Digital Marketing Trends to Stop Using Immediately

Key Takeaways

if you're still using any of these digital marketing trends you need to stop right now if you want to transform your website into a customer or lead generation machine I'll show you all my best tips and tactics and secrets to get their best let's dive in hey guys a West metallic here for the deep end and if you're not subscribed yet you're going to want to click that little subscribe button and the little bell icon next to it so you never miss another video you need to succeed online ok so digital marketing is one of those things that just keeps evolving over time it never sits still for a minute so there's a lot of things that you may be still using that are considered outdated there could even be harming the health of your conversions in your website so today I'm going to go over some of those outdated trends you're definitely gonna want to ditch in 2018 going into 2019 so let's get right on with the list number one is text-based ebooks as a lead magnet so why is this something you should ditch because a couple years ago the thought of an e-book was a little more exciting to people they thought this is gonna be really something big they can sink their teeth into but so many people have been doing this for so long and most people kind of do it wrong and they should they've just put out really skimpy unsatisfying ebooks and people have caught on to that and people kind of know now that they can expect something that's going to not live up to their expectations so what do you do instead if you can't do that you book as the lead magnet well I definitely recommend replacing that ebook with something that's a little more valuable specifically something that's highly engaging I would recommend things like a video series or a quiz or a five-day challenge of some kind that really gets people involved and promises a result at the end of it ok number two is focusing on quantity of blog posts over quality so it used to be that people just were on a time crunch and they basically were on a an editorial schedule wanting to push out two or three blog posts a week thinking that Google was really going to reward the consistency and to be honest they used to but now Google is moving toward user signals so basically what that means they're rewarding things like time on page and how far user Scrolls down the page as the real signals to determine if it's good quality or not so the fix here would just be to focus more on the quality even if that means you're putting out fewer posts you're really going to make sure each one counts so do your keyword research make sure that it's a blog post that people are going to be searching for and then make it long enough for Google to really see it as an authoritative piece so what I recommend is generally over 2,000 words now blog posts used to be more around 600 to a thousand words but Google is really rewarding those 2,000 word Plus posts these days and not only do you need to use enough words you need to use the right words so instead of keyword stuffing your your posts with with one specific phrase that you really want to rank for which was kind of how we used to do it a few years ago now Google is really rewarding relevant keywords to your topic because Google has gotten much better at understanding overall topics this past year so basically what you're gonna want to do is come up with a lot of relevant words to your topic so that Google knows that you're putting out a piece with really great coverage on your topic for example for the deep end site you know we did we offer web consulting and web design so Google would expect to see words like WordPress or e-commerce or development on that page so go deep with your content you know show your expertise without using industry heavy jargon you're definitely going to want to write it conversationally and format it for the web using short sentences short paragraphs bullet lists images all that good stuff basically you want to make it really easy for your visitors to scan the page since that's how about 80% of people will consume your content all right a number three on our list is relying on organic or free social posts alone now the reason you're gonna want to ditch this tactic is because organic Reach has gone down drastically over the past few years so basically what I'm saying is if you have a Facebook page and you're just making Facebook posts thinking that all of your page followers are going to see that post they're not it's really only about 2 to 3 percent of your pages fans that'll ever actually see your post so unfortunately the time has come to put a little bit of money behind these posts but it's not all bad news because they offer really great targeting options so you can not only hit the people that are actually fans of your page you can also go after highly relevant cold traffic which is the only way to really scale your business because think about it if you're only talking to the people that already know your brand you're not really able to grow at a high rate but be careful just because you're going from free posts to paid ads doesn't mean you should be you know hitting people over the head with promotional ads they should still be helpful relevant content then you can retarget that the people who have read through that content with the more promotional style ads you may be used to okay next we have generic automated email blasts that just go out to all of your subscribers so the reason this is a mistake is your email list is gold your email list is still the most valuable resource you have as a business more valuable than social because you own it so what you don't want to do is waste that by putting the same generic message in front of everybody so what you want to do is segment that list within your email program like a MailChimp or drip so you can segment people based on activity level meaning have they read your emails or do they ignore them you can send different messages to people with different levels of activity you can also send different messages to the different ways they got on your list in the first place so let's say you have a list of actual buyers customers and then you have a list of people who have just subscribed to either a newsletter or a lead magnet you're going to want to talk to those groups very differently for instance for your existing customers maybe you want to send them an email about an add-on service or product that'll enhance that they've already got and just for your more casual subscriber list you might want to send them an email about sort of an entry-level product or service that if they buy that they're more likely to buy more down the road okay the next thing I want to talk about is using keywords stuff to web pages so Google is much smarter than it used to be and it now understands overall topics of a page and it actually rewards pages that go in-depth into a topic over just using and reusing the same keyword phrase over again so here's the fix rather than using the same keyword phrase over and over again do you want to rank for in Google what you want to do is use that phrase a few times maybe once in a headline and a time or two in the body text but you're also going to want to supplement that with a lot of closely related keyword phrases specifically phrases that Google would expect to see on a page covering that topic so you can go to a website called LSI graph calm and just put in the keyword phrase you want to rank for and it's gonna give you a list of all the other words that Google thinks possibly should be on that page now of course use your discretion and only use the ones that really make sense for your specific case and then you can put in your page in a really natural readable way okay so the next thing you're gonna definitely want to stop doing right now is talking at your potential customers rather than talking to them so basically so conversations are the new conversions and if you're basically just pushing a lot of information out there with no follow up and no conversation taking place you're really pushing away a large chunk of your business so what I would recommend here is just simply adding several opportunities for these conversations to happen on your website and keeping up with them so for instance you could have a chat feature on your website that can pop up when someone has scrolled down a certain percentage of the page just asking if they have any questions and the cool thing about these chat features is they can be wired to go right to your phone so someone has a question it just pops up on your on your smart phone you can answer in real-time and let's say you have a blog section on your site or videos so basically at the end of a blog or at the end of a video you're just gonna want to ask if they have anything to add to the conversation if they have any questions just give them the opportunity to talk with you and let them know that it's expected and it's okay but it's not enough just to prompt these questions you have to actually respond to them respond to every comment every question you get and it's a great way to build that engagement and really play the long game and in the end you're gonna get a lot more customers from that engagement and that just so happens to segue perfectly into this so basically are you using any of these currently on your site are you planning on ditching any of them I want to know all about it I want you to leave it in the comments below let me know what you're doing now and how you plan on changing it going into 2019 so leave the comments below and of course I'm just a comment away if you have any questions leave them down there as well and I will get to all of them alright and if you haven't subscribed yet you're definitely going to want to subscribe right over here in this circle icon and if you haven't accessed my free mini-course yet how to guarantee website ROI it's really easy just click the box right over here and you'll get free access to that all right guys I'm Wes McDowell for the deep end and I'll see you in our next video