Use these 3 digital marketing trends to grow your business and generate leads in 2021
Use these 3 digital marketing trends to grow your business and generate leads in 2021
Brands and their customers talked over social media channels even more. Ecommerce sales went through the roof. And people used search engines even more to help them navigate through lockdown.
So, what does 2021 have in store for us?
Three areas where you need to focus this year to help generate new leads and strengthen existing relationships for your business, include social media, SEO and video.
The good news is, they all relate and work with each other. If you action each tactic well and consistently, they will have a compound effect on one another.
So, your social media can benefit your website’s search engine ranking. Your video marketing benefits your social media channels with better engagement and helps your website to rank higher with more engaging content. And your SEO helps more users find your website, and in turn engage with your video and find your social media channels.
Social media – grow your audience and influence
There has been a big shift in social media use for businesses over the last few years. Gone are the days where it is just a social tool for keeping in touch with old friends. More and more businesses, particularly in the construction and interiors sectors, are using social media to grow their business.
Why should I use social media for my business?
Social media will help to increase your brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, generate new leads, and provide excellent opportunities to talk to your customers.
It is a great way to tell your story and tell your prospective customers why they should be doing business with you.
So many construction and interiors businesses use social media to grow their audience. It is an important and influential factor in the specification process.
The role of social media in construction
For example, interior designers will form relationships with brands who actively post on Instagram or Pinterest – very visual platforms. Their appreciation for aesthetics and innovation for products lend themselves well for telling your story over Instagram and Pinterest.
Another example is LinkedIn which is a great way of joining a community. There are many construction and property private groups on LinkedIn, where it is an excellent opportunity to build trust and develop relationships.
Here you can tell peers your story, your values, and your opinion on industry events. Never sell. It is not an opportunity for you to go all in straight away with your best pitch.
A final tip for establishing social media as part of your marketing strategy, is to be specific which channels you use. Don’t just use every channel going. Find out where your audience is e.g. do they use Facebook, Instagram or Twitter the most?
Once you’ve done this, you can then concentrate on that platform, and do it well. You will get much better results rather than spreading your brand’s message thinly over several social platforms.
SEO – make sure your website can be found
Increasing your website’s search engine rankings is an excellent way to increase your website leads.
The great thing about SEO and making sure your website can be found in Google (and Bing) searches, is that a user who visits your website is generally interested in what your company has to offer.
The best thing we can suggest here is new content. Write blog posts on key trends in your industry or a case study write up to tell your audience how you’ve helped a client. The idea is to educate and inform your prospective customer. This will then position you as an expert in your industry and someone who your audience will turn to.
Why create content for your website?
According to Hubspot (inbound sales and marketing specialists), business-to-business companies that blog regularly generate 67% more leads per month than those that don’t.
Your new content is a big factor in how Google decides to rank websites. Excellent content that your readers enjoy will really help to push your website up the rankings.
How do I decide what keywords to use?
Use free tools such as Answer the Public or Wordstream. With Answer the Public, you can enter keyword phrases that you would like to be found for e.g. building contractor in Manchester, and it will tell you other ways in which your audience can search for the same phrase.
With Wordstream you can put in any website and it will give you an idea of the keyword phrases it gets found for. So you can use it to research your competitors.
There are other factors to help your website’s SEO, for example making sure the technical aspects are in place e.g. page titles, meta descriptions, but for the purposes of this post we want to keep it relatively short and actionable.
A final bit of advice for your website’s SEO is ensuring lots of rich content for your users to engage with. Particularly videos. Which leads us on nicely to our third and final factor to help you generate leads.
Videos – the best way to engage with your audience
Humans generally find videos more engaging and memorable than other types of content. Smart Insights have predicted that people will spend 100 minutes a day watching online videos in 2021.
So communicating your brand over video is a great way to get your audience’s attention.
The introduction of Live Streams on various social platforms and the increasing popularity of YouTube, means video should be used by brands to engage with your audience. The rise of Tik Tok demonstrates the importance of video, and while it might not have its place within Construction and Interiors just yet, it will.
Isn’t video expensive?
No, it doesn’t have to be. If you wanted an official brand video (the term corporate video springs to mind, but it just sounds dull when you say it like that), then you will need to invest a fair amount of budget into creating exactly the right content.
However, for the purpose of this blog we are talking about short form video i.e. videos you record yourself generally under ten minutes in length.
You only have to log onto LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram to see the popularity and engagement of video content. It’s a great way to get your personality and your message across. Which in turn builds relationships and generates leads.
What shall I say in videos?
When you’re thinking about what to say, think about what you are trying to achieve. So if you are looking to grow your business, build relationships and generate leads, the important thing above all else is to be authentic.
Talk about your brand’s values and who you like to do business with; or recent projects and how you helped your customer; or your thoughts on key industry trends.
Videos are great content which feeds your social media channels and will also help your website to go up the search engine rankings. There is also talk of short form videos being shown in Google results pages, so it’s important to give your videos the right hashtags and meta information.
What next?
By implementing the three digital marketing tactics above, will give you the very best chance to grow your business and generate leads in 2021.
Business has changed considerably in the space of 12 months. But it’s clear to see that any brand that uses digital marketing to promote themselves (and done right) will reap the rewards in an ever-increasingly digital world.
Time54 is a specialist marketing agency that works exclusively with building product manufacturers within the construction industry.
We can build your brand awareness and authority through strategic and tactical marketing that leads to specification inclusion.
Time54 works with and has helped many building and interiors companies raise their awareness in the marketplace and increase their specification inclusion on numerous projects.
We are a specialist building and interiors marketing agency and help brands to:
- Increase specification.
- Influence architects.
- Build authority.
If you are interested in how we can help your business target architects and grow through specification led marketing, get in touch to organise a Power Hour zoom meeting.
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