There are a number of digital marketing trends that – at this moment – are a tad beyond what most contractors will put to use in reaching their market. But that may change one day, though. Augmented and virtual reality technology, for example, are getting a lot of attention for how they can give consumers a sense of seeing new products in action before an actual purchase.
Who knows? In a future scenario, a homeowner could place goggles over their eyes and suddenly see what their home would look like after a renovation. Perhaps this will become part of your “must-do marketing” strategies or incorporated into your home show displays. Virtual reality technology may also be used in technical training programs that allow students to “experience” equipment repair and installation without actually having it in the classroom.
If you’ve checked out a website for a tech-savvy company, you may have interacted with a “chatbot” before. This is an artificial intelligence program that simulates a human conversation. As it anticipates questions and answers, it’s a similar concept to an automated telephone attendant that answers your customer service call and tries to resolve your problem with programmed solutions.
The human version of the chatbot is “live chat,” where someone visits your site and a chat box appears and asks if the visitor has any questions. It’s basically an instant messaging technology where a real person from your company is able to answer the questions of a site visitor through a chat box. This tool helps move the prospect from a passive site visit to the beginning of engagement. If a visitor is on your site, that’s a sign of interest in your product or services. Live chat lets you connect at that moment rather than after they fill out and submit a form… or move on to a competitor’s site.
Whether you’re ready for that step or not, there are other digital marketing trends that are important to not overlook. For example, Search Engine Optimization is still a staple for online marketing. Yet “optimizing” your site to pull web traffic gets more complex every day.
For example, Google is a huge fan of mobile – because consumers are huge fans of mobile. The search engine understands that the majority of consumers start their searching and shopping with their smartphones, and the company now favors the mobile version of a website when supplying search engine results.
Regardless of how deep you are digging into digital technology, make sure you get at least this far. Mobile friendliness is essential if you want your website to count for anything. Also make sure your mobile page speeds are up to expectations for impatient consumers. Google considers page speed as part of its ranking algorithm, and it does so for mobile as well as desktop. Site visitors do too. Frustration over slow load times loses business.
If you know anything about SEO, you know that keywords are important. But the view of words and phrases that matter to your market is shifting toward anticipating the questions customers have – and answering those questions with exceptional content.
When delivering SERPs (search engine results pages), Google looks at the quality of the content not just at the words within the content. Assessing content depth is one of the factors Google uses to measure content quality. Sites with more layers of content for visitors to explore do better in search results than sites with poor quality content. Create content in various types of formats – text, image or video – that answers questions and guides visitors to the next step.