2023 has already proved to be a challenging year across the globe, with the cost of living crisis and inflation impacting companies across all sectors.
Most businesses are finding themselves re-evaluating their marketing strategy to balance their cash flow and keep satisfied customers flowing through the door, but it can be difficult to assess where your areas for improvement might be.
If you’re a small business or one of the many growing businesses in the UK, getting that help sooner rather than later can help you reach your target market faster, increasing profit margins and leading to more traffic to your site.
As The Guardian reports, responding to a recession with agility is crucially important to safeguarding your income as a business. By decreasing brand awareness through de-investing in marketing, you can endanger your company’s carefully built reputation, and make more room for competitors to flourish.
This can be seen most explicitly in the Kelloggs vs Post advertising campaign of the Great Depression, as detailed by Forbes. While Post reduced their marketing efforts in a bid to save money, Kelloggs doubled down on their campaign to back their beloved Rice Krispies cereal. This enabled Kelloggs to secure itself firmly as the industry leader and capture customers from competitors.
Therefore, there is evidence to show that despite the tightening of purse strings in the current circumstances, customers are still actively searching for products and services. The solution to doing the heavy lifting to meet your target audience halfway lies in effective SEO strategies to climb to the top of the search engines’ results pages and nurture that lead generation.
As a result, you may need to refocus your marketing strategy to target those customers who are not yet fully invested in converting, or are hesitant to part with their cash in the current climate.
This is where clever search marketing strategies can target both your existing customers to remain loyal, and reel in those who are unsure about converting, and you may need the help of a high quality search marketing agency like Leeds-based Maratopia to assist you with securing more resources to focus your efforts on the marketing strategy that will work best for you and your company culture.
So, How Can A New Online Marketing Strategy Help My Business?
Read on to find out which challenges are currently facing businesses, and how search marketing can help including:
- How rapid technological advances are paving the way for changing the way we interact with customers online.
- How new data protection laws are changing the way we store customer data.
- Changing attitudes of customers and trends
Rapid Technological Advances
In an ever-increasing digital world, one of the biggest challenges facing businesses is the ability to stay on top of technological developments.
The world is becoming increasingly reliant on tools like cloud computing for data management and storage solutions, and many processes are now completed using marketing automation, with tools like email marketing campaigns constructed using software to focus on your target audience.
A fine balancing act is needed to ensure that these marketing activities do not spam users and alienate them, but will instead entice them to visit your site and convert.
How Can Search Engine Marketing Help Me with Technological Advances?
As time progresses, the emphasis on internet marketing is only increasing. Search engines like Google initially only made 10,000 searches per day in 1998, but as of 2022, 3.5 billion searches were being completed every day. Knowing your way around Google is now as integral to your business as traditional marketing campaigns.
With the prevalence of online shopping only continuing to grow following the Covid-19 pandemic, targeting customers online remains a consistent goal for business growth opportunities.
Search engine technology is ever-evolving to display the results that are most relevant to the user’s search query, so navigating your way around SEO practices in Google, and other search engines, is the key to establishing an increased amount of user clicks, and reaching customers with the relevant content that they’re looking for.
Using a marketing strategy carefully constructed by our SEO experts can help you to navigate the evolving nature of paid advertising in search engine marketing campaigns, as well as how to create effective Google Ads to boost the impact of your company’s presence in search results.
Changing Customer Expectations
Following the growth of inflation and spending cuts, many customers are now choosing to budget their disposable income more frugally, with research showing that the cost of food alone has risen by 19% from 2022-2023.
This reduction in disposable income could lead to a drop in sales, as customers fight to keep their savings unscathed. Ultimately, this may make it harder for businesses to acquire new customers using limited resources, and harder to hang on to loyal customers.
This is without mentioning the rising cost of utility bills, which has led to many businesses increasing prices to offset the additional cost.
Research has shown that the average commercial electricity bills were around 30% higher in 2022 than in 2021, placing business owners in the impossible situation of balancing cost and profit without alienating customers. A recent news article reported that small businesses in Leeds are struggling to make ends meet with customers struggling to pay these inflated prices.
If this resonates with you, you’re not alone.
For this reason, it would be wise to look at the methods that search marketing can offer you to boost the effect of your search engine marketing strategy, and make the most of every penny invested in your marketing budget.
By prioritising online customer experience, maximising your reach, and improving overall quality of your website can have incredible effects over time to draw a larger client base to your site. Using tools like blogger outreach, pay per click advertising, and SEM strategies will encourage search engines like Google to build trust flow with your site, and prioritise ranking your content over your competitors.
To keep track of your customers’ search intent, you should also invest in keyword research to track search trends, and write your website content accordingly, including meta tags which are crucial for telling search engines about your page and what it contains.
Customer demand can fluctuate according to seasonality and global events, and tracking keywords can help you to tailor your content towards channelling your products and services towards prospective customers by making your site appear higher in organic search engine results.
How Can Search Marketing Strategies Help?
If you use search marketing companies like Maratopia to help you with constructing marketing campaigns to target your customers and climb the rankings of the various search engines, there are a number of strategies open to you, depending on the angle that will best suit your business strategy.
For example, if you want to target customers who are searching with specific search terms, using pay per click advertising will help you to boost your paid search results on Google by running a targeted ad campaign.
These ad campaigns will increase your number of website visitors with paid ads that will appear above organic search results, therefore boosting the visibility of your website into a premium position on page 1.
If you’re after boosting your conversion rates, focusing your efforts on your website design and content marketing may also be an excellent strategy to pursue. With pages written using targeted keyword research search engine spiders can crawl your page to identify relevant content for the user’s search intent and ensure that they are receiving the most up to date and appropriate material for their query.
To improve your page content, you’ll need to conduct keyword research that will allow you to see the relevant keywords that your customers are using in their search queries and acquire a deep knowledge of what your customers are looking for.
This means you can then target your content towards each search term and using SEO for your site, you can create a marketing strategy with lasting impact.
The key to creating a website with maximum impact is to understand your customer’s journey from landing page to exit, and any barriers that may prevent them from converting. A key understanding of Google’s Core Web Vitals and how they affect the ranking of your page in search results will enable you to stay ahead in your SEO strategy as a business.
Read our blog about Google’s Core Web Vitals to get up to scratch on how they could be affecting the performance of your site.
Data Privacy and Ethics
With the growth of technology, there has also been a need to address data privacy concerns globally. Throughout the last 20 years, data breaches, piracy and identity theft have risen exponentially, prompting new laws to protect customers’ information while browsing and shopping online.
If you store customer information electronically as a company, you’re likely to be subjected to stringent guidelines about how long you can store customer information, where it must be stored, and how you can use it.
How Can Search Marketing Help Me with Data Privacy?
The implementation of Google Analytics 4 in July 2023 has seen an increased emphasis on data protection, with Google removing some of the features previously used in Universal Analytics that stored more data about customers and their identities.
For example, the IP Anonymisation feature prevents businesses from identifying customers by their IP address while using Google Analytics 4 software, and only stores customers’ information for a period determined by the company. This is usually set to a maximum of 26 months, after which time it is deleted.
If you want to learn more about how Google Analytics 4 has shaped search marketing, read our GA4 Guide to Success to find out how it can benefit your company with its new and enhanced features.
Final Thoughts
It’s a good time to be investing in search engine marketing strategies for your company. Internet marketing is on the rise, and the increasing intelligence of search engines means that search engine marketing tools can help you boost your business’ marketing strategy for the better.
By investing in SEO and increasing your ranking as a company within search results, you will receive an increased number of conversions as a result. As a small business, channelling your marketing efforts into both SEO and PPC, as well as lead generation will only place you on Google’s radar, while paid advertising will place you directly under the customer’s nose.
Do you need a new search marketing strategy to help you reach the top of search engines?
Contact experts at Maratopia today for a free SEO audit and a friendly conversation to start your SEO strategy today!
