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Tips for Effective Email Marketing in 2024

Importantly, when it comes to online marketing, the powerful application of email marketing strategies has never been denied among groups of online marketers. Plus, online marketers still seek new approaches to make their email marketing always up-to-date with more developed outcomes than ever. In this blog, we will provide you with some practical tips for effective email marketing strategies that your business ought to know in this 2024 online marketing era.

Why Email Marketing Matters for Businesses?

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As mentioned earlier, email marketing is also considered an online marketing strategy that has always been prevailing among businesses, even though the time has passed so far. However, email marketing strategy is enduringly effective for many reasons, which you may unintentionally overlook!

  • Allows Personalized Communication.
  • Cost-Effective
  • Promotes Targeted Messaging.
  • Boosts High Return on Investment (ROI).
  • Has Measurable Results.
  • Strengthens Customer Relationships.
  • Drives Sales and Conversions.
  • Helps Increase Brand Awareness.

Key Tips for Effective Email Marketing in 2024

Embracing the right tips and integrating them in the right way can help bolster the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. As such, while doing online marketing with email integration, it is significantly important for your business to take these following tips into account.

1. Focus on Segmentation and Personalization

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Segmentation enables your business to deeply understand the needs, interests, and preferences of your subgroup audience. Consequently, it drives your online marketing efforts to become more relevant and effective over time, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates. By focusing on this aspect, you can create more personalized marketing campaigns by using email as a communicative means to deliver your tailored messages to your target audience as desired.

2. Optimize for Mobile Devices

As you can see, the daily use of mobile devices tends to evolve more and more nowadays. Due to this mounting practice, it is crucial that your emails be well-optimized for massive groups of mobile viewers. In order to apply it to your online marketing, you may utilize a responsive email design to make your email readable through different screen sizes. Also, you may keep your content concise and scannable by using easy-to-read formats, such as bullet points and short paragraphs.

3. Create Captivating Subject Lines

When creating an email, one of the most imperative parts that will catch the audience’s attention at their first sight is the subject line. In other words, when it comes to email marketing, a well-crafted subject line can make all the difference in whether the audience will choose to read your email or not. By mastering this, you need to critically bear in mind which styles of texts can captivate readers the most. For example, you may create catchy subject lines that stimulate a sense of curiosity and urgency to open such an email right away at that moment.

4. Deliver Right Emails at the Right Time

Right timing is what clearly influences the potential of achieving more open rates through the audience’s interests. In this case, if you consider your target audience’s behaviors, preferences, and time zones, you will be able to figure out the optimal time when your arrays of audience are most active. As a result, your delivered email tends to be more open and interactive, leading to a wider range of engagement. However, it is vital to note that too many times of email sending can negatively lead to subscriber fatigue, which is totally harmful for your marketing outlook.

5. Emphasize Automated Campaigns

Notably, automation is essential in terms of its consistency and convenience for online marketers. To make it clear, by adopting automation to your email marketing strategy, you will experience a time-saving and systematic process while creating personalized email campaigns. This means you can spend the majority of your time in creating newly intriguing content and planning other marketing strategies. Meanwhile, you can also run your email marketing performance with a systematically predetermined timeline, ensuring the static and consistent time your subscribers receive their emails.

6. Provide Values with Clear Call to Action (CTA)

For content creation in online marketing, offering valuable content to your subscribers is always a must! Consumable contents drawing the audience’s interests may involve informative articles, exclusive offers, helpful tips, and so on. Remember, it is even more effective to provide valuable content that truly builds relationships with your audience rather than just selling your products or services to them. Plus, always don’t forget to clearly shed light upon your determined call to action prior to sending emails to your audience.

7. Check for Junk and Spam Scores

In essence, checking for junk, as well as spam scores is also crucial. It helps your business ensure that delivered emails are actually reached to your audience’s inbox in lieu of being flagged as undesirable spam. High spam scores can potentially result in poor deliverability, affecting your reputation and reducing engagement with your emails. By monitoring and improving your spam scores as usual, you can promote the chances of your emails being seen and opened by your intended recipients, significantly leveraging the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns in the long run.

8. Monitor and Analyze Metrics

After running your email marketing practice, another important task you ought to do is to track key metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, and forward rates in order to insightfully understand the overall effectiveness of your campaigns. These observed data can help your business make a sound decision and fulfill the niche of your marketing strategies.

Conclusion

To sum up all, email marketing is another online marketing complement, leveraging businesses to achieve positive outlooks through close relationships with groups of target audience. By upholding the use of email as your marketing tool, you can expand the possibilities of successful customer’s rapport, creating long-standing loyalty with a larger amount of revenue in the long run. As such, we could say that the power of email marketing can effectively bring about sustainability to your long-term marketing efforts.

Currently looking for a trusted partner strengthening your digital marketing practice? MarketingGuru is your all-in-one solution! Our gurus are eager to help your business accelerate the sustainable growth through comprehensive digital marketing services, taking your marketing efforts to new achievements. Contact us today for your upcoming success!

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Blogging Beyond Trends: A Necessity for Business Growth

For years, blogging has been broadly known as one of the most powerful components of a business’s digital marketing strategy. Owing to a wide range of benefits, a sound blogging content can effectively enhance the overall image of your business in many different aspects. In this article, we will take a look at the reasons why blogging is still a necessity for your business growth, together with some helpful tips on how to create your own blogging content.

Why Blogging Becomes a Necessity?

In particular, blogging is significantly vital for a business digital marketing strategy for various reasons:

1. Blogging Brings About SEO Benefits.

In fact, search engines like Google favor websites that update their content on a regular basis. Therefore, creating a blog is definitely the answer for this situation. You can achieve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits with blogging by publishing fresh, high-quality, and keyword-rich content as usual in order to leverage your website’s visibility in search engine results.

2. Blogging Helps Increase Website Traffic.

Website traffic refers to the number of visitors who land on a website, as well as the overall interactions they have, which can help measure the popularity and success of a particular website. Accordingly, intriguing blogs will attract visitors who are interested in your business. As such, if you regularly provide valuable blogging content, you will be able to drive traffic to your website with the increase of brand awareness.

3. Blogging Builds Loyalty and Trust.

By sharing explicit guidance and reliable information in your blogs, you can represent how professional you are when it comes to specific blogging topics. The more you provide practical and accurate sources of information, the more your business gains loyalty and trust among visitors in the long run.

4. Blogging Establishes Authority.

As mentioned earlier, blogging is a notable way that allows you to share your value and expertise towards a particular topic through a string of texts. While giving reliable information and insights, you can establish your business as a thought leader among all competitors within an industry.

5. Blogging Builds Relationships.

When it comes to building relationships, publishing a blog is exactly worth a shot to enhance the engagement with your audience. By responding to insightful feedback, you can express how much you value and care about your customer’s opinions, which can lead to further creation of more relevant and valuable content for them.

6. Blogging Encourages New Leads.

While including an intended call-to-action (CTA) in your blogging strategy, you can motivate your audience to pay attention and take further actions for your business. For example, they may sign up for new accounts, go through your other online platforms, or even making a purchase with your products.

7. Blogging is Cost-Effective.

Compared to traditional forms of marketing like advertising, blogging seems to be relatively inexpensive. As such, this can be an optimal approach for reaching your target audience, together with promoting your business without the undesirable waste of money.

Helpful Tips to Create Blogging Content for Your Business

  • Define Your Audience: Understand your target audience and figure out what topics are truly relevant and valuable to them.
  • Set Clear Goals: Determine and make well-planned goals on your desirable achievements with your blogs.
  • Conduct Keyword Research: Find out and identify relevant keywords and topics that your audience is frequently searching for in order to optimize your blogging content for search engines.
  • Create a Content Calendar: Plan your blog posts in advance to make sure that they are literally suitable and align with your marketing strategy.
  • Focus on Quality: Create high-quality with well-researched content that places value to your audience and signifies a sense of leading professionals among others in your industry.
  • Use Visuals: Add some attractive images, infographics, or videos to leverage your blogs to the next level of more engaging, interesting, and shareable styles. 
  • Promote Your Content: Share your blog posts on different social media platforms, email newsletters, and other channels to increase visibility, reaching a wider base of audience to your website.
  • Measure and Analyze: Track the performance of your blogging masterpieces after publishing by utilizing analytics tools in order to see what’s working and what should be improved more.
  • Stay Consistent: Publish your new blogs as frequently as you can to keep your website up-to-date and keep your audience’s mainstream relentless.

Final Thoughts

All in all, it goes without saying that blogging is, and has always been, a fundamental necessity for businesses of all sizes, especially when they involve digital marketing into their active marketing strategy. Blogs remarkably help escalate business growth to another level with a variety of sustainable results. Thus, businesses should take blogging’s importance into account and embrace its power for overall expected outcomes.

Now, it’s your turn to embark on a blog’s journey, and MarketingGuru is here to fully support your determination! Follow us and get comprehensive digital marketing advice from our gurus right away!

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SEO Checklist 2023 to boost your search ranking

SEO services are known as a hack for web owners.

MarketingGuru is a full-service digital marketing agency in Thailand that notably specializes in SEO services across regional and global companies.

We serve digital marketing services to clients from different industries and business experiences with measurable results. Over 50+ Clients are happy to contract with us because of the 200% of ROI.

However, organic keywords are not always key! From our expertise in SEO services, we will discuss Other crucial elements to be a top-search in Google ranking below.

  1. Improve website usability 

First of all, website architecture matters for either customers or Google easily navigate. Whereas, it is a first impression that influences visitors to stay on your site instead of clicking the red x button of a window without action. Unorganized themes and layouts evenly decrease their trust and credibility. 

Web owners may use Google Analytics and Google Console to track users’ behavior and what information they are looking for to drive digital marketing effectiveness. Also, you can keep your site accessibility and availability :

  • Make it crawlable to get detected by robots
  • Visual sitemaps to plan your page
  • Consistency, simplicity and accurate

  1. Check site speed 

Presently, Responsiveness is a big concern to be one of the ranking factors by Google and repeat business. Customers are prone to feel confused and frustrated and abandon your site if they are not able to see and connect with content quickly. Don’t make them wade through a slow experience! Keep Testing your site speed and check if it works well with any different devices, locations and operating systems.

Here are some tips to speed up your site

  • Use external CSS/JavaScript and code
  • Optimized graphics and video size 
  • Apply browser caching
  • Minimize an iframes

  1. Find your competitors

Our Digital Marketing agency helps clients to outstanding competitors by utilizing SEO services. These tools will bring analysis of competitors’ offerings, marketing strategies and target markets. Additionally, medium-tail or long-tail keywords entail support pages and compare what needs to be improved. Also, researching new ideas like relevant keywords in the same category. Though, be unique as a way of attracting potential customers.

  1. Assess your content, always

Content evaluation is of considerable importance whilst marketing algorithm updates are ever-changing. Content creators and Digital Marketing agencies need to follow and implement search rater’s guidelines. This assessment ensures that content resonates with your audience and provides solutions for customers’ pain points. Determine your content: Does it trustworthy and provide value to visitors from search engines viewpoints? Does it feed high-quality and up-to-date information?

Poor content can cause serious damage to your audience’s experiences besides bad design or slow page loading. Lots of advertisements or spammy links from other sites are not a bright idea either. As is known, SEO services facilitate users to find keywords that are relevant to your title and target. You can get the most out of those words to attract more traffic and engagement for free with When organic keywords optimization.

Common elements to create top-quality content:

  • Know keyword intent to increase conversion rate
  • Help the reader to navigate easier to find what they are headed
  • Verify what types of pages you want to display
  • Understand Google algorithms and make them brief, guided and accurate

Apart from content quality, meta-description quality should not be ignored.

  1. Link buildings

Regarding SEO services, off-page SEO is another of the most powerful search engines. specifically, it brings a huge traffic boost to your website directly. Considering, the core of off-page SEO is building backlinks. Your ranking depends on quality of the content rather than quantity. Although linking is contemporarily and competitive use the right tool such as LinkAssistant to source leads and search for potential links. Furthermore, utilisation of white hat techniques avoid the risk of penalty. Besides, natural links will fuel brand awareness.

301 and 302 redirects, for instance, have just deemed no harm to SEO because they can elevate PageRank and traffic efficiently. Especially, in the right place – visual content displayed on Facebook and Pinterest. Next, specify “Canonical URL “ to clog duplicate content and Google from index one of them.

  1. Create a robot.txt File

  1. Fix technical SEO issues

Keep in mind that having SEO issues without knowing it is a complete waste of money. We understand that nobody wants to lash out at the Digital Marketing budget due to labeled crawl equity in Google. As well as company ROI and marketing goals are blocked.

Perpetually check and update your site links that may indirectly cause a budget issue. Broken links, long redirect chains and redirect issues cease a crawler from visiting your website as they imply your content is low quality. Such links damage bounce rate, company reputation and relationship with Google. Again, Users may concerned about whether your company is reliable or not.

  1. Track and measure SEO KPIs

Finally, Key Performance Indicators for SEO are a basis for any marketing companies and agencies. It gauges their progress to make better decisions on campaigns. Moreover, remarkable outgrowth helps to maintain customer retention and perceived value.

Google Analytics and Google console even more improve ability and provide insight from CTR (click-through rate), conversion on your landing page and customer engagement. Which is difficult to measure. Use analysis on keyword performance to have a deeper understanding of marketing projects.

  • Traffic
  • Backlinks
  • Conversions

MarketingGuru digital marketing agency is ready to professionally enhance your web ranking to be a top search in Thailand!

We provide free consulting for full-stop marketing services in Thailand, Contact us today!

24 Essential Digital Marketing Terms To Know in 2020

Every industry comes with its own jargons and digital marketing is the same. Knowing at least some of the marketing terms will help you work and collaborate with others much more efficiently.

We’ve separated the marketing terms into categories:

  • Broad Digital Marketing Terms
  • Metric-related Marketing Terms
  • Operational Marketing Terms
  • Sales funnel Terms
  • Website Strategy Terms

Broad Digital Marketing Terms

1. Brand awareness

Brand awareness is the degree to which people will be able to recall and recognize your brand. Therefore, brand awareness largely depends on brand recall and recognition of your consumers.

Brand recall is the extent of how closely connected your brand is to a product. 

Brand recognition is the extent of whether consumers will be able to recognize a brand through its attributes.

Generally speaking, brand awareness involves a situation where your customers will be able to see your brand and know of the solution that you can provide for them.

2. Buyer persona

Buyer persona is one of the most common marketing terms. They are basically a representation of your ideal customers. The information usually included in a buyer persona are demographics, psychographics, lifestyle and, sometimes, their role in a company. The more in-depth of a description you can provide of your buyer persona, the better because your buyer persona will help brands understand the motivations of their customers.

3. Digital marketing

This refers to any form of online communication aimed towards persuading people to buy a product or service.

4. Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on the customer. Usually, this focuses on the most ideal customer to a business instead of simply showing marketing messages to simply anyone. This can be done through various strategies, from social media marketing to blogging. As a result, you will be able to attract the right customers to your company which also helps with long-term scaling with better ROI.

5. Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is a process that educates and builds trust between your business and your prospects to help guide them down the sales funnel. This involves providing personalized experiences to your prospects and converting them into customers.

6. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Often confused with SEO, SEM is the process that is aimed towards increasing your website traffic through paid ads on search engines. One example of this is by using Google Ads.

7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a free digital marketing channel that takes a lot of time and effort that is all about pushing your website to the first page of search engine results where more people will be able to see and enter your website.

Metric-related Marketing Terms

8. Churn rate

Churn rate is one of the many marketing terms used to measure customer retention and contributes to the recurring revenue of the company. It also identifies the number of customers that a company loses within a given time period.

9. Cost per lead

Cost per lead is how much you spend on acquiring leads and it is also quite related to Customer Acquisition Cost which can be easily found in paid advertising channels.

10. Customer acquisition

Customer acquisition is related to the resources and processes involved in attracting new customers. This is related to brand awareness, lead generation and nurturing.

11. Customer acquisition cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the cost related to turning leads into a customer. In order to calculate CAC, you have to divide the money spent on attracting customers with the number of customers acquired in the time period that the money was spent.

12. Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a predicted amount of net profit that can be acquired from one customer over the course of your business. Therefore, if you can increase your CLV, you will be able to increase the value of each customer. CLV is calculated by subtracting customer revenue with gross margin and dividing that number with your churn rate.

13. Growth marketing

Growth marketing is a marketing process that involves designing and experimenting. The purpose of this is to optimize and improve the results of a target area. As a result, growth marketing can help you achieve growth in your business.

14. Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used as part of tracking the progress of a character towards a marketing goal. By setting your KPIs, you will be able to evaluate your business’ performance and optimize your marketing strategies.

Operational Marketing Terms

15. Content Management System (CMS)

A Content Management System (CMS) is a software tool that helps marketers and content creators organize and manage, as well as track their performance on the website content.

Some popular CMS examples are HootSuite, SproutSocial and Buffer.

16. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a software used as a contact database mainly used in sales. It helps to identify insights and provide analytics to the business. However, its main feature is the ability to store contact information to help salespeople track their interactions with stakeholders.

Some popular softwares are HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho.

17. Marketing automation

Marketing automation is a software designed to automate marketing tasks. It is all about nurturing leads along their customer journey by leveraging content to address your customer’s needs depending on which stage they are in. In short, you are catering content to your prospects based on their behavior which is more powerful than simply sending out emails to everyone. As a result, marketing automation will elevate the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

Sales Funnel Terms

18. Top of the funnel (ToFu)

The funnel shows how you turn prospects into customers.

The top of the funnel (ToFu) refers to the first stage of the buyer’s process. At this stage, the buyer is aware of a problem and, as a result, they are actively looking for a solution. They will likely consume informational or educational content such as reading a blog or watching a video. You want to have your visitors take the desired step to move down the funnel.

19. Middle of the funnel (MoFu)

The middle of the funnel is the middle stage of a prospect’s buying process. They will have identified their problem, are still actively looking for a solution and consuming content that can present your business as the solution. This is also where responsibilities move from marketing to sales.

20. Bottom of the funnel (BoFu)

The bottom of the funnel is the last stage of a buyer’s process. It is also when the buyer has identified a problem, done their research and is ready to buy. Here, buyers will usually request a free demo or a free consultation and are beginning to talk with a salesperson.

Website Strategy Terms

21. A/B split testing

A/B split test is an experiment comparing 2 variables. Specifically, it does this by presenting it to a randomly split audience and comparing the results over time.

22. Conversion rate optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a method used to increase the number of conversions on a webpage without having to bring in more web traffic. In any case, CRO is a method you should go with if you’d like to make the most of your marketing efforts.

23. Landing page

A landing page is a web page used for lead generation. In addition to this, the more optimized a landing page is, the more likely that your website visitors will turn into leads.

24. Thank you page

Once customers submit information on a landing page, they are usually redirected to a thank you page. Its purpose is to thank them for the submission as well as providing more steps that they can take with your business. These help to immediately nurture your leads and provide better customer experience.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is filled with jargons, therefore, learning these terminologies will help you understand more about this topic and optimize your marketing efforts. Ultimately, we hope you have gained some great knowledge from this article!

If you are interested in including or developing your marketing strategy, let our experts at Marketing Guru help you! Get your free consultation today.

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How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners | 2020 Guide

Passive income. Most people who strive for passive income initially achieve it using affiliate marketing. You may be wondering about how to start affiliate marketing on your own or as a side income for your business. 

The idea of affiliate marketing is to promote other people’s products. It is usually with the help of affiliate marketing programs or networks. You typically earn a percentage of those products sold through your marketing as part of revenue sharing. 

As defined by Shopify, “Affiliate marketing is an online sales tactic that lets a product owner increase sales by allowing others targeting the same audience—“affiliates”—to earn a commission by recommending the product to others. At the same time, it makes it possible for affiliates to earn money on product sales without creating products of their own.”

There are 4 different parties involved in the process of affiliate marketing: the product creator (or the merchant), the affiliate network, the marketer, and the customer. It allows for both product creators and product marketers to receive a share of revenues in accord with their contribution.

The Merchant

The Merchant, also known as the product creator, or the brand. These people are the ones who create the product for selling and can range from big corporations to small businesses. As long as they have a product to sell, they are the merchant.

The Affiliate

Similar to the Merchant, this party can be big as well as small companies. They can earn from a few hundreds of dollars to thousands or millions a month.

They are the ones who do the marketing to attract and, essentially recommending the products to potential customers. This marketing effort is all in hopes that the customers will end up buying the product through our link or using our code, usually for an extra discount. It can also be in the form of an entire site dedicated to certain products.

One of the most popular affiliate network sites is This is why I’m broke.

The Consumer

This is the customer, they are the ones who allow the affiliate system to run. Without customers, there will be no sales for the Merchant. Neither will the affiliate receive any commissions.

The affiliates are ones who market their products to the consumer however they see fit. Some examples are through social media, content marketing, or even digital billboards. 

The Network

Not many people consider the network as part of affiliate marketing. However, it is still an essential part of affiliate marketing programs. There is an intermediary between the affiliate and the merchant.

Affiliate networks such as Commission Junction or ClickBank will help the affiliate marketing process much easier by handling the payment and product delivery.

Depending on the product, the affiliates may be required to enter the affiliate network as some products may not be available elsewhere for affiliates to enter.

To summarize, you can become either a merchant or an affiliate marketer. 

If you were to become a merchant, you can have others promoting your product. This promotion is in exchange for giving others a commission for their sales.

If you were to become an affiliate marketer, you can choose one or more products to promote. Then, you can market them to consumers to make money.

For today, we will be discussing how to become an affiliate marketer.

For Merchants: How To Start Affiliate Marketing

If you want to be a merchant, you will have to create affiliate marketing programs. You will be selling your product with the help of affiliates. This can be done in 4 steps. Keep in mind that these are not easy, but many people have already achieved it.

  1. Come Up with a Product Idea
  2. Validate Your Product Idea
  3. Create Your Product
  4. Become Part of an Affiliate Network

Step One: Come Up with a Product Idea

This step is most likely the easiest among all the other ones. Your idea does not have to be completely original. Rather, innovate from something that already exists. 

Think of how to make a product you are already using better. This should be within the field of your own interest. However, do not get too attached to your idea. Stay flexible to make sure that you can adapt to what consumers want out of your product.

Reading reviews of those products are extremely helpful in coming up with those ideas.

Always ask yourself, will people pay for this idea?

This leads us to the next step…

Step Two: Validate Your Product Idea

This step is essential to making sure you can actually obtain sales. It will help you save time, money and effort. 

Now, to really make sure that people would be willing to buy your product, simply ask them. 

Be specific and make sure that you are asking if they want to buy your product because, most of the time, people will likely say that they like something just for the sake of being nice. While it is perfectly alright to be nice, we need a surefire answer in order to make sure that your product idea is good enough that people will see the value in buying it.

You can ask your friends or strangers on various social media. Make sure that you are asking people who are related to the product!

For example, if you are interested in selling a step-by-step guide to starting a small business, you can ask people who have commented or tweeted about a blog related to entrepreneurial ventures. Send out plenty to make sure you have enough people in your for the rest of this step.

If most people replied that they would not buy this product idea, take into account their feedback. What other comments did they make? Is there a way for you to improve upon this idea? Either develop your current ideas or pick a new one and repeat the steps above.

After a good number of people have replied with a yes, the next step is to answer those replies. Provide a link for them to buy, and that once a certain number of people buy it (let’s say 5 ), you will create it.

The reason for this is to confirm that people actually want your product idea enough to spend their money on it. 

Once enough people have bought your idea, it is time to start making the product.

Step Three: Create Your Product

Depending on your product idea, this step will vary. One of the best ways to create any product is to first learn how to do it.

Let’s say you will be selling an online course, there are plenty of resources online that can teach you how to do it. So learning these are a great starting point for you. 

Digital products are probably the easier ones to create without too much financial investment needed. 

Step Four: Become Part of an Affiliate Network

If you are selling a digital product, tools like Digital Product Delivery or Gumroad can be very easily set up as these platforms will already take care of the commission process and other payments.

Next, search for and reach out to other merchants who have a decent following within your products’ niche to promote it. This can easily be done with some simple social media and google search.

Depending on how niche your product is, the easier it will be to pitch to other merchants.You will want to contact them by simply introducing yourself, your product, and asking them to partner together for a shared revenue.

Side note: For digital products, affiliate commissions are usually 50% or even higher. This is because there is no cost of replication. Everyone wins from the revenue share, therefore, there is no need to be greedy on this.

Start from trying to get at least one partner first, you can work out the commissions and details later. Just make sure you get started.

Another route to start affiliate marketing for beginners is to become an affiliate marketer yourself.

For Affiliate Marketers: How To Start Affiliate Marketing

It is much easier to start out by building enough traffic on your marketing channels first before actually selling. 

Below, we will be describing the 4 total steps you can use to start out with affiliate marketing. Keep in mind that this is just one way you can go about affiliate marketing and there are other ways as well. Here are the 4 steps:

  1. Pick a niche and review products
  2. Building an email list
  3. Live Webinars
  4. Pay Per Click Advertising

Step One: Pick a niche and review products

Think of the product you are already using in your day-to-day life. Is there one you are particularly interested in? 

This could be a book, a kitchen gadget, or hair styling tools. 

You can look around for the exact product or something similar in affiliate marketing networks. 

One of the places with a wide variety of products is Amazon Associates.

Make sure that your product recommendations are genuine and authentic, that way people will not be thinking that you are just trying to make some quick money off of your audience.

When writing blog reviews, you can use affiliate links. Affiliate links are the links to the products you are recommending. They usually follow a regular URL with “/ref…” at the end.

However, as you can see, relying on other people would require a large amount of traffic to actually make a good amount of money. This leads us to step two.

Step Two: Building an email list

Email marketing is still one of the best channels these days. It is also a great way to start affiliate marketing for beginners. Here are 3 ways you can do this on your website.

Header Bar

A tool we recommend is Hello Bar.

This will put up a call to action at the very top of your website. Offering an incentive such as an ebook that includes your product reviews or sending your audience to an email of the product review video will help as part of your marketing strategy.

Exit Intent Pop-up 

Hello Bar can also be used for this.

An exit intent pop-up will show up on the screen when visitors show signs of leaving your website such as moving the mouse towards the “X” button. You can use it as a way to offer some kind of resource your audience will be interested in as an exchange for their email.

Sidebar Widget

When it comes to sidebars, affiliate marketers must make sure that the ones on their website are not overly cluttered. Having only one call to action is enough. This should also provide some kind of value to your audience in exchange for their emails.

Some tips in affiliate marketing for beginners are to send your audience an update once a week. It is important to not make all of your emails about sales. Only when you create a new product-reviewing post.

Step Three: Live Webinars

This step can be done once you have gathered a few contacts.

These are much more engaging content that is very helpful in higher ticket items. Your audience are likely to prefer watching a live presentation much more than reading a blog review.

LeadPages is a popular tool that you can use to create a simple landing page for your audience to sign up for your webinar. Don’t forget to promote it on your social media to inform your followers one  week ahead of the event!

These can be hosted on Google Hangouts for free or on Zoom as well.

Use this opportunity to talk all about your product as well as answering your audiences’ questions about it. 

If you can get your merchant to provide you with a deal or bundle especially for your audience, it will serve as a great incentive for people to buy.

Step Four: Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Once your affiliate marketing starts to take off, it is time to move up to paid advertising.

Although this can be a bit of a learning curve, your affiliate marketing business can scale much more with this step. You can use PPC to:

  • Grow your email list
  • Grow your sales
  • Get more people to sign up for your webinars

When more people sign up for your email list, you will be able to market to them again. This will grow your chances of sales because they have shown interest in your content and are more likely to trust your recommendations.

An efficient and time-saving method of email marketing is to set up your own autoresponder that markets to your email list in an email sequence. There are various tools to help you with this, one we recommend is MailChimp.

Conclusion

To sum up how to start affiliate marketing, there are two paths that you can choose. As a merchant or as an affiliate. Although becoming an affiliate is somewhat of an easier path compared to merchants. The two routes are equally worthwhile. It all depends on your preference as well as your current knowledge.  

As this guide is about affiliate marketing for beginners, we hope this step-by-step process has been helpful! Now go out there and make it happen.

If you own a business or are currently looking for ways to increase your sales, let Marketing Guru help you. Get a free consultation for your digital marketing strategy today! Contact us here.

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5 Influencer Marketing Trends That Your Business Should Use in 2020

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The social media marketing game is huge and has grown to the level where brands engage social media influencers to help their brands gain awareness and attract new customers. This is why it is important to be aware of the influencer marketing trends.

Influencers’ have reach and yields that are not to be underestimated. With social media playing a pivotal role in many people’s lives, it is no surprise that influencer marketing – a once supplementary marketing strategy, has grown to become a primary strategy employed by the biggest companies in the world.

What is Influencer Marketing?

You’ve probably heard of the term “influencers” on social media before. Influencer marketing is a collaboration between a brand and one of these influencers to market the brand’s product or service. The purpose of course is to tap on the influencers’ popularity to gain brand recognition and win customers from the influencers fanbase.

The question that you’ll probably then ask is “What difference is influencer marketing compared to using a celebrity?”. Influencers are different from celebrities in the sense that they can be anyone found on anywhere. They don’t have to be popular movie stars or A-list personalities. It could be a reputable journalist, a respected designer in the fashion industry or anyone in any industry really. What makes them an influencer is the following and reputation that they have because this is what gives them influence. They are known people or experts in their own domain and hence, this makes the content that they share the most engaging and noteworthy. Thus, businesses in their domains will look to reach out to use their influence on the particular demographic that they are targeting.

The Influencer Marketing Industry

Influencer marketing has grown into a $15 billion industry. Despite the problems faced by this industry, such as influencers with fake followers, it is still an industry that continues to grow rapidly. This can be attributed to consumer trends and behavior such as, 74% of consumers trusting social networks when making a purchase decision. Influencer marketing also has shown significantly high returns on investment for businesses with the average influencer marketing campaign earning $6.50 for every dollar spent.

While it is important to grow your business through digital channels like SEO, the influencer marketing industry is definitely a good alternative mean. The figures mentioned above should allow you to grasp how this industry is able to grow into an industry with the magnitude it has today. It should also very likely kindle your interest in trying to grow your business through such a channel. To help you in your influencer marketing journey, here are some trends that your business should look out for in influencer marketing for 2020.

Trend #1: Use of Micro-Influencers

When engaging in influencer marketing, typically businesses would want to be as cost-effective as possible. This means getting the most value out of the money spent on engaging these influencers. At the same time, businesses would require the meeting of certain KPIs like engagement, conversions and leads generated when utilizing influencer marketing.

This brings about the struggle of what is the appropriate kind of influencer to pick. Influencers can be categorized into three different categories: nano, micro, and macro-influencers. Nano and micro refer to the influencers with smaller reach – in the range of 1,000 to 100,000 followers.

Now, your first reaction is probably that nano and micro-influencers probably won’t get you enough traffic and awareness that your business is looking for as they could only get you 100,000 followers, at best. But, do bear in mind that costs for engaging in influencers are not cheap. Engaging influencers usually cost in the range of $10 – $25 per thousand followers for a post. Below is an influencer engagement pricing chart did up by Influence.co. You can see that the rates scale exponentially when it goes into the macro/mega-influencer range.

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Average Sponsored Instagram Post Rates by Influencer.co

 If your business operates in a niche field that the micro-influencer is actively involved in or has a follower base that may have interest in, it may be more cost-effective for you to use these smaller influencers. This is because consumers these days desire engagement with the brand and it has been proven that engagement rates are higher with micro-influencers who have an engagement rate of 3.6% compared to macro-influencers’ 1.5%. Higher and more genuine engagement is also more likely to help translate the extra reach you’re getting into sales.

Engagement Rates Among the Different Influencer Categories (Source; Later.com)

Trend #2: Emerging Alternative Influencer Marketing Platforms

Typically when engaging in influencer marketing, you would think of Instagram as the undisputed king of influencer marketing and that is probably still true today. However, there are other platforms that are starting to emerge as major channels in influencer marketing.

Tik Tok, a short-form video social platform has seen a sudden growth over the past year, amassing 2 billion total app downloads. Its young user base – 66% of them under 30 years old, has allowed it to be a platform that is suitable for businesses targeting the younger age demographics. Major brands like RedBull have also engaged in smaller Tik Tok influencers. RedBull hired KeeOh, a Tik Tok content creator with 5,000 followers to create a funny short video involving their product, using humor to make the followers interested in its product. It is a perfect example of using smaller-scale influencers to gain cost-effective yields on TikTok by utilizing memorable content.

 Twitch, which is a video game streaming site, home to the best gamers and internet personalities, is also utilized by non-gaming related brands to advertise their products. For example, KFC has used one popular Twitch PUBG streamer’s (Dr. Lupo) channel to advertise their marketing campaign. This helps their brand be noticed by the viewers and create demand amongst them. Twitch’s platform, while primarily gaming related, also has streaming categories such as “Just Chatting” and “IRL”, allowing these streaming personalities to just stream live feeds of themselves hanging out and talking to viewers instead of playing games. The interactivity for influencers on these platforms with their audience is high because of the live chat in each streamer’s channel, which allows advertisers to also engage almost directly with the influencers’ audience.

These alternative platforms are definitely worth checking out as they may help businesses to be more specific in targeting and could prove to be more cost-effective in terms of gaining engagement and brand awareness.

Trend #3: Long Term Partnerships with Influencers

Another trend that will prove to be effective in 2020 for influencer marketing is long term partnerships with influencers. Brands are going to become more invested in influencer marketing and as such, they start to seek long-term partnerships with influencers instead of a one-time advertisement or endorsement.

Brands will start forming partnerships with influencers and engage them in the long run. This is useful as it creates more touchpoints for the brand with the influencers’ followers, allowing for more content to be produced. The result is a more cohesive campaign with a better brand recall among the influencer’s followers.

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GymShark’s long-term collaboration with Fitness Influencers helped them grew exponentially (Source)

One trend that will be useful to marketers in 2020 is to go beyond the series of influencers endorsed posts and have the influencers be involved in the products. Brands like GymShark were first to hop onto this strategy early on in their business. GymShark started off its marketing by sending out free samples of their workout clothing to influencers and eventually ended up collaborating with some of these influencers to create the influencers’ own line of products. The partnerships and collaboration with these influencers will help businesses to build a greater sense of trust and commitment toward the brand with their followers, resulting in long term benefits.

Trend #4: Using a Storytelling Approach

Generally in sales advertisements, companies tend to come up with catchy, memorable and short captions in order to ensure that its target audience is kept interested and that their attention is captured. In influencer marketing, however, it has become a trend for companies to do the opposite of the traditional advertising methods.

The use of an influencer would mean that businesses want to create a message that will resonate well with their followers. As such, the best way is to craft a story that details the influencer’s personal experience with their use of your products or services.

Instagram’s caption limit of 2,200 words has allowed influencers to write in detail their story and experience with using the endorsed product or service. Functions like Instagram Stories can also be utilized to craft a cohesive story regarding your brand.

Since followers of these influencers get a glimpse into their daily personal lives, they would be able to understand and see some of the struggles faced by these influencers. By showing how your company’s product or service helps these influencers solve some of the issues that they face or their personal experience with your product, their followers would be more sold and feel more involved with the product.

Trend #5: Utilizing Video Content

Video content in marketing is definitely hot with online marketers now with 87% of them using it. This is probably due to how video content gains on average, 135% more organic reach as compared to other forms of content.

This explains why it is essential to incorporate video content marketing into your influencer marketing campaign. Influencers are able to help you create an array of different video content, from product reviews to short-form stories, unboxing videos and even live streams

By creating content based around your product will allow these influencers to better promote your product and in the case of live streams, they can engage your target audience better as it allows for direct chatting with their followers. The result of these efforts is a greater appeal visually for your target audience.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a channel of marketing that should be tapped on due to the number of engagements and brand recognition you can create. These 5 trends on Influencer Marketing in 2020 should be able to help guide and give you an idea of how your influencer marketing campaign should be like.

You may wish to consult a digital marketing agency with these tips in mind to help you run your next influencer marketing campaign!

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The Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends in 2020 You MUST Know to Stay Competitive

The digital marketing landscape is one that is ever changing and constantly evolving. As the new decade starts, digital marketers must learn how to adapt and stay ahead of the curve in order to thrive in the competitive digital marketing landscape. We enter this new decade a smartphone obsessed society, with people spending an average of over 3 hours a day on their smartphones. This reliance on smartphone brings about opportunities and new ways digital marketers can explore to better reach their customers. In this article, we will discuss the quintessential trends for digital marketers to understand to succeed in the upcoming year.

1. Voice Search

“Alexa, where can I find the nearest Thai restaurant?”. Questions like these will become more common with people demanding more convenience from their smart devices. These voice enabled devices act as an assistant to help people in searching for products online.

Voice technology has already been a significant force in the search engine domain. Google announced in 2016 that 20% of the searches it has received have voice intent. This figure has grown to a predicted staggering 50% of searches in 2020.  Furthermore, it is predicted that by 2022, 40% of a surveyed population by Capgemini would prefer using a voice assistant as opposed to manual search.

There are actionable steps that us digital marketers can take to capitalize on the trend of voice assistants. Digital marketers can shift their focus of targeting shorter keywords to targeting long-tail keywords instead. This is important for targeting users of voice search because of the way they are likely to search for the things. For instance, users will search with full sentences when speaking. Like: “Can I find out what’s the best digital marketing agency in my area?” instead of typing “Best Digital Marketing Agency near me”. This would change up the game for digital marketers as they have to now look at more long tail keywords to target.

Additionally, there are companies like Jetson.ai that help businesses craft and transform their online marketplace into a fully voice search integrated one. Allowing consumers to buy from your site using only their voice. Below is a video of Jetson in action.

With these statistics showing the move of consumers to voice search and purchasing, capitalizing on voice technology with these tools and tips is paramount to a digital marketer’s success in 2020.

2. Diversifying Marketing on Social Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. These are the most renowned social media platforms that come to mind when people talk about social media marketing. However, what they fail to notice is the trend of companies seeking to do their marketing on other platforms and increasing their engagement by doing so.

Take for example: TikTok. TikTok is a social short-form mobile video platform where users can share their self-produced entertainment content. TikTok is a rising star in social media marketing, with an impressive download volume of 614 million in a single year, outmuscling established competitors like Instagram. TikTok’s growth can also be seen in its sudden growth in ad spending, growing 75 times from May 2019 to November 2019 in the span of only half a year.

Pinterest is also another emerging platform for companies to marketing their products, especially for companies that have females as their target demographic. Presently, Pinterest have a monthly active user base of over 300 million users, with 70% of these users being female. Pinterest is great for digital marketers to share their visual content, ideas and style inspiration.

In 2020, with these emerging alternative social media platforms, it is important for you as a digital marketer to keep up with the trends and appropriately use the different varieties of social media platform to effectively capture your target audience’s attention. Choose wisely and market smartly!

3. Personalized Marketing

Let’s face it, if you’re an online retailing site, you would be more than glad to have 15% of your visitors converting into customers. But the fact of the matter is that it is highly likely that you’re only going to see about 1 – 5% of your site’s traffic convert into customers. This most likely has got nothing to do with your marketing efforts being low quality or that your products are uninteresting.

The likely reason for why your visitors leave your site is probably because the messages they see on your website don’t resonate with them. To curb this issue and possibly boost conversions, you would have to make use of personalized marketing tools to ensure that your visitors needs are satisfied.

One very good example of a company that does personalization well are companies like Asos, End Clothing and Amazon. These companies make it a point to track your buying patterns and show things that you are likely to buy based on your cached buying and product viewing history. Additionally, they notify customers through e-mail on deals that they think are of interest to them. 

To make the best of this trend as a digital marketer, tools such as OptinMonster and Barilliance could help your company to create personalized exit intent pop-ups and even personalized floating headers to promote relevant deals and sales to customers that are deemed interested. By tapping on this trend of personalized marketing, you could bring your digital marketing game to the next level as well as see your conversion rates soar. With companies seeing a sales increase of over 50% after utilizing such personalized marketing tools.

Personalized marketing is the future and will become commonplace in the future of e-commerce and digital marketing. Mark our words.

4. Augmented Reality Content

The future of ecommerce is in augmented reality. Shoppers want to be able to experience and feel what an object looks like in their space or on them without even having to leave the house. The amount of convenience this could bring to them as well as enhance their shopping experience is insurmountable. 

AR being an upcoming trend is also backed by consumers’ sentiments as surveys have shown that 70% of consumers believing that AR could bring them benefits and 67% of media planners wanting AR in their digital marketing campaigns.

Presently, we are seeing furniture companies like IKEA implementing AR successfully into their online stores. Customers can use the AR function to see how a piece of furniture would look like in their living space! This helps to bring more trust and satisfaction in the consumer shopping experience. The level of immersion brought by AR can help to create a shopping experience that is hard for competitors not using it to replicate, helping your business appeal better to potential customers.

5. Automated Advertising Campaigns Optimization

AI and machine-learning are powerful tools that we as digital marketers should make full use of. There are algorithms designed to help ease our digital marketing journey by optimizing our online advertising campaign.

There are software out there like SmartyAds and SalesForce Marketing Cloud, that are able to help you with your online advertising. Automating tasks and processes such as the keyword bidding process to even helping with personalizing your emails to each client.

By acquiring the service of such software, you’ll free up valuable time as a digital marketer to do tasks that robots and algorithms can’t perform. Automation is the way to go in terms of making your digital marketing campaigns more effective in the future.

Still Can’t Figure Out How To Strategize in 2020?

Fret not! Our gurus at MarketingGuru are here to help your company with campaigns and digital marketing strategies. We have a team of creative and trendy gurus who are consistently in the know with regards to marketing trends. To find out more about our services you can head over to our site! As a full service digital marketing agency we are experts in not just SEO, but also in Social Media and Pay Per Click marketing as well.

You can get a FREE SEO AUDIT from our expert gurus by dropping in an email to us. We wish you all the very best in your 2020 marketing endeavours!

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12 Holiday Marketing Trends You Should Know as a Marketer

Tis’ the season to be selling! The holiday season is here again and companies are looking for opportunities to market their products to consumers who are more willing to spend because of the festive mood. 

To prepare you for the festive season, our gurus at MarketingGuru will be sharing with you 12 Christmas Marketing Trends and Campaigns that you need to know to greatly boost your holiday season business

1. 80% of Shoppers Stated Internet as the Greatest Influence for Purchase

Digital Marketing Influence for Consumer Purchase

Based on a survey conducted by WordStream, it was found that 8 in 10 shoppers in the holiday season cited the internet as their greatest influence for making a purchase.

If anything, this statistic proves how pivotal the use of online marketing is for the festive season. If you own a business, it is of paramount importance to optimize your website to gain exposure to the aforementioned 8 in 10 customers.

Find out more about how you can optimize your website to capture their attention from this article or get a FREE SEO audit courtesy of the gurus at MarketingGuru (Yes, we are playing Santa Claus right now!).

2. The Usage of Facebook/Instagram Stories for Holiday Marketing

Instagram Stories Usage for Holiday Marketing

Another important trend that should be remembered by marketers for holiday season marketing is the use of Facebook or Instagram stories as a tool for marketing their products.

Facebook’s 2019 Holiday Marketing Guide, highlighted how window shopping for products has seen  a shift to shopping through stories. Based on Facebook’s survey on consumers, 69% of people surveyed expressed that stories are a favorable way of helping them become familiar with new brands or services and 62% become more interested in brands or products after seeing them in stories. With these statistics, it has become very evident that the importance of marketing through Facebook or Instagram stories is high and that if your brand hasn’t already started utilizing these means of marketing, you’re missing out.

In case you’ve missed it, we have an article that helps guide you if you’re unaware of the potential mistakes that you may make when using Facebook for advertising. Hopefully this helps as you venture into Facebook and Instagram stories marketing.

3. Effectiveness of Email Marketing

Email Marketing Effectiveness for Holiday Season

As old-school as the notion of using emails to get to your customer may sound, the figures have shown that email marketing is still king during the holiday sales period. Klayvio’s research has shown that 27% of holiday spending during promotions like Black Friday and Cyber Monday comes as a result of email marketing. This is also further backed by how email has seen a higher conversion rate as opposed to organic searches and social media marketing. This just goes to show that as a smart marketer, you MUST capitalize on email marketing now to capture more of your audience. Time to start sending out these promotional emails to your customers!

4. Mobile: The go-to consumer purchase channel

Picture for Mobile Platform being the preferred holiday season channel

The smart phone is a very convenient way for consumers to access and shop on the internet. The World Advertising and Research Centre (WARC) has predicted that 72% of internet users will access the web solely via their smartphones by 2025. Hence, it is no surprise that mobile shopping dominates the holiday season as the preferred consumer purchase channel for online shopping.

Mobile purchases accounted for 54.3% of all visits to retail stores for Cyber Monday in 2018 and this amounted to $2.2 billion in sales. 66% of consumers also used their mobile devices to make purchase decisions during the holiday season.

What this means for marketers is that they must be able to ensure that their websites are mobile device friendly. This could be achieved by ensuring that your website has a responsive web design, which allows your website to fit a variety of screens of different sizes. It is important to invest in making your website mobile friendly, not just for the holiday seasons, as Google’s mobile-first index allows websites with a mobile version to be shown first. By making your site mobile friendly would help to optimize it for Google’s search engine.

5. Mobile Page Load Speed KILLS Conversion

Google Pagespeed

Statistics have shown that during the holiday season, a slow mobile page load speed could cause a drop of up to 20% conversion for every second of delay. Losing sales of such volume due to an unoptimized mobile site is costly to businesses looking to thrive in the holiday season. As such, marketers cannot just solely focus on promotions and forget about the basics of site performance!

Google Pagespeed Analytics Opportunities for SEO
Google PageSpeed Insights’ Analysis

One tip we could give for marketers looking to optimize their website for the holiday season is to run their domain URL through Google’s PageSpeed insights. This allows for them to receive a rating on a scale of 1 to 100 from Google of their website’s performance. An analysis of the causes and opportunities for increasing load speed of the mobile page will also be given when the website’s URL is tested. This should help in solving load speed issues and help to reduce such unnecessary losses.

6. Cyber Monday II: The Hidden Gem

Cyber Monday 2: Sales Opportunity Online Marketing

If you somehow have not prepared your business for Christmas season, fret not because there is a great opportunity that can still be tapped on for increased online sales. Introducing, Cyber Week II, the week where consumers flock online to treat themselves after the tens to hundreds of gift cards they received as Christmas gifts.

Cyber Week II starts on Christmas Day, with Cyber Monday being the Monday that follows it. During the 2017 holiday season, it was discovered that in the week after Christmas, consumers have an Average Order Value increase of 28% from Christmas week and the weeks before that.

With this, we hope that you are able to use this information to sustain and planning out your marketing campaigns for the holiday season, making it stretch past Christmas or if you have missed out on it, take advantage of the post holiday period!

7. The Impact of Personalization

Picture of Personalized Letter

In an Evergage report on personalization, 70% of surveyed marketers have said that personalization has a “strong” or “very strong” impact on their company advancing customer relationships. This trend is especially important in the holiday season when there will be a barrage of email or mobile marketing deals coming from different companies

To stand out from this barrage of holiday deals bombarded at consumers, marketers need to know how to personalize. An example of this could be to use the information on your customer’s browsing history on your site to send them appropriate deals regarding the products they have been looking for. This helps to capture their attention as your company provides them with what they need conveniently, making you stand out from the pack.

8. Retarget Your Customers

Customer Retargeting Online Marketing

Retargeting of customers is to target your customers who might have products from your site on your cart or browsed your website for a significant amount of time only to have bounced in the end. It is especially important to retarget your customers during the holiday seasons as certain products that may be of interest to these customers may be on sales during the holiday period.

SoftwareAdvice’s statistics on retargeting has shown that customers are 70% more likely to convert when retargeted with display ads. This statistic is further backed by how click-through rates of retargeted ads are 10x higher than the click-through rate of the initial display ad.

With so many customers being more receptive and impulsive to buying products during the holiday season, retargeting them would be appropriate, especially since there is a chance that the products they were interested in previously may be on sales.

9. Guide Your Consumers

Consumer Guide Online Marketing

Research from SearchEngineLand has shown that consumers want direction when shopping for gifts in the holiday season. Shoppers were 1.98 times more likely to be browsing a gift guide to find compelling ideas for gifts to their loved ones. This should not come as a surprise to anyone as it is a very common scenario to be out of ideas for gifting!

Marketers should come up with content like gift catalogues or ideas for their business’s products in the holiday season in order to give guidance and direction for these lost consumers, in turn creating higher conversion for their companies.

10. Secret Santa!

secret santa picture for online holiday marketing article
Secret Santa surprises. Christmas celebration in the office

Christmas season means a whole lot of Secret Santa and Gift Exchanges from consumers, be it within their family or the companies they work at. Usually these events have a specified budget such that the participants would know how much they would have to spend minimally.

What this means for marketers is that when optimizing your companies website to prepare for Christmas sales, you should focus on using meta tags, descriptions and alternate image texts that involve price points. Content like Secret Santa gift ideas and catalogues could also be created in order to drive higher traffic to your website during the period. This is affirmed by SearchEngineLand’s keyword research on Secret Santa during the holiday period, which shows that multiple of the top searched queries involved a price point.

11. Free over Fast

free shipping vector for online holiday marketing article
free shipping boy. vector illustration

While there may be an urgency for getting gifts in this holiday season, consumers still have a preference for free shipping over fast shipping during this period. In a survey by Etsy conducted for consumers for 6 major countries (China, France, Germany, Japan, UK and USA), at least 52% of the surveyed from each of these countries have expressed that they’d prefer free over fast shipping. This is further backed by how Comscore found that about 80% of the transactions made on desktop during the holiday season, included free shipping.

The implication of this for marketers in the holiday season is that they have to be able to set a threshold price for free shipping that is reasonable enough for consumers to want to spend that amount and for their company to not be losing money from providing the free shipping. Free shipping seems to be a qualifying factor for consumers to consider shopping from a company nowadays during the holiday season.

12. Local Search Presence

google my business banner for holiday online marketing article

Having your business listed in the Google local listing directory by using Google My Business is critical in the holiday period. Statistics have shown that 50% of users on mobile platforms have visited a store within one day of doing the local search during the holiday period.

Marketers must know to take advantage of this statistic by optimizing their websites such that shoppers looking for a local store via Google can easily find their website. This in turn will help in boosting the website’s SEO performance as well as increase traffic from people around the shops area.

Conclusion

And on the 12th day of Christmas, MarketingGuru gave to you, 12 top trends that you should know as a marketer. Now that you are equipped with this information, go out there and get those customers for your company this festive season!