With 20 years’ experience in marketing, Anicca Digital’s very own Ann Stanley discusses the State of Digital Marketing in 2019.
What happens after you search in Google?
The percentage of people clicking on sites is dropping dramatically – 50% now don’t click on anything. This is because Google is trying to keep you on its pages for longer through featured snippets.
It means you will most likely have seen a drop in organic traffic, as you now have to run fast to stay still. If you have only seen a small increase in organic traffic then you are doing well.
Facebook Changes
Facebook changed its algorithm 18 months ago, which now makes business posts more unlikely to appear in a user’s feed. The result of this change has been a major drop in organic posts reaching audiences – only 6% now reach audiences – and a major increase in the use of Facebook ads.
However, like Google, Facebook is trying to create a walled garden and keep users within its own platform, rather than drive them to your website.
UK Ad Spend
In 2018, the UK’s ad spend was the third highest in the world for advertising, due to our growing e-commerce economy:
- Total ad spend online reached £13.4 billion
- Online marketing now makes up 57% of all advertising in the UK
- This is an increase of 15% year on year
- Massive growth in social spend of 23% year on year
- Search makes up 51% of the total online spend
- The use of smartphone, video and social media are where a lot of the increases come from
Automation and Integration
There has been massive growth in smart campaigns, machine learning and smart shopping ads, but the automation of the day to day running of ads takes control out of the advertiser’s hands.
There are benefits, such as integration between platforms – Shopify data can be integrated with Google Ads, Facebook and Pinterest.
There is also an increase in chatbots on websites to provide customer service.
Automation increases the importance of creativity. Having less control over a platform means more reliance on creativity for content. The use of video is recommended because the engagement is high, enabling you to cut through the noise.
Concentrate on conversion rate optimisation to increase your website’s performance.
Invest in your website with grant money available through the Chamber of Commerce, Local Enterprise Partnership or growth hub.
Benchmark Data on Engagement and Conversions
The average page load time is six seconds, but Google thinks it should be two seconds. This means most websites are slow and we need to speed them up in order to see effective conversion rates and bounce rates.
Concentrate on improving conversion rates for users, not sessions.
You need a conversion rate of more than 2% or you need to improve your website.
Cookie Compliance
Changes to privacy regulations mean that users will have to positively opt in to analytics cookies. This will have a major impact on remarketing, as this is all based on cookies. When implemented, websites will likely see a 70% – 90% drop in available analytics data. Ann is currently working on recommendations going forwards, but currently recommends not taking action yet.
Using the A10 Marketing Framework
What is a strategy? It’s the journey from where you are now to where you want to go.
Review your overall business situation – do you want to grow? Do you want to see new customer acquisition? Your strategy is how you are going to get there.
Examine your current situation – what are your marketing objectives?
Consider these in relation to the 7 Ps:
- Product
- Promotion
- Price
- Place
- People
- Process
- Physical Evidence
This needs to overlap with POET – Paid, Owned, Earned and Technical media – all the elements you need for digital marketing.
Tech is important in relation to this because of the growth in voice search, chatbots, tracking, etc.
Existing planning frameworks – SOSTAC and RACE – reach, act, convert, engage – do not consider assets, analysis or who your audience is.
The 10 steps of the A10 Marketing Framework enable you to analyse and plan, and are flexible for offline and online.
The guide includes an analysis cheat sheet – a step by step analysis to identify how you are doing currently. It provides a good starting point to then build your strategy around.
Audiences and analytics will enable you to target audiences who are in the market to buy and find audiences to match your current converters.
Download the full A10 Marketing Framework from the Anicca Digital website.
