10 Marketing Tips for  2020

Any industry that relies heavily on technology has major changes year after year. Marketing is one of those landscapes that changes so quickly, it’s challenging to keep up with the best practices. Here are 10 marketing tips to optimize your strategy this year, based on the latest trends:

1. Look for Opportunities to Diversify

Most marketing budgets today don’t allow businesses to pursue every distribution channel at once. You need to carefully select channels that are most likely to bring strong returns from your investment. So look for opportunities to diversify your strategy by first researching your audience. Identify niche sub-channels where you’re able to cut through the marketing noise, such as on YouTube, social media groups, etc. Then you can diversify your strategy knowing the payoff will be worth the investment.

2. Embrace Paid Social

86% of social marketers already use Facebook ads, and the platform’s advertising revenue continues to grow. Meanwhile paid advertising options have come up on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and elsewhere. Social media platforms are tweaking their algorithms, making it clear to brands that paid promotion is a must if you want to get visibility. If you want your social strategy to maintain or gain momentum, then embracing paid social is a must.

3. Focus On Your Existing Content

Most marketers today understand they need to produce large volumes of content to build a traffic base. They often focus on creating new content, overlooking the value in their existing assets. Pro marketing tip: if you want to keep up with today’s competitive markets, it’s important to use your current content to its fullest potential.For example, you can:

• Identify your most popular content and use these insights to inform future content you create.
• Update old content with new data, visuals, or perspective then republish for more reach.
• Repurpose old content as an infographic, video, slide deck, etc. You can also turn a series of blog posts into a ebook guide or report.

4. Nurture Brand Advocates

People look for recommendations from their peers to make purchase decisions. Your own customers are a powerful resource to help you reach new audiences and drive conversions. To make the most of your brand advocates, create campaigns to incentivize them to spread your message. Create an online community or offer rewards for referrals, for example. You can also create a branded hashtag and encourage audiences to use it.Audi once took advantage of a hashtag a fan created on Twitter called #WantanR8. They surprised the Twitter user by letting her drive an R8 for a day, then used the hashtag to promote the vehicle and offer more free rides to Twitter fans:

5. Constantly Optimize User Experience

Creating a message that speaks to your target audience is only the first step to success in online marketing. It doesn’t matter how great your content is, it won’t drive conversions without excellent website user experience (UX) to go with it.So make sure you’re constantly testing and optimizing UX to drive marketing goals. This includes improving site speed and navigation, ensuring your content is easy to consume on mobile devices, and more.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.