Digital marketing is increasingly becoming the most cost-effective marketing medium for startups and small businesses, because for various reasons, i.e. low cost, maximum outreach, easy to execute, and quick to measure!
Some of the best digital marketing strategies recommended for local businesses include social media marketing, email marketing, and search engine optimization, or SEO. Aside from those, you should add new technologies into the mix.
2023 is the year that your business should start utilizing the best that business technology has to offer, for instance, if you are using WordPress at the backend, you must look for solutions that can increase WordPress loading speed.
With the fast-evolving digital trends, local businesses should keep up with the latest marketing strategies, especially those in digital marketing. In this article, you’ll learn the different ways to apply digital marketing to local businesses.
Here are some of the ways that you can effectively apply digital marketing to your business:
1- Artificial Intelligence: AI for Intuitive and Smart Marketing
Sometime in the future, artificial intelligence or AI would be a driving force for content creation, necessary communication, email personalization, product recommendations, and e-commerce transactions. AI marketing involves programming search and shopping rules to help understand human commands and behaviors. It allows marketers to identify consumers’ needs and wants quickly.
Here are the advantages of AI for local businesses:
- Leverage Existing Platforms – Attract local clients through improved user experience with prototyping web design before launching a local business website. It helps web design platforms create reliable, fast, and appealing websites that local businesses should possess.
- Data Collection and Analysis – When local businesses have easy access to statistical tools, customer behaviors and shopping patterns can be easily analyzed. In this way, they anticipate the needs and preferences of customers.
- Machine Learning – With the help of AI voice assistants, chatbots, and other machine learning algorithms, businesses can track customer habits, helping business owners determine the best digital marketing strategy, and make sound business decisions.
Netflix uses sophisticated AI technology to customize its suggestions based on its customer’s recently-played shows. You can find various uses for your local business; you only need to use your imagination and creativity. In 2020, you should use AI to do effectively reach out to your clients.
2- YouTube Commercials: Use the Power of Video Marketing
Youtube is one of the most popular video marketing platforms to date, and this kind of digital marketing strategy is not unusual. However, most business owners have not considered using YouTube Ads, which can also significantly impact sales as it directly captures your target audience.
YouTube commercials are instrumental in gaining paid traffic, which leverages the user’s search engine history with Google AI. The AI crafts your message to your audience, which is not as expensive as Google AdWords. It would mean more site traffic and a higher return of interest (ROI) for your local business.
To create your Youtube ad, you should make a high-definition video that talks about the highlights of your company. You can create a 5-second or 15-second video depending on your budget and message length. In 2020, try to take advantage of Youtube’s advertising platform.
3- Programmatic Advertising: Automate Buy and Sell Ads
Programmatic media marketing is the algorithmic real-time buying and selling of advertising space with the help of a software or computer program. Because of AI technology, you can automate the ad-buying process, which helps target more specific audiences, which is a focus of local businesses.
For instance, real-time bidding is a form of programmatic ad buying, which is fast and efficient. It means lower customer acquisition costs and higher conversions.
Here’s how you can kickstart your programmatic ad strategy:
- Treasure Customer Data – Remember that your customers’ information is gold. Programmatic media buying should be tied up with customer data or first-party data to create an effective digital marketing strategy. It enables local businesses to draw meaningful and relevant conclusions about different types of customers across multiple channels.
- Collect Customer Data – Collect consumer data from offline and online sources. For instance, you can ask for the email address of a customer after an in-store purchase or after a phone booking. A travel agent can request to get the client’s email address.
- Programmatic Video Advertising – It practices the use of bots to purchase ad space based on your set prerequisites. You, as the local advertiser, can set your budget, define your ideal audience, and provide easy access to your ads.
If you want to produce your local business’ ads quicker and more accurately, you should learn to automate with programmatic advertising in 2020.
4- AR and VR Marketing: Immersive Consumer Experience
Augmented reality or AR and virtual reality or VR have grown more prominent in local marketing businesses. VR is creating a virtual space or environment with the help of computer-generated simulation, giving users a more immersive shopping experience.
Consumers can feel like they’re inside a virtual area using VR devices such as Google Earth VR or Star Trek Holodeck. They can even feel like walking through your physical store with your VR. If they are in doubt that they want to visit your place, they can check out your VR mall.
AR simulates a part of a new world. It augments the real world with virtual images, like a customer being able to see what new furniture will look like when placed in a living room. It overlays the real environment with sounds, graphics, and smells.
Customers can try on certain products like lipsticks, eye shadows, dresses, and other apparel. AR will add a more personalized and immersive experience. It’s a simplified way of showing customers things without bulky products.
Local shops can use AR and VR to give them an edge over their competitors with huge digital displays and AR and VR devices that customers can use when exploring the store. You can integrate your AR with social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, with customers using them as filters.
Conclusion
Local businesses can benefit from digital marketing trends such as AI marketing, programmatic advertising, YouTube commercials, video marketing, and augmented and virtual reality. These trends can help transform your local business, allowing you to reach a more comprehensive and targeted audience and new prospects for the success of your local market.
