2020 Inbound Marketing Trends Your Small Business Can Use

Outbound marketing efforts are falling by the wayside for small businesses. Instead, a renewed focus is being directed toward inbound marketing strategies that create engagement and brand trust.

Fortunately, you don’t require the resources of a major corporation to utilise the most effective inbound marketing strategies for 2020. Here are some of the overarching inbound marketing trends and how your small business can use them.

SEO for Voice Search

Voice search is becoming more popular each year as people depend on their smartphones for on-the-go information. Compounded with the growing popularity of home assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, this trend is expected to continue.

SEO has been a hot topic for years now. Having an SEO strategy is essential when selling a business, looking for new investors, or trying to drive more traffic to your site. To optimise your content for voice search, you need to ensure that you have enough information about your business available online. Confirm that your address, contact information, and hours are up-to-date on your website. Claim your Google My Business page to enhance those efforts further.

The next step is to rephrase some of your content so that it’s answering a question by using long-tail keywords. When someone conducts a search by typing into Google, they often use broken grammar. For example, “best pizza restaurant,” whereas a voice search is typically phrased as a full sentence. In this case, the search might be, “what’s the best pizza restaurant near me?”

Not only will optimising this way help you with voice search, but it will also improve your chances at landing position zero on the SERP.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular in 2020. Videos are used by small businesses to deliver more information in less time, build engagement, and reach customers in personalised ways.

You can start by creating short videos that provide information relevant to your business or give a behind the scenes look. For example, a bakery might show a time-lapse of how they decorate a cake. Videos are shareable and can be repurposed in several ways.

Another method for using video marketing to your advantage is to host live social media streams. When you go live on Facebook or Instagram, you’re interacting with people in real-time. Additionally, going live sends a notification to your audience that overrides the tricky social media algorithms that cause small businesses so much grief. You can use these to stream events or even just to share information about holiday hours or what to expect from your business. The resulting boost will impact your static social media posts for hours afterwards as well.

Finally, using the new social media phenomenon, TikTok can help you reach a new audience and build a rapport with Gen Z.

Lifecycle Email Marketing

Email marketing is more challenging now than ever. That being said, it’s still an effective way to build a rapport and increase conversions. Lifecycle email marketing is the next level of this tried-and-true approach to inbound marketing.

Lifecycle email marketing uses AI and machine learning to hone in your messaging through hyper-segmentation. In layman’s terms, it focuses on where a single customer is within the sales funnel.

For example, you could have two potential customers who have yet to make their first purchase in very different stages of the process. One might abandon while browsing, while the other might abandon with items in the cart. By using lifecycle email marketing, you can remind people of what action they should be taking specific to where they are in the purchase process.

To use lifecycle email marketing, you’ll need an email CRM system that integrates with your website platform. Klayvio is a fantastic system for this purpose.

These three big inbound marketing trends for 2020 are great starting points for updating your small business marketing strategy. With the right tools and measurable goals, you’ll be able to take your business to the next level.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on what marketing trends you are engaging with this year. Drop us a comment below 🙂 Note: This post includes affiliate links which means that if you make a purchase, we will receive a small thank you commission at no additional cost to you. This does not impact our reviews and comparisons — we only recommend tools we have used extensively and love!

Originally published at https://www.optimiseandgrowonline.com.au on March 17, 2020.