It’s important to know the digital marketing trends of 2022,As a business owner, you always want to stand out from the competition. But maybe you’re not sure where to start with all the material you find online.
“Don't be too bored to read till the end...This may be the right time to turn your business around and make it the best you ever wanted.”
1: Fix Your Listings
“Near me” searches are growing exponentially year over year on desktop. With the rise of voice search, they’ll be even more important. It’s estimated that 22% of voice searches are location-based.
If you haven’t done so already, make to claim your Google My Business profile. This is your most visible listing, since it will show up every time someone does a search for your business.
Want to get started fixing your listings? Check out Birdeye’s free listing scan which shows you how accurate your listings currently are on the Internet.
#2: Send Review Requests
Customers trust reviews. The more reviews you have, the better. That’s why it’s important to ask your customers to leave reviews. This is the kind of social proof that your customers trust.
To get the best results, make sure that you’re sending review requests via text and email. This makes the process easy for the customer. They don’t have to spend time looking for your business. All they have to do is click the link and write a review.
#3: Respond to Customer Reviews
Lots of business owners don’t respond to reviews. That’s a big mistake. A study by Harvard Business School showed that responding to reviews leads to a higher overall star rating.
But responding to reviews has multiple benefits. First of all, it helps you build loyalty with your customers. A simple “Thanks a ton, we hope we can see you soon!” can help leave a positive impression in the mind of your customers and encourage them to come back for more.
Plus, responding to reviews can help your business rank higher on search engines. Google has confirmed that responding to reviews helps your SEO.
#4: Implement Webchat to Your Website
Webchat works for businesses. We’ve seen customers like Rick Patterson of Pretty Handy Guys Handyman Services see results within the first month of implementing webchat.
Webchat works because it’s much more convenient than other communication channels: phone and email. These days, lots of people try to avoid phone calls whenever possible and emails are often ignored. Webchat offers the best of both worlds, convenience for the customer and a high chance that their question will get a response.
You might be wondering if it’s realistic for a small business to implement webchat onto its site. Chances are that you don’t have the resources to have a team on standby for customer chats. Luckily, you don’t need a full team.
A solution like Birdeye can make webchat easy for small businesses. Your customers will get an automated message when they ask a question through chat. You’ll be able to respond from your smartphone when you have the chance. It’s an easy way to turn more website visitors into customers.
#5: Text Your Customers
While customers are ignoring promotional material in their inboxes more than ever before, they still love texting. Text messages have an open rate of 98%.
So whether you want to advertise a sale or send, get a review, or send an appointment reminder, text messaging can help you. Just remember to include a strong CTA in order to motivate the customer to take the desired action (ex: “Leave us a review on Google!).
#6: Stay Active on Social Media
While you probably have a Facebook profile page already, make sure that you’re staying active on social media. These days, customers expect to see businesses active on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Though it’s true that Facebook does have a low reach for organic posts, customers now expect businesses to post regularly on social media. We’ve seen that a low-effort way to reach customers is by sharing positive reviews. After all, nobody can sell your business quite like your customer.
#7: Display Reviews on Your Website
Social media isn’t the only place where you can display your reviews. According to the Spiegel Research Center, displaying reviews can increase conversion by more than 360%.
Birdeye allows you to display reviews on your website. The Birdeye review feed pulls in reviews from all over the Internet, updating automatically. Your website visitors can immediately see the opinions of your happy customer.
#8: Make Your PPC Campaigns More Efficient
There’s one more area where social proof can help you: in your paid Google ads. If you’re running these ads already, consider Google seller ratings. These seller ratings allow you to display your overall star rating in your ads.
According to Google, adding seller ratings to your ads increases clickthrough rate by a stunning 17%.
Of course, there are a few requirements that you need to follow in order to run Google seller ratings. Here’s what you need:
At least 100 reviews collected in the last 12 months in the country you’re running ads in.
At least a 3.5 overall star rating
#9: Improve Customer Experience
Last but not least, take some steps to improve your customer experience. Remember, a delighted customer is happy to recommend your business to friends and family. The trick to creating more happy customers is by going through customer feedback and finding potential areas for improvement.
An easy way to gauge customer satisfaction is through net promoter score surveys. A net promoter score asks customers how likely they are to recommend a business to family and friends on a scale of 0-10.
You can also find areas of improvement by looking at your competitors’ reviews. Maybe your competitor is providing great customer service, and their customers are mentioning it in reviews. Paying close attention to these reviews helps you understand how you can improve your own business.
#10. Technical SEO [the easy kind]
The content side of SEO is supreme, but with the page experience update and mobile-first indexing of 2021 and the tools we have available today, there’s plenty you can do on your own in terms of technical SEO. If you’re unfamiliar, a new set of ranking factors called Core Web Vitals came out last year with the page experience update.
Core Web Vitals in plain English:
LCP (Largest contentful paint) = How long it takes the largest content asset on a page to load.
FID (First input delay) = How long it takes for your site to register a user’s first tap or click on your page.
CLS (Cumulative layout shift) = How stable the page is (i.e. are there any unexpected movements on the page like elements shifting around when you pinch/zoom/scroll, disruptive popups, etc.).
You can use Google Search Console to check your Core Web Vitals. Many of the recommendations for improving your Core Web Vitals will require a developer, but..
Here are some technical SEO optimizations for 2022 that you can do on your own:
Compress images using a free compressor tool (Tinypng.com is my absolute favorite).
Resize your images so they are not wider than the maximum column width of your site.
Implement comment moderation for your blog to prevent spammy links.
You can also use the free LOCALiQ website grader to identify more opportunities to improve your website’s technical and content SEO.
11. Use Facebook lead ads to collect zero-party data
Third-party cookies, which are in their final days, allow ad platforms to string lots of different data together into insights—both on your audience or to provide custom audiences to target—with respect to their hobbies, occupation, income, marital status, inner thoughts and more. Just kidding on that last one (but am I?).
And if you’re thinking hey, that sounds a lot like Facebook ad targeting options, you’re right.
This is information people give out in their public profiles and activity. And as such, Facebook lead ads—where the form can auto-populate based on the user’s profile, and where a user might feel more inclined to give out that information—are suddenly more appealing now.
When given directly by the user, it’s called zero-party data—the purest and most pristine data in all the land.
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