landing pages, web pages, blog posts, and any other web content should include questions. Either as titles or headings or sub-headings, questions should be highlighted on your website.

Create a Frequently Asked Questions Page

When people ask questions, they use the 5 Ws and 1 H. Who, what, when, where, why and how are almost certainly used in voice searches. Hence, creating an FAQ page will do wonders for inquisitive users.

Begin each question with either of the 5 Ws and 1 H. Also, answer the questions in a conversational tone.

Create Blogs for Specific Questions

If a question requires more detail to answer or is receiving a lot of attention, you can assign a blog to it. This will greatly improve SEO for your website as well as visits to that page. If you structure it right, the page will be featured in Google’s snippets and send more traffic to you.

3.    Optimise for Mobile Search

In the UK, 20% of households reported having a smart speaker in 2019. That includes 6.58 million homes and a total of 10 million users. That’s on top of the voice assistants installed on smartphones and tablets.

A study by Code Computerlove and Mediacom North revealed  93% of UK voice-device owners used them at least once a week. That was up from 83% in 2018. That’s a huge audience you can cover. Since most of them are using voice search through their smartphones, it’s best to optimise your website for mobile browsing. 

There are several ways to do this, but you need to begin by designing a mobile-friendly version of your website. Most website builders today, including WordPress, are automatically optimised for mobile-friendly web pages.

However, to improve mobile-friendliness, make sure that your website is easily viewable on mobile screens. Ensure the font size, the videos, the images, and the interface are all easily readable and usable.

Improve Loading Times

A critical factor in improving SEO, in general, is improving loading times. When users are looking for an answer to a question, they need a swift answer. A website that loads quickly will often be their favourite pick. If a website fails to load quickly, users will either bounce or abandon the search altogether.

Website loading speed improves the chances of a customer staying on for longer. It also improves your website’s search rankings. Here are just a few things you can do to improve your website’s loading speeds:

• Use Compressed Images: Small file sizes mean that the website has less data to load. It’s just as simple as that. This will improve your website loading speed immensely.
• Use ‘async’ and ‘defer’: These are commands that reduce JavaScript parsing and the time it takes for a browser to render your website.
• Reduce Redirects and Plug-ins: If you can do without a plug-in or a redirect, don’t use it. It will only make your website slower and increase the loading time.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): This reduces the distance between a server and the website so that you can load website pages more quickly.

4.    Structure Your Content For Specificity

Make sure that your content is structured well. It should be broken into different headings and sub-headings, and paragraphs not longer than 2-3 sentences. This way, your content will be easily scannable by Google. It will make for much more specific answers to voice-based queries.

Concentrate on Readability

A great way to improve SEO for voice search is to improve readability. Using simpler language, shorter sentences, and more direct answers to questions will improve your search result rankings. For voice search, there’s no better way to appeal to your customers.

5.    Use a More Conversational Tone

People tend to be more conversational with their voice assistants. Hence, companies and online businesses need to invoke more conversational tones in their marketing material. Their web pages and websites need to incorporate more conversational language.

They need to concentrate on the type of questions being asked and keywords being used to do this. They need to focus on short, but informative answers that don’t bore the user. Voice-based answers are much shorter than you’d think. According to a study, the average voice search results are 29 words long. Businesses also need to concentrate on the conversational styles and tones of local people to target niche searches.

Also, if there’s additional information that the user needs to open a link for, indicate that. For instance, if there is a picture or a graph, highlight its presence in the text.

6.    Work on Your Google My Business Profile

Your Google My Business profile contains all the necessary information customers need to find you. This includes your location, your phone numbers, emails, website, and timings. Claiming that profile will do wonders for your SEO. It’s exactly the kind of specific information that voice-based searches require.

7.    Create Landing Pages

Creating landing pages for your business is very important to capitalise on voice search SEO. Using phrases that incorporate the name of the city, area, or neighbourhood you’re in will attract local customers. Using keywords that include gender, professions, age, etc. will also lead to high search result rankings. 

8.    Segment Your Customers by Device

Voice algorithms use data about the types of queries for any user, their gender, location, device used, etc. Hence, you need to do the same. You need to segment the users on your website by their age group, gender, and even the devices they use. This way, you’ll find out how to serve them better depending on the topics they search for.

Real-time data and research on consumer insights can help understand how your customers use voice search. You don’t need to be extra specific. Just lump them into age groups like Gen Z, Millennials, Baby Boomers, Gen X, etc. You can also lump them into groups like smartphones, smartwatches, and smart speakers.

This way, you can find out who is searching for what, and in what way. This will improve your chances of climbing up the voice search results ladder.

9.    Use Schema Markup

If you’re not already, get acquainted with schema markup. It’s used to mark up content and tell search engines what your site is about. It’s an HTML add-on which helps search engines understand your content’s context. This way, you’ll rank better in typical searches. Specific queries made through voice search will be more easily directed to you.

Google understand the language used by several different schemas. Hence, schemas can help add a lot of useful data to your website. They help seal the deal when it comes to SEO for voice search.

10. Make Your Website Easy to Navigate

Do yourself a favour and make your website easy to navigate. Google should be able to navigate through your website to pick out specific content. Hence, any content that is listed under certain categories should be easy to find.

The best way to do this is to:

1. Build a Sitemap: This will make it easier for search engine algorithms to crawl through your website and index relevant pages.
2. Do Some Testing: Conduct blind voice assistant tests to ensure that your website is easy to navigate. Try and conduct some sample tests with blind test subjects as well. If they can navigate your website with ease, you’re in the clear.

Using these 10 tips, you can improve your Google search rankings for voice-based search. This is a fundamental shift that all companies need to make sooner or later. With voice search taking up a significant share of the search market, its dominance over search is all but inevitable.

The post 10 Strategies to Make Your Web SEO Compatible with Voice Search appeared first on The SEO Platform.

A study by Organize Agile showed 19 companies worldwide had been using Agile for three years or more. The agile method involves having scrum sessions, and HR teams work in agile fashions, and project managers employ agile practices.

So, should you apply the agile methodology to marketing in your business? The answer is in the details of the methodology itself. Let’s examine what the core components of the agile methodology are first.

What are the Values of Agile Marketing?

Responding to Change

Agile marketing doesn’t require you to write 30-40 page long documents and plans. However, every quarter, a single, overarching plan is specified. This includes goals and aspirations that brings everyone on the same page. Then, every two to four weeks, priorities are reset depending on the progress made. Breaking this process down into smaller time frames is what the agile methodology is all about.

Rapid Iterations

Traditional marketing goes for a campaign to be run 3-6 months a year. With agile marketing, there is a different approach. It’s called the iterative approach. A small strategy is agreed upon, and ideas are thrown around about what may or may not work. Then an experiment is designed to test it. More on that later.

After that, the results are measured in terms of engagement (likes, shares, impressions, etc.). Then the results are documented. Depending on the success or failure of these plans, the next phase is agreed. This iterative approach slowly shows marketing departments what is working and what’s not. The documentation allows them to respond to challenges in the future. This way, every campaign is a learning opportunity in several phases.

Testing and Data Lead the Way

Agile marketing is also blind to position and designation. The highest-paid person in the room doesn’t make the decisions. With data and metrics showing everyone what’s going on, nothing else matters. Also, in agile marketing, choosing the right metrics makes all the difference. Vanity metrics aren’t much use at all.

Small Experiments Replace Large Bets and Hunches

Here, agile methodology uses the 70:20:10 rule. 70% of the budget and 50% of the time is used on things known to work without fail. This is spread out broadly over all types of audiences.

20% of the budget and 25% of the time is spent modifying work and improving them. Perhaps the distribution, media, or content changes.

The last 10% of the budget is used with 25% of the time. We fully expect that only 2 or 3 of the ideas will work out of the 10. We focus on ideas that are newer and more experimental. Some of these ideas turn out to be in the future, 70% and 20%.

Individual Interactions Superseded One-Size-Fits-All Solutions

Agile marketing allows individual interactions to take precedence over one-size-fits-all solutions. What that means is, general marketing tactics don’t work for all audiences. They never have, and they never will. Hence, agile marketing focuses on specific insights that can be gleaned from people that are working on projects together.

If someone stumbles on an insight that improves the business’ marketing strategy, it’s chosen. It’s got to be backed up by data, of course. However, conventional wisdom and hierarchy never stamp that out. In a way, this helps new ideas be tested more often than not. In most cases, it allows marketing strategies to progress further and more quickly than before.

Hierarchy Sinks, Collaboration Rises

Marketing organisations have this structure that usually stops different silos in an organisation from talking to each other. Marketing may not talk to sales, and marketing may not have the ear of senior management. This stops communication from happening. People that can genuinely work together to come up with great ideas never get there.

However, with agile marketing, certain processes are put in place so that groups collaborate. They’re setting priorities together so that the company benefits. Otherwise, marketing departments and sales, and management never get together. They keep worrying about their budgets or their justifications and bottom lines.

Benefits of Agile Marketing

1.    The Ability to Pivot

Agile marketing is about pivoting to improve. In essence, it allows iterative steps to improve upon a strategy if it’s not working. This will enable companies to improve their strategies with data. The response to data allows them to make more informed decisions en route to their goals.

2.    Better Transparency and Visibility

Marketing has a very strong alignment with other departments. These include sales and product management. An agile strategy, however, requires all these departments to collaborate. This includes giving them projects to work on together and giving them more visibility into each other’s departments.

While this is opposite to what traditional methodology says, it’s also a welcomed improvement. It stops departments from worrying about their budgets and justifications and improves the company as a whole.

This is one of the most important benefits of agile marketing.

3.    Higher Work Quality

To become more agile, organisations have to offer an environment of encouragement. Staff must be encouraged to speak out and try new things and expand their skills. As a result, with the agile methodology, the company progresses further and become more valuable. Teams often have dedicated employees who specialise in one area of marketing. However, they also have strong, diverse knowledge across all principles.

A large variety of such employees do companies a lot of good. If a marketing team is built around such principles, individuals will become more motivated to do quality work and trust the company. According to the 1^st Annual State of Agile Marketing Report, 47% of marketers say they have a higher quality of work. The report also cited that 80.9% of agile marketers were satisfied with their teams’ progress and management.

4.    Better Productivity

According to a report by Agile Sherpas, 37.3% of marketers have more productive teams when using agile processes. 31.7% of marketers have also experienced prioritisation of work across marketing departments as a result.

The agile marketing process breaks down the entire marketing campaign into smaller, more manageable chunks. Hence, it makes the campaign much easier to manage and improve and tweak over time. This involves testing campaigns with different content, over different marketing channels, and with different approaches.

Agile marketing also requires a pace and pipeline to sustain such experimentation. Overall, this produces a much greater amount of productivity.

5.    Quicker Identification of Issues and Problems

Running smaller, low-risk experiments regularly allows agile teams to break activities down easily to more profitable plans. Here, improvements can be made on more fundamental levels, and bottlenecks can be resolved. Detailed analyses can determine the individuals or teams which need additional resources.

The processes that are no longer working can also be bettered or scrapped altogether. This is much less likely when it comes to traditional marketing. It’s unorthodox to revise a plan before traditional marketing campaigns come to an end. However, it’s also not profitable to keep going without changing anything.

This is where agile marketing rises to the occasion.

6.    Improved Communications

As highlighted above, better communications is one of the best agile marketing benefits. A lack of communication always results in a loss for the company. Whether or not it results in a financial loss is beside the point. It will generally result in the loss of a potential gain. Without communication, a great idea can’t come forth. Without communication, people can’t brew over ideas and make them better over years and years. This results in slower progress for a company than it could’ve been.

While it’s conventional wisdom to stop too many cooks spoiling the broth, traditional marketing goes too far. If you don’t give cooks time to exchange notes or argue over what’s better, the broth will grow stale.

These benefits are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to agile methodologies. Continuous improvement will always benefit a company over sticking with a stale strategy that is doing more harm than good.

The post 6 Benefits of Agile Marketing appeared first on The SEO Platform.

5G will ensure faster internet download and upload speeds for sure. However, what will it do beyond that? 3G and 4G have done wonders for marketing opportunities around the world. What will 5G do to improve that further? To understand that, first, let’s see what base advantages the technology brings.

What Will 5G Do for Connectivity?

5G runs on a higher frequency than 4G. In essence, it can carry much more information than 4G, yet its short-wavelength ensures that it doesn’t have a lot of range. That is one of its limitations. However, with time, this will get better anyway. As for its advantages, they far outweigh the drawbacks.

Faster Speeds

This is a no-brainer. Of course, 5G will be faster than 4G. Transmission speeds right now are peaking at 15-20 Gbps in ideal scenarios. That means orders of magnitude faster uploads and downloads.

Low Latency

At the moment, 4G has a latency of about 5-20ms. That corresponds to the delay in receiving information. 5G will get that latency down to 1ms. This means the near-instant transmission of information resulting in remote software activation with virtually no lag.

5G will allow controlling sophisticated equipment like surgical tools and robotic arms, etc. virtually. Instruments that require the utmost precision could be controlled without needing to account for missed information.

It will also mean that lag experienced in video calls and streams will be down to a minimum as well.

Network Slicing

Virtual networks are also a feature of 5G. You can create subnets to provide connectivity to more adjusted speeds. This will throttle or boost the speed in certain parts of a network. It will allow the prioritisation of connections. It’ll be great to adjust the speeds in case of emergencies.

Greater Volume of Connected Devices

At the moment, 4G offers support for 4000 connected devices per square kilometre. 5G will bump that number up to a million. That’s a jump in the connectivity of a factor of a thousand.

Hence, marketers will technically have access to a thousand times more people within any area than they did before. In terms of reach and advertising, that is an enormous jump; in fact, it’s the greatest in history. 5G digital marketing will bring this into the mainstream.

The applications for this range from basic IoT, to the dream of smart cities that connect every single device. While that dream is far off, it’s being built right now.

What is 5G Digital Marketing?

The effect of 5G is multi-layered, and one of the many fields that will feel the impact is the marketing industry.

Faster E-Commerce

Mobile E-Commerce is growing at an accelerated rate. Every year, E-commerce sales shoot through the roof. This year’s Single’s Day in China has brought in $115 billion in sales. Hence, more people are buying more products through more devices.

As networks speed up, zero-latency will result in a better shopping experience. Especially during flash sales, the biggest problem is customers failing to buy products fast enough. Stocks run out before they’re able to complete their transactions. This is made worse by the barrage of requests that overwhelm servers during these sales days.

Better Personalisation

The faster internet connections we will see as a result of 5G will result in a growing number of users as well. With greater accommodations for users per unit area, this is a certainty. Thus, more remote connections and more data will mean greater personalisation. With more data about a single person or a single group of people being connected, personalisation will become more efficient.

Marketers will be able to gather more information about their target niches than before. This will result in more personalised ads, email marketing campaigns, and notifications. 

More Efficient Targeted Marketing

As connectivity speeds get faster, the number of wireless users around the world will increase. That means, greater data will be available for marketing. In essence, this means niche marketing or targeted marketing will become more specific.

There will be greater opportunities for marketers to push products and services on to customers based on their needs. Thus, providing hyper personalised experiences using video, AR, VR, and other technologies. Greater hardware usage will be incorporated into targeted marketing like facial recognition and biometric data. More behavioural data will also become part of marketing strategies.

Greater Segmented Video Advertising

Mobile video advertising is one the rise. 5 second-30 second ads before a video on YouTube are now normal. Most of these video ads are topical. For instance, a tech ad will be shown on a tech channel. A makeup ad will be shown on a beauty vlog channel. Hence, segmentation will apply further and further to video ads.

Due to the increased processing of data and increased segmenting, video ads will continue to be segmented. Also, greater quality videos will be processed with 5G so that better quality ads may be available for each video.

Enhanced Customer Experiences through AR and VR

AR and VR are nearly as much in their infancy as 5G is. However, there are already AR, and VR enabled ads in the wild today. People can use AR and VR to see how different pieces of furniture will look in their rooms. They can also map clothes on to their bodies to get accurate measurements.

More complex ads will be possible with faster 5G speeds. 5G digital marketing will allow people to take advantage of 3D modelled imagery, holograms, etc., everywhere.

Certain retailers are already experimenting with mobile apps. You can measure things with VR technology and provide VR experiences for ads. For example, Diesel’s fragrance “Only the Brave” simulated a VR experience. Through it, you could experience crawling out on a high rise ledge to reach through an open window. 

More Interactive Advertising

When ad load times become nearly instant, marketers will be able to employ more creative techniques for ad design. Thus, getting more engagement from customers and greater leeway to create more heavy ads. In essence, websites will be able to handle larger ads without a dip in performance. Ensuring websites are easier to navigate with the increased load will make ads more complex and more interactive.

This may slow the growth of ad blockers and reduce bounce rates. However, 5G will impact more than normal website ads. It will impact ads on mobile screens and mobile apps. With data about who’s in the vicinity of where you are, businesses will target users with specific ads. Product placement and ads could also change in real-time on different devices. Depending on the person watching and how they’re feeling even, more and more ads will be personalised. 

Lower Ad-Blocker Usage

According to PageFair’s 2017 report, nearly 615 million devices had ad blockers installed. That’s completely fathomable judging by the number of ads that people are bombarded with every day. However, with 5G, the possibility of ad blocker usage dropping is growing. Slow loading speeds is a major gripe with ads that people have. With blazing fast internet download speeds, 5G may solve that completely.

Marketers will get ads out much faster than before. Also, since 5G allows for greater segmentation of advertising based on real-time analysis, fewer ads will have to go out. Since more targeted advertising will be chosen for specific customers, ad blockers will need to block much fewer ads.

This may mean that customers will think of ads as less intrusive in the future. It also may mean that they will think of blocking them as less of a concern. The overtly negative sentiment that ads have gathered over the years may be reduced.

More personalised ads and targeted marketing will result in a much lesser need for it in the first place.

Real-Time Analytics

Due to the lower latency that 5G provides, devices will be able to process and analyse what is considered real-time data. For example, customer Tweets about a brand can be processed much faster than before. A brand can be alerted about a barrage of negative or positive tweets about their new products or services. They can be alerted about issues with their services and glitches in their programming much faster.

This is strongly linked to the hyper-personalisation mentioned earlier. This way, companies will be able to cater to specific problems in certain regions and countries.  This will improve greater segmentation of marketing materials and better targeting of specific types of customers.

Truly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many applications of 5G digital marketing that we may not be aware of yet. The applications will come with greater proliferation. 

The post How Will 5G Change Digital Marketing Forever? appeared first on The SEO Platform.

With the COVID-19 pandemic still forcing people to stay at home, there are great opportunities for AR and VR devices to target their customers. Social distancing, quarantine and fear of catching the virus have shut a lot of people away from the outside world. With more people relying on digital purchases and contactless payments, it’s time for AR and VR to play their part. So here are 7 ways in which AR and VR will transform digital marketing.

1.    Try Before You Buy

The two things that people are most terrified of buying without trying are clothes and furniture. The former includes shows or any item that you have to wear. For electronics and games and other items that don’t require wearing, it doesn’t matter as much. However, the in-store experience has yet to be replicated. For older shoppers and consumers, and even for younger consumers, this is imperative.

Hence, AR and VR will play a huge part in try before you buy digital marketing. Augmented reality advertisements have already become real. They allow you to use the AR capabilities of your phones to measure yourself for clothes. Some ads can let you place furniture in your living room through your camera and see how it looks.

This kind of innovation has found itself in the digital marketing space. Before long, other items on sale will become subject to the same treatment. While the AR and VR trend for “try before you buy” marketing, it won’t catch on immediately and is something to look out for in the future.

2.    Virtual Tourism

Virtual tourism has also become one of the biggest applications of VR digital marketing. You can use VR helmets for touring different places around the world in tourist hotspots. You can even tour libraries, museums, and art galleries without having to be there physically. This has also caught on during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, there are several more applications to this rather than just visiting Europe or South America virtually. VR can allow people to travel back in time to a rendering of a palace or castle hundreds of years ago. That kind of virtual tourism carries a lot of potential for not only history buffs, but school children and history majors.

Virtual tourism can allow people to see inside places like abandoned buildings and caves where too many people aren’t allowed. Dangerous areas of the world that have remained unexplored due to extreme peril can be explored through VR helmets now.

3.    Augmented Branding Materials

Branding materials like business cards and brochures can be taken to the next level by adding AR or VR. Users can scan printed material with their devices so they can access a range of features. This will give them more information to play with and to get in contact with the brand.

A user can scan a brochure in the right spot to bring up a video of the product or service advertised. They can bring a dynamic element to the static text that is displayed there.

4.    Augmented Reality for B2B

B2B brands can transform the customer/vendor relationship with VR in several ways. The sales process in B2B has been tense for a long time. Hence, the limitations of the vendor to realistically provide all the apparent information. However, with AR, there is potential to create working virtual models that allow the customer to visualise concepts clearly. Brochures which are just listed with details and a non-animated model don’t catch the eye. A significant area where AR can improve B2B sales is to create a 360-degree environment or model. This will allow customers to see exactly what they can expect with a finished product. Simple presentations aren’t as immersive or powerful as these virtual worlds are.

5.    Opportunities for E-Commerce

Augmented reality has given marketers and brands the power to thrive without putting consumers at risk. For example, Gucci recently launched its shoe-try-on lens with Snapchat. This allows people to shop for shoes without needing to go to the store. This can be a huge opportunity for E-commerce.

6.    Contactless Engagement

AR and VR represent a great opportunity with the COVID-19 pandemic. With so many people forced to stay in their homes, there is a need for contactless engagement. Virtual concerts, fashion shows, augmented tours, shopping, etc., are needed. Not only is it important for those most vulnerable to stay home and experience more of the outer world, but it’s also essential.

For this reason, AR and VR are incredibly useful for times like these. Even after the pandemic, when someone is in the hospital or hurt or ill, they will need means of entertainment. These can include virtual concerts and tours or shopping sprees. 

7.    More Immersive Storytelling

AR and VR digital marketing will allow for more immersive storytelling to materialise. For example, Facebook is making it easy to jump into virtual worlds and immersive content. With their 3D photo images, and panorama images and 360-degree video, it’s easier to experience a whole world. That’s the kind of experience that a flat video doesn’t bring.

The potential of AR and VR is boundless. However, for digital marketing, there is a huge shortage of content today. In the future, there will be several AR and VR applications for every industry and app. Digital marketers shouldn’t miss out on opportunities like these. It’s just another way to engage with the customer.

The post What Can AR and VR Do for Digital Marketing? appeared first on The SEO Platform.