As a small business owner, staying up to date on digital marketing trends is essential to staying competitive and maximizing your return on investment. In 2023, some of the top digital marketing trends for SMBs that will still be relevant to SMBs include key channels known from the past, but also channels of relatively recent emergence. Here’s a rundown of the top digital marketing trends for SMBs in 2023.
User-generated content: a safe bet
This is content generated by your customers, influencers or community members. In 2023, this type of content can be about people testing your products, recommending you or even including you in their listing. When you come across this type of content, don’t forget to repost it.
User Generated Content is among the top marketing trends for SMBs in 2023 because these content :
- Do not require any creative effort on your part
- Are very interesting
- Have an added value in the eyes of the public
- Strengthens the credibility and legitimacy of your SME
It’s not difficult to use UGC for your SME. Just try to encourage the creation of collaborative formats with your audience. Encourage them to talk about their feedback, testimonials, product tests, etc.
Influencer marketing for SMEs
It is not always easy to get a celebrity as an ambassador for your product or service. However, it is possible to get the ok from an influencer. Internet users rely on influencers to regularly get recommendations. So small business owners can use influencers as a channel to connect with an engaged audience that needs their products or services.
But you have to be picky and fussy in choosing influencers. Not all influencers have the same connection to the audience. Nor are they in the same niche. When you want to hire an influencer, consider their :
- Audience: how many people can you reach with your message?
- Engagement: the rate of interaction of fans with its publications?
- Relevance: Is their audience relevant to your business?
- Authenticity: is the influencer authentic?
You need to ask yourself what your product or service means to the influencer. Are they promoting something similar? These are questions you should ask yourself before signing an endorsement contract with an influencer.
Some small business owners will find niche influencers with a small but highly engaged audience a real gold mine. The one that will allow them to have exponential returns on investment.
Content marketing
There’s nothing like informative or entertaining content to engage and interact with users. Content marketing is on the rise.
Focus on original content
On the net, the algorithms privilege more and more the original contents. The ones that can’t be found anywhere else. This encourages entrepreneurs to implement real strategies to produce original content ideally on each social network and on their blog.
It is important to create original content on multiple social networks to multiply the points of contact with your audience. Users have different behaviors depending on the platform they are on. It is therefore your task to continuously adapt your content according to the platform. You need to ask yourself each time what your ideal customer is looking for on that social network. Avoid recycling silly content from one place on the web to another.
Don’t hesitate to use the advantages of social search. More and more people are searching directly on social media before consulting search engines. So keep publishing original content and improve yourself by watching your data.
Favour the short video format
The video, in this case the short one, is a content that you can exploit in the implementation of an effective digital marketing strategy. Whether it is on :
- YouTube Shorts.
- Instagram Reels.
- TikTok videos.
- Pinterest idea pins,
You can attract and retain customers with short videos. It is the most watched and sought after format across all platforms. To integrate short videos in your marketing strategy, you can rely on hot formats to attract audiences. These are short and very interactive contents like TikTok videos or insta-reels. With these videos, the user can scroll, click on links and sometimes even go directly to purchase.
This type of short video is very popular with Internet users. The algorithms of the different platforms often put forward this format as well. Favour this type of content to gain visibility and easily attract a large audience.
There is the second format: the cold format. This one is intended for the loyalty of the members of your community. It consists of Youtube videos, podcasts, blog articles, etc. This format complements the short videos. It is more passive in terms of consumption and provides more accurate and lasting information.
Once you’ve used short videos to grow your audience, you need to take out the cold format for retention. The mix of these two formats will help convert and retain your community members.
Generate traffic with SEO
The natural referencing will always be topical. It is very important to increase the visibility of a website. Several factors explain the rise of SEO:
- First of all, the awareness of many SMEs of the need to position themselves well in the results of search engines;
- Stronger competition in terms of paid ads;
- digital offers are increasingly developed in conjunction with physical points of sale
Improving the positioning of your web pages in search engine results is crucial for SMEs that want to generate traffic. This is even more important if the SME works thanks to Internet users’ requests. However, this channel requires time. It is therefore an investment whose results will not necessarily be immediately visible.
It is important to note that this list is far from exhaustive. Other digital marketing strategies may include email marketing, online advertising, etc.
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