How Best to Deploy AI Tools for Affiliate Marketing

AI is still a relatively new technology, but it has the potential to revolutionize the affiliate marketing industry. Significantly, the technology deepens as the internet deepens. As AI continues to develop, smart marketers can always take advantage of it in even more innovative ways for affiliate marketing. Marketers can effectively use AI to create more personalized and targeted affiliate marketing campaigns, develop more effective chatbots that can answer customer questions and provide product recommendations. They can directly help to analyze data from affiliate marketing campaigns in real time with a view to identifying trends and optimizing campaigns for maximum results. This leads to a boost in lead generation and sales conversions which ultimately helps to boost the overall performance and good ROI on your affiliate marketing initiatives/strategies. If your AI tools are right, your affiliate marketing will be right.

To get your affiliate marketing right, you need the right AI tools. Even though there are very many AI tools out there on the internet, some of the most popular AI tools most affiliate marketers like to use are:

• Content Generation Tools: Every affiliate marketer needs good content for effective marketing. This is where content generation AI tools become relevant. These tools can be used to write blog posts, create social media posts, and develop email marketing campaigns. Content generation tools like Shortly AI, Jasper AI and Copy AI are hugely popular among affiliate marketers.
• Chatbots: Chatbots are smart automation tools affiliate marketers find very handy. These tools can be effectively used to automate customer service, answer questions, and provide product recommendations. Some of the popular Chatbot platforms with affiliate marketers include ManyChat, Chatfuel, and Drift.
• Data Analysis Tools: Affiliate marketers need data analysis tools to track conversions, measure ROI, and identify trends. Some of the most popular data analysis tools among marketers are Ahrefs, SEMrush and Google Analytics.

These tools can be of little help if you don’t do things right. In this wise, to get your affiliate marketing on the right track, it is good to:

Set Clear Marketing Goals: Without clear goals, it is difficult to know how well your marketing is doing at any point in time. Therefore, before you start using AI for affiliate marketing, it’s important to set your marketing goals very clearly. You must clearly define what you want to achieve with AI. Do you want to automate tasks, improve targeting, or generate more leads? These are questions your set goals must clearly address.
 
Choose the Right AI Tools: Even though there is a number of AI tools available out there on the internet, what is most important however is to choose the right ones that suit your needs. To do this correctly, you must factor in your marketing budget, your goals, and the features that are important to your needs.

Test, Re-Test and Learn: After setting clear goals and choosing the right AI tools, next is to start testing and learning to see how you can optimize your marketing campaigns for better results. In this quest, you can decide to experiment with different settings and strategies to see what works best for you, and then make the necessary adjustments for better results.

Exercise a Lot of Patience: Even though AI is a very powerful tool, it still takes quite a while to learn how to use it effectively. So, you should not expect to see great results overnight. You must therefore exercise a lot of patience to keep testing and learning as you market along.

Last Line

Presently, there is no gainsaying the fact that the future of AI in affiliate marketing is quite bright. As AI continues to develop, affiliate marketers will have access to more powerful and reliable tools that can help them automate tasks, improve targeting, and generate more leads and sales. Therefore, if you want to succeed very quickly in affiliate marketing, you can do well to adopt AI-powered tools to help you out. 

10 Reasons Your Business Needs a Website

You cannot do business successfully online without a strong online presence. These days, more and more people are shopping online, one of the reasons more people are taking their businesses online. Before buying any product/service online, a lot of web users prefer looking up online reviews about the product/service. The info they are looking for is usually found on the websites of the product/service merchants. This makes it imperative for every online business owner to have a website even if it is just an e-commerce store. Consumers spend considerable time online searching for suitable products/services and on online research. This considerable time is spent moving from one website to another. For this reason, no matter the size of your online business, it is hugely important to have a website. Discussed below are 10 reasons why having a website is extremely important for the growth and success of your online business.

1. Professional Look: Online, your website is your business window in the internet. That is where customers and potential customers first make contact with your online business. If the website you are running your business out of is well-designed and attractive to customers, it helps to give your business a more professional look. It also shows a sign of seriousness, authenticity, reliability and approachability.

2. Saves Customers’ Time: A website is usually helpful in providing all the relevant info about the products/services on sale. By doing so, it helps to save time considerably for customers since no customer prefers to move out of a store to make all kinds of purchases if such purchases can be made in one store. Many websites have features that sort and departmentalize products. This also helps customers to save time searching for the products they want on the website.  

3. Improves Credibility: No one does business in a vacuum particularly on the internet. So, if you have a website, it helps to improve the credibility of your business. Your website provides all the relevant info about your business, including easy contact information. With that, even as deep as the internet is and filled with many niche businesses, with many similar to yours, your website helps your business to have a marked and recognizable presence on the internet. It is not enough therefore to simply have a website. What is most important is to build a website that greatly enhances the credibility of your business online. Once your website is good, it creates a good impression in the minds of customers. That can be great for the credibility of your business.

4. Provides Social Proof: As more and more people shop online, most of these shoppers usually prefer to make their purchase decisions in consideration of the behavior of other customers. So, by having your own website and other official pages on different social media platforms, it helps to provide social proof to potential customers. Also, if your business can be successfully searched online with relevant keywords, that helps its social proof tremendously particularly if customer testimonials also come up in these searches.

5. Helps to Generate Leads: If you have a website, it helps to increase the potentials of the business to get leads. Web users may visit your website without making a purchase but could leave a contact for follow up. Customers who make purchases may leave positive reviews and feedback. Down the road, such reviews can help other customers to make a purchase from the website. A good website can help a business this way to generate leads and sales in unlimited manner.

6. Enhances Competition: Without a website, no business stands any chance to compete favorably on the internet. Your website helps to increase your chances of competing with other brands. It provides a fair platform to compete well with other brands. You can only benefit from organic traffic from search engines if they rank your website high enough. A high ranking website (well optimized though) means more organic traffic, more leads and more sales which can indeed trump your competition. Without a website, your business loses its ability to compete fairly and that means loss of business to its competition.

7. Showcases Brand Value: There is no better place online than a website for business owners to showcase their products/services. On a website, online business owners really represent what their brands stand for. Most customers expect a business to have a website and it is through the website a business can have its brand stand out to be counted. Whatever features business owners have on their websites like mission statements, logos, colors, graphics/photos that are unique to the website help its brand value.

8. Listing of Offers: There is no better place for an e-commerce store to list its products offers than its website. This is so because a website is the first interaction between a business and its customers. No smart marketer can therefore afford to neglect their business website. Many e-commerce stores habitually list different offers on their websites thereby helping to make shopping easy for customers. By providing offers on a website, it completely eliminates the need of using a third-party website to sell any product/service. It helps to make one-stop shopping available to shoppers.

9. Increases ROI: Marketers are always in business to make money. Keeping costs low and sales high is what helps to enhance the Return-On-Investment, ROI of a business. Building a responsive website costs very little including hosting. If you factor in the ROI, having a website proves to be extremely beneficial. Most of your marketing is done out of your website. It is the website that helps to bring both organic and inorganic traffic to your business and it generates leads and sales. That is how the business gets to earn income and when matched with the cost of setting up and running the website, the ROI is greatly enhanced.

10. Provides Help to Customers: Online shoppers are always in great hurry searching for solutions to their problems. That means interactions with websites and business owners which on their own create problems too. A well set out website always comes very handy to help customers/shoppers solve their problems. Business owners can deploy AI in form of chatbots on their websites to relate with and help customers round the clock. If customers don’t get satisfaction from chatbots, they can always leave their inquiries and or concerns on the website for the business owner to handle whenever they come online. The website remains available for these customers to return to later for answers to their inquiries.  

5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Directly Benefit your Business

Presently, Artificial Intelligence AI is readily one of the fastest-growing online technologies in the world. This is largely due to its versatility of use in many fields of human endeavor. Business owners now hugely depend on AI because of its proven capabilities to automate some business processes fully and some partially. AI directly helps businesses to stimulate growth and to stay competitive and that helps to increase its popularity among business owners. Behind this growing popularity is the efficiency of AI in helping to push businesses towards their optimum performance in growth rate and volume of business. AI helps businesses to make better operational decisions by automating many essential business processes and predictive analytics. This way, AI is presently directly responsible for changing the way businesses work and how business owners run their businesses.

Discussed below are some direct benefits of AI which entrepreneurs and small businesses in particular find especially useful.

1. Enhanced Cyber Security

If you do business online, no matter the size of the business, cyber-attacks are always a clear and present danger to the business. Daily, cyber criminals are becoming bolder and more and more sophisticated. What most of these criminals are usually after is to steal data, lock the data to ask for ransom, or to corrupt the data to simply ruin the business. If you run a small business online, a single cyber-attack is capable if wiping you out of business completely. That is why you need to have in place good cyber security measures to protect your business round the clock. This is exactly where AI comes in very handy. With AI, many cyber-attacks can be recognized, predicted, and countered in good time before they do any damage to your business. AI helps to automatically upgrade cyber security systems regularly to equip them with the capability to counter any attacks if and whenever they occur. AI can regularly scan system health by keeping watch on hardware and software systems to predict any kind of failures that might end up becoming the gateway for cyber attackers. That protection is round the clock 24/7.

2. Smarter Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Management is at times a complicated business activity which AI can help make simpler and smarter. Business owners now pair up modern supply chain management processes with AI for better efficiency. From smarter inventory management systems to smarter warehousing, tracking and shipping, AI is very handy throughout multiple stages of the supply chain. Many businesses do find use for AI in customer service to collect data related to target markets while others are applying AI algorithms to their handling and shipping processes. With the help of predictive analytics through AI, it has also become easier for many businesses to predict accurate delivery duration and deadlines.

3. Predicting Outcomes

AI helps business owners to make better operational decisions. If you want to make better operational decisions, it is crucial to take possible outcomes into account before making any decision at all. This is exactly where AI plays very crucial roles by way of machine learning. Machine learning using historical data can help in identifying possible outcomes of an operational step. With its smart algorithms, machine learning can use events that have already happened in the past as references to learn and compare patterns. That way, these algorithms can assist business owners to predict with fair accuracy, possible outcomes in the future.

4. Better Ads Targeting

Effective ads online are ads that are well targeted. AI helps business owners to better target ads for effectiveness. With AI, it becomes easier for businesses to reach the right users directly. In this era of digitization, AI is one of the ways of making better performing digital ad strategies. AI can suggest the right target markets, average internet speed, average user income, and more vital user information based on the quantitative data collected through different surveys and sources in the past. AI can also provide useful suggestions, including the right steps to take to make digital ads more effective. In addition, modern SEO techniques effectively use AI to filter the right content/blogs and display them on the first page of the SERPs of search engines. That translates to good organic traffic for the business. The icing on the cake is that AI algorithms get automatically updated regularly and are thus always equal to the task of helping businesses to develop the right growth strategies.

5. Business Cost Reduction

AI engenders better and more efficient business processes. That tells on the cost of operating a business. Anything that helps a business to save costs is crucial for its growth. For instance, using AI for customer service is one of the most efficient ways to reduce the costs of running the business. Some research evidence suggests that AI is capable of solving 70% of customer queries on its own if paired with chatbots. That hugely helps to reduce costs on customer service operations. The good thing is that when most chatbots are uploaded on cloud servers, they do not require regular maintenance. That together with their effectiveness in customer service greatly helps to reduce costs for a business. It goes to show that AI generally is a major key to reducing the overall costs of running a business online.

Summary

If well deployed, AI has proven to be one technology that is capable of helping small businesses to grow rapidly online. This it does by helping businesses to reduce their cost of operation as well as helping to bring the best out of the businesses. When that happens, growth is inevitable. AI also helps businesses to keep a close eye on evolving strategies/trends as well effectively spy on competition. When businesses manage to keep cost of operation low and evolve workable strategies, they grow faster. AI is hugely useful for that growth.

Effective Small Business Social Media Marketing Techniques

These days, irrespective your brand or industry, you cannot afford not to have social media as part of your small business marketing strategy. That is unless you want your small business to stagnate. As a marketer, depending on your experience, your brand and even your temperament, you have the option of using many marketing techniques for your marketing campaigns, but social media marketing should always be a sure choice. You have the option of exploring several social media marketing strategies among which are:

Influencer Marketing

If you have a massive following in your social media handles, you can become an influencer for brands. First, you must grow your audience to a reasonable size for it to be effective for influencer marketing. If you do not have that sort of following yet particularly on the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes, you can partner with micro-influencers to get your brand in front of your niche audiences. Most Micro-influencers tend to have 10-100 thousand followers and often come off as more relatable and approachable for partnership arrangements than the big celebrity influencers.

Messenger Marketing

If you need quick one-on-one messaging, you can use social messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, AI-powered chatbots and Skype. Feedback in instant and reliable and you can market any product/service through these messaging apps. Aside customer support and resolving customer problems instantly, messenger marketing is very effective using these apps. Through the instant messages, you make product/service suggestions to customers to help solve their problems. Promos, discounts and new products arrivals can be better announced using these instant messaging apps.

Employee Advocacy Programs

Smart marketers can deliberately turn their employees into extensions of their social media programs. That way, you can easily start an employee advocacy program. There are online platforms like GaggleAMP and Dynamic Signal that encourage employees to share content on their social network in exchange for points, prizes, and internal recognition. If your employees take advantage of these platforms to share your content on the platforms, a combination of their collective following in addition to yours can help give a much wider exposure to your marketing content than if you relied on yours alone. There is always a very big difference in the reach of your business through employee advocacy programs.

Organic Social Media Marketing

Do you know you can actually do practically anything and even advertise on social media for free? Great if you do! But, in case you don’t, be informed that you can do organic social media marketing for free just as other free social media activities. Some of these free activities include, publishing marketing content, publishing posts, commenting on articles/content, inviting users to like/share your page, engaging with reviews, and actively interacting in social media groups. Most marketers know that it is hugely challenging to grow a large and engaging following particularly on pay-to-play networks without spending money, but you can still do a great deal of marketing on social media without expending a dime. That is done by way of organic marketing.

 

Social Media Advertising

Many social media marketers find social media advertising intimidating, but it is incredibly lucrative if you know what you are doing.  Once you learn the ropes and do what is expected, getting the right results is a given. Through social media advertising, you get access to tons of metrics. Through such metrics, it is possible to know if the strategy you are using is earning you profits or helping you to make losses. Whichever it turns out, you can always at any time adjust your strategy to get the best results. The most result-oriented social media advertising you should be using at any point includes techniques like Facebook ads, sponsored posts, YouTube ads, and LinkedIn InMail.

Live Streaming

Live streaming is a great way to showcase your products and engage with your customers in a more personal way. Live streaming because it is real time, manages to turn talk-at-you marketing into back-and-forth mutually beneficial conversations. It still promises to get more personal as internet technology tends to deepen marketing activities by the day. Such experiences can make the difference between a one-off purchase and a life-long customer. Smart marketers always explore viable ways to Host a webinar or go behind the scenes of a product launch to build trust and relationships with the audience particularly through live streaming.

How to Use AI to Acquire and Retain Customers

Online marketers are increasingly relying on Artificial Intelligence, AI for problem-solving in their marketing activities. They do this by using AI powered aps some of which are voice-activated virtual assistants, auto responders, CTAs, customer service and retail and e-commerce automation. Online business owners now depend more and more on the power of AI and machine learning to significantly increase brand awareness, enhance customer engagement, improve user experience, meet customer expectations and to find solutions to even more complex business problems. 

 
Direct Marketing Benefits of AI

You can achieve many milestones in your online business which allow you to acquire new customers and retain existing ones if you do the following.

Use AI-powered social media tools to help you monitor and gain valuable insights about your brand.
Use AI to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy. That way, you can manage to create content that’s relevant to your target audience.
Integrate AI into your e-commerce site to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
Use AI to significantly improve your website user experience by making it intuitive, accessible, and easy to navigate.
Use AI to help you generate high-quality leads that are likely to buy your products and become customers.
Use AI to personalize and tailor-fit your product recommendations based on your customers’ preferences thereby increasing repeat purchases.

No matter the nature of your online business, it is possible for you to acquire and retain customers more efficiently than what it normally takes to get same things done manually. Here is what you need do.

Improve Your Website User Experience

As an online business owner, your business window into the internet world is your website. That is where visitors can interact with your brand, respond to your call-to-action, and to purchase products. To make these interactions smooth, it is important that visitors to the site have a great experience while navigating through the site. With AI, you can improve your website user experience several fold by way of personalized recommendations, search relevance and seamless customer service through AI chatbots. In particular, the presence of AI chatbots on your e-commerce website contributes to a great user experience on the site because they provide 24/7 assistance and support in the absence of human customer service.  They help users to get accurate answers to their inquiries more quickly and efficiently when compared to manually scrolling through text-based FAQs.

Evaluate the Performance of your Content

This you can do by using AI to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy. If you’ve been creating content for a while, by deploying AI, you can easily identify the gaps, find fixes, and evaluate the performance of your content marketing campaign. Even if you’re into retail or e-commerce business, you can use AI to identify the gaps in your content marketing. Your content may be directly focused on your products and their features, but through AI, you can better determine the relevant content that addresses your audience’s needs and pain points faster and more accurately.

Pre-Qualify Prospects and Leads

When your new leads are not converting into sales well enough, you can rectify the situation with the help of AI. If you have a bit of experience in online marketing, you’ll know when you’re not getting good sales despite the high traffic your website is receiving. If you are experiencing this, it could mean you are not taking some marketing actions correctly. It could mean your CTAs are ineffective, your content marketing strategy is poor, you are targeting the wrong audience, you are promoting your products through the wrong social media channels or you are using the wrong type of Sign-up form. With the help of AI tools, you can extract relevant data to help you learn more about your target audience. These tools also provide predictive analytics on your customers’ behavior. By using them efficiently, you can improve your lead generation strategy because they’ll help you to identify which leads to pursue, where to find them, and how to effectively engage them.

Cut Down on Cart Abandonment Rate

If you run an e-commerce business and you experience a high cart abandonment rate, it could mean certain things are just not right with some operations in your website. Many online shoppers may abandon their shopping carts because they’re not ready to buy yet, high extra costs, privacy concerns, complicated/cumbersome checkout process, privacy concerns and most commonly, not enough customer-friendly payment methods. AI-powered chatbots can come in handy to address these issues by diligently guiding customers through their shopping journey. AI chatbots can with smooth conversational approach give customers a nudge to prompt them to complete their purchase. They also act as a virtual shopping assistant or concierge that can let a customer know about an on-the-spot discount, a time-sensitive deal, a free shipping coupon, or any other incentives that will encourage them to complete the checkout. Even lost orders due to cart abandonment can be recovered with the help of AI. If AI does these for an e-commerce website, it can lead to an increase in conversion rate for the business.

Social Listening

Marketers can deploy AI for social listening for potential customers. This is simply a process in which AI can be used to analyze the conversations, trends, and buzz surrounding your brand across different social media platforms. Social listening effectively analyzes what’s usually behind the metrics and the numbers. It determines the social media sentiment about your brand and everything else relating to how people feel and relate to your brand. Such AI generated data/information you get through social listening can be used as a guide in your strategy to gain new customers. Without a doubt, getting this type of intricate data can constitute an enormous and very daunting task for human beings. AI helps out very nicely.

Increase Repurchases

Marketers can increase repurchases with predictive analytics made possible with the use of AI. Predictive analytics is the process of making predictions based on historical data using data mining, statistical modelling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other techniques. Through it, marketers can generate insights, forecast trends, and predict behaviors based on past and current data. Its practical use is when marketers rely on it to predict customers’ propensity to repurchase products as well as its frequency. When used to optimize marketing campaigns, AI-powered predictive analytics can generate customer response, increase repurchase, and promote cross-selling of relevant products. Predictive analytics helps marketers to focus their marketing resources on customer retention while targeting a highly motivated segment of their markets that may be happy to return and repurchase more products. This helps to save on ads costs for marketers. AI makes it possible.

Provide Personal Recommendations

Most online shoppers really value personalized marketing experiences. The reason brands are able to boost their sales when they tailor their recommendations based on consumer data. Recommendation systems’ algorithms typically rely on data on browsing history, pages visited, and previous purchases. Thus, smart AI can accurately analyze customers’ interactions with website content and find relevant products that will interest the individual customer. This is how AI makes it easier to target potential customers and effectively put the best products in front of the site visitors. With AI, recommendation engines are able to filter and customize product recommendations based on each customer’s preferences and correctly match the customers’ preferences with the right products. Because of this element of personalization, marketers can effectively acquire and retain customers with the help of AI.

8 Digital Mobile Marketing Trends To Look Out For in 2021 and Beyond

Resulting from the astronomical increase in the use of mobile devices worldwide, digital mobile marketing has also increased in popularity among enterprising digital marketers. Most of these marketers now have digital mobile marketing as very important components of their overall marketing strategies. With mobile devices now accounting for about half of web traffic worldwide, mobile marketing continues to grow in tandem. This trend is likely to continue in the coming years with even a predictable increase in popularity. That is exactly what experienced digital marketers are predicting. For digital marketers to stay current and competitive in the coming years therefore, they must effectively monitor and adapt to trends in mobile marketing. Going forward, no marketer can afford to ignore these, here eight trends.

1. Mobile-Based Content

Given the rising popularity of social media platforms particularly TikTok, there is a general expectation that we will see a rise in mobile-based content particularly in vertical video formats on mobile social media apps. Digital mobile marketing will thrive better with the creation of more online videos in the coming years. Videos are very popular with younger generations on social media. The exact same way mobile devices are popular with them. Now that this younger generation is growing into a significant market, marketers will need to connect more with them in their very popular hangouts, which is social media. That is the expected trend going forward.

2. Mobile-Optimized Content

Since more and more people are doing business from mobile devices, optimizing content for mobile devices will be in the upward trend. Every marketer needs quality content to grab consumers’ attention and produce conversions. Mobile marketers will be focusing more on putting out more high-quality content optimized for mobile, including interactive options to attract traffic. This trend is bound to continue.

3. Mobile Ads Automation

There has been a remarkable increase in the use of mobile devices in recent years. This trend has engendered a significant increase in the use of mobile apps. These apps have become extremely useful in mobile advertising and eCommerce in recent years. This trend is bound to continue and with the use of automation to save time and other costs. Digital marketers going forward will now be able scale better and more quickly with the aid of Artificial Intelligence, AI-enabled ads automation.

4. Video Content

In the coming years, we are going to be seeing more marketers pushing out more video content to please mobile users. Presently, videos make up over 60% of all mobile traffic. As this trend goes up, we expect more mobile-friendly content to come in the form of videos. This trend will entice more marketers to turn to posting more video content over and above traditional blog posts to meet consumer needs in the coming years.
 
5. Mobile Voice Search

Recently Google has found a way to index voices. That has led to increased use of voice search and voice control. Right now, there are more home electronic devices in use, such as Amazon Echo and Apple HomePod. It is projected that more consumers will buy these devices for their homes and continue using them on their smartphones. By using these devices, many more consumers will rely on speaking to receive search results and answers. This trend will continue in 2021 and beyond.
 
6. Structured Data

There is every reason to believe that structured data is going to continue to dominate in SEO results. With Google Search now becoming more and more intelligent, searchers now get structured data snippets on top of normal search results. This looks like a search bonus if you ask me because these snippets greatly help those looking to rank on the first SERPs of Google. This trend will continue, and could even, be improved upon in the coming years.

7. Push Notifications

There is likelihood that push notifications will continue to be popular with marketers in the coming years. This is inspite of their attendant nuisance value, if badly used. More marketers will likely add them to their communication strategies because they attract good results when used correctly. When used on mobile devices, push notifications help provide timely updates and other content besides marketing information on the go. They help to enhance the much-needed marketing interactions taking place online.

8. Chatbots

Chatbots are becoming the blue-eyed boys of Artificial Intelligence, AI, helping marketers online. With more and more people working from home because of one restriction or another, chatbots are becoming hugely relevant to marketers. This trend is bound to continue as AI becomes smarter and more popular in the coming years. Right now, many marketers rely on chatbots to make automated calls and to answer consumers’ questions out of a website or even on social media. These smart bots tend to make getting information and doing business faster and easier for consumers. Going forward, bots will come in very handy to remind consumers on time of repeat purchases and even to notify them of exciting new products, ongoing deals and promos.

Current Trending Digital Marketing Strategies

The best digital marketing strategies currently trending with marketers derive hugely from sophisticated technologies like Machine Intelligence and Machine Learning. These technologies are daily evolving very rapidly and smart marketers are latching on. Right now, this technological onslaught has greatly redefined the whole marketing ecosystem and even the entire cyberspace. Internet businesses are now compelled to look deeper into their marketing strategies and reinvent themselves continuously if they must survive. This is the reason they have to continuously innovate to keep pace with the changing lifestyles and future marketing trends. Business survival is and remains the bottom line in all these.

Here is what marketers are now embracing for survival in digital marketing world.

Repetitive Tasks Automation

It is smart to assume that repetitive tasks in digital marketing can be automated and they are being automated. With the use of technologically advanced software, you can now automate repetitive marketing tasks like email marketing, social media or website actions and many more. Time is of the essence in any business and software that help businesses to save time must find usefulness any day. The reason tasks automation is now trending. 


 
Inbound Marketing

 Content still remains king and with the deft combination of visual and written content, marketers still get inbound traffic from evergreen content which they have posted even a long time ago. Content still remains at center stage to get traffic from keywords searches largely responsible for organic traffic. Even now, fresh and original content remains a hot favorite for major search engines like Google. Searchers rely on them for marketing information and that translates to inbound traffic. Great content is thus still very relevant to marketing efforts even now.

Growth Hacking

As the name implies, how growth hackers manage to remain on the right side of the law is really amazing. It is a great credit to their professionalism. Growth hackers ply their trade by playing with data and creativity to give rise to revolutionary products. They craftily use some groups of small and simple techniques to stimulate growth and demand for businesses. Because of their high success rates, growth hacking has emerged as one of the best marketing strategies in this age and time. The reason it is trending right now.

Chatbots

Chatbots are smart internet bots which can be programed to do many wonderful and amazing things in digital marketing. Their potentials are enormous and marketers are still discovering them. They are smart and able to strike very intelligent and meaningful conversations real time with customers thereby doing effectively what the business owner may have been required to do all by himself. Many customers are comfortable speaking to chatbots instead humans because they find them efficient and are very quick in their responses to inquiries. Some chatbots are very cordial and helpful in recalling a whole purchase history. With chatbots helping out in automation of repetitive work, business owners can then free up their valuable time to attend to other more important tasks.  The reason marketers love chatbots even more right now. They are really trending.

Video Marketing 

In digital marketing, content is still highly valued provided it is original and visual content characterized mostly by original videos helps to enhance that value. Smart marketers know this, the reason they cannot afford to ignore video marketing in their marketing strategies. Visual content in a deft combination with written content tends to work wonders in digital marketing world right now. With the prevalence of smart hand-held devices everywhere, videos streaming has become much more competitive. Smart marketers thus cannot afford to miss this trend as videos are more likely to result in conversions than plain text. Right now, around the world, every second of the day 24/7, someone somewhere is watching a video. Can you see the huge marketing potentials therein? 


 

4 Small Business Trends Steadily on the Rise

If you are very current with trends, you must have noticed that small businesses are going through a whole lot of changes in recent times. Apart from ethical and regulatory requirements, the advancements in communication fields, IT, marketing and other fields are playing major roles in engendering changes in the way and manner people run small businesses these days. The small business trends discussed here currently appear to be rising steadily because more people have started to pay more attention to them. Just take a look around you. You will discover that many small business owners are now:

 

Focusing more on customer service: Many small business owners have realized that if you support your customers well, your chance of customer retention increases tremendously. Of course, they know that repeat customers are extremely valuable to their businesses. With advancement in technology, many now use chat apps to literally lead customers by the hand to do business with them. Many are now able to provide 24/7 support services by way of availability, prompt response and prompt solutions. Right now, if you do not have chatbots for customer interactions, the time to deploy some in your own business is now.

Getting their businesses online: That simply means, less storefronts and more websites! The good news is that small businesses lately have become quite divergent and very daring too. With current popularity and real advancements in mobile technology, most small businesses are now flourishing significantly on the internet. The internet somehow allows these businesses to make some reductions in physical storefronts thereby saving on maintenance costs and some other space related problems. So, get smart now by getting yourself a business website if you don’t have one already. It goes with the trends.

Paying more attention to environmental issues: Small business owners are steadily endeavoring to go clean as well as green in the way they run their businesses! That is largely because environmental issues have become a very big concern of the modern world. Going with the flow, it is an excellent thing to see that small businesses have started paying special heed to environmental issues. With global concerns rising over issues like global warming, pollution, plastic, flora and fauna extinction, small businesses now do things to enable them conform to going clean and green to protect the environment in which they do business. So, you now see small businesses deliberately encourage cutting down on plastic and paper use and urging their customers to do same. Online shopping is one great eco-friendly way many of them do business these days.

Having more social media presence: These days, smart marketers consider social media presence a necessity and not a luxury. For that reason, having a presence on social media has become an absolute must for almost all business ventures who want to remain competitive. Hitherto, the online presence people were used to was mainly limited to having a complete website. Not anymore! With the advent of very popular social media platforms like, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, the game has changed completely. Social media craze has compelled many businesses to expand their online presence to the social media where the customers can be found and interacted with very easily. Right now, even the smallest businesses of the lot are trying their utmost to up their games on social media by socializing and promoting their goods/services to a very large mass of people. That no doubt is good for business. Get social, by putting your own business on social media platforms. That is the place to be right now if you sincerely want to take your business to the next level.