9 Mobile Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore

As we become more and more reliant on using smartphones, mobile marketing becomes more critical for modern brands.

Certain trends have become obvious, and ignoring them puts a serious damper on our branding results. Here are mobile marketing trends that you absolutely have to pay attention to, and should consider implementing before we hit 2020.

1. Omnichannel Marketing

You have to keep in mind that not all mobile interactions start or end on your smartphone. Users are navigating from multiple devices. Their buying journey may start through voice search on a smart assistant and continue on a mobile device.

Browsing the web has become very fragmented and harder to monitor. There are no longer linear sales funnels any more because interactions have become faster and scattered across devices.

There are gaming platforms, smart TVs, and even smart home devices. We are living in an age where you can stream television through a smart fridge. Times are changing. Your marketing efforts need to reflect that.

Here’s a detailed omnichannel marketing guide and how to implement it in your overall marketing strategy:

2. Visual Search

Ok, some of marketing trends really start resembling sci-fi movies. These days you can point your phone camera to any object around you to associate web search!

Google Lens is an image recognition technology developed by Google, designed to bring up relevant information related to objects it identifies using visual analysis based on a neural network.

If you haven’t got serious about visual marketing yet, this trend should have encouraged you to!

3. Ever Evolving Instagram Ads

Traditionally mobile-only, Instagram is growing by the day, and they have been getting into the advertising game for awhile as their user base increases. Some bigger brands have been getting on board with the platform and started marketing from there, but the crowd is still pretty thin.

Instagram is adding new and new advertising options every year. This year they are introducing ads inside their Explore section where users would go to discover new content and feeds:

That makes it a great place to start setting your own ads, with great returns. Of course that means you should be putting a good amount of focus on your overall Instagram marketing strategy. If you haven’t launched one, it is a good time to start.

4. Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) works by overlaying virtual objects on top of a real-world environment (usually by using the camera on a smartphone).

If you experienced the hubbub of Pokemon Go, you witnessed augmented reality in action. Other examples include IKEA Place offering you to virtually “place” IKEA products in your room and Timberland building a virtual fitting room (known as magic mirror).

5. Video Ads

Video ads are a little bit controversial right now. The data still isn’t in on how effective they are, and different sources report wildly different success rates. But there is no denying that more brands are using them, including on mobile marketing.

Platforms like YouTube are especially reliant on the advertising form. You may want to consider jumping on the bandwagon and trying it for yourself.

6. Mobile Apps In Google Search Results

Google started blending their first-page search results to include mobile apps a couple of years ago. Where you would normally see ads or universal search results in the top spots, you could find Google Play and iTunes recommendations right on the first page.

These days Google is also showing the whole section filled with related Google Apps including average ratings and price. Advertisers are also welcome to advertise their official app right inside their sponsored listing.

Apps already make up a huge chunk of mobile usage these days. Even if you don’t have an app yet, it is worth making one just to take advantage of their popularity, and Google’s new promo guidelines.

7. Social Commerce

As mentioned, ecommerce is becoming increasingly omni-channel, i.e. unifying every sales channel to create a single commerce experience has recently become the only way to go.

It has also become highly cross-platform: Driving sales from Google only is no longer sustainable. These days of mobile apps and social media ads, you can monetize your social media presence and create multiple marketing channels.

With Facebook focusing more on “buy now” buttons, and platforms like Instagram and Pinterest really pushing the ecommerce side, we are now seeing a socialization of online consumerism.

The line between shopping cart and social media has been blurred, and it is time to take advantage of that. Not only can you begin to use social platforms for direct sales and lead building (which works great via mobile devices), but you can make your own site more social. The early, creative birds get the worms here.

8. New Payment Systems

Payment systems are seriously changing. Samsung has a payment platform that can be used almost anywhere, in spite of whether they are optimized for it or not.

Services like PayPal are being accepted from big names like Walmart. Smartphones have their own wallets, such as through Apple Pay. It is no longer an option to ignore these new ways to pay, because customers would rather go with a brand that offers the choice.

9. Customized Lifestyle Apps

What can we learn from products like the FitBit? That apps are no longer accessories, they are lifestyles.

People use mobile devices to reflect and enhance the way that they live, such as through fitness apps (FitBit, MyFitnessPal), financial assistance (Mint, Mint Bills), and even smart homes (iSmartAlarm). You can promote your services by creating a lifestyle based app of your own.

Have you noticed any hot mobile trends in marketing lately? Let us know in the comments!

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How I Ranked For 636,363 Keywords Using This Simple Hack

When I started doing SEO on NeilPatel.com I used this advanced formula to rank for 477,000 keywords.

Over time, my traffic started to flatline and I wasn’t ranking for many more keywords, even though I was continually creating more content.

But then I figured out a simple hack that took me from 477,000 keywords to 636,363 keywords as you can see in the image above.

So, what was this hack?

Well, it’s so effective that I just updated Ubersuggest so that includes the hack.

So how did I do it?

When someone does a Google search, what are they typically doing? They are trying to find a solution to their problem, right?

So how can you easily identify these problems people are searching for?

Typically, you want to look for 3 types of keyword phrases:

1. Questions – people type in questions because they are looking for answers. And if your product or service helps answer those questions, you’ll see a boost in conversions.
2. Comparisons – when someone is searching for comparison keywords such as “MailChimp VS Converkit” there is high buyer intent, even if your company isn’t mentioned in the search phase. (I’ll go into how to leverage this in a bit.)
3. Prepositions – when keywords contain a preposition, they tend to be more descriptive. If you aren’t sure what a preposition is, simple prepositions are words like at, for, in, off, on, over, and under. These common prepositions can be used to describe a location, time, or place.

But how do you find these keywords?

Well, I just updated Ubersuggest to now show you questions, comparisons, and prepositions.

Just head over to Ubersuggest and type in a keyword that you want to go after. For this example, I typed in the word “marketing”.

Then as you scroll down, in the keywords ideas table you’ll see tabs for questions, prepositions, and comparisons.

I want you to click on the “view all keyword ideas”.

You’ll now be taken to the keyword ideas report that looks like this:

Now, click on the tab labeled “questions”. It will adjust the keyword recommendations to show you all of the popular questions related to the main keyword you just researched.

You’ll then see some suggestions that you could consider going after. Such as:

• Why is marketing important?
• What marketing does?
• How marketing works?

But as you scroll down, you’ll find more specific questions such as:

• Why a marketing plan is important?
• How marketing and sales work together?
• How many marketing emails should you send?

Now that you are able to see these questions people are typing, in theory, you can easily rank for them as most of them have an SEO difficulty score of 20 or so out of a 100 (the higher the number the more competitive it is).

More importantly, though, you can create content around all of those phrases and sell people to your product or service.

For example, if you created an article on “why a marketing plan is important,” you can go into how you also can create a marketing plan. From there you can transition into describing your services on creating a marketing plan and how people can contact you if they want your help or expertise in creating one.

You can do something similar with the “how marketing and sales work together” article in which you can break down how to make each department work together. From there, you can either be an affiliate for software solutions that help merge the two departments like HubSpot or sell your own software if you offer one. You can even pitch your consulting services that help tie sales and marketing together.

And as for the “how many marketing emails should you send,” you can create content around that and have an affiliate link to popular email tools that have high deliverability and offer automation. Or you can promote your own email product.

Now imagine all of the extra keywords you can rank for by going after question-related keywords. What’s amazing about this is most of these keywords are competitive and they have extremely high search intent.

Can it get any better?

Speaking of search intent, I want you to click on the comparisons tab.

You’ll see a list of ideas just like you did with the questions tab. But what I love doing here is typing in a competitor’s brand name here.

Let’s say I am offering an email marketing tool. I could type in “Mailchimp” and see what comparison ideas Ubersuggest comes up with.

Now for this example, I want you to imagine that you have an email company called Drip and Drip isn’t really mentioned in any of these keyword comparison ideas.

What’ll you want to do is create articles on all of the popular comparison terms like “Mailchimp vs Constant Contact” or “Mailchimp vs Convertkit” and within those articles break down the differences and also compare them with your own tool Drip.

Be honest when writing the comparisons. Show off which is the best solution using facts and data and break down how you are different and in what ways your own solution is better than the two solutions the reader is comparing.

This will bring awareness to your solution and you’ll find that people will start purchasing it even though they were comparing two of your competitors.

If you want a good example of how to create a neutral comparison type of blog post, check out this article comparing web hosts.

And if you want to take it one step further, you can click on the “prepositions” tab to find even more ideas.

Sticking with the Mailchimp example, you can see that people are curious about Shopify and WordPress integrations.

You can write articles related to integrations and also push your own product and break down how it differs from the others.

If you want to take it one level deeper, it will give you ideas on how to modify your business. For example, if I created an email marketing tool, I would create a Shopify, WordPress, Woocomerce, and Squarespace integration based on the ideas I got from the prepositions tab.

So how did I rank for 636,363 keywords?

I didn’t use all of the examples above on NeilPatel.com because I am not really trying to sell a product and I don’t have the time to write thousands of new blog posts.

But I did type in my domain name into Ubersuggest and then headed over to the top pages report.

From there I looked at the pages that are already ranking well on Google and clicked on the “view all” button to see the exact keywords each page ranks for.

As you can see from that page I rank for questions like “what is affiliate marketing” as well as popular prepositions and comparisons.

How did I do this?

Well, that top pages report shows you keywords each of your pages already ranks for. So all you have to do is research each of those terms through Ubersuggest and find popular questions, prepositions, and comparisons.

Conclusion

The natural instinct for any SEO or marketer is to rank for popular terms that have a lot of search traffic.

But there is an issue with that strategy. It takes a lot of time, it’s extremely competitive, and many of those search phrases don’t cause a ton of conversions as they are super generic.

So, what should you do instead?

Focus on solving people’s problems. The way you do this is by creating content around the questions, prepositions, and comparisons people are searching for in Google.

What do you think about the new Ubersuggest feature?

The post How I Ranked For 636,363 Keywords Using This Simple Hack appeared first on Neil Patel.

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International SEO FAQ: Multi-Lingual and/or Multi-Regional Optimization

Lots of online businesses and digital publication are going global these days and we have to thank the Internet for giving us this incredible opportunity.

Yet, even though it has been around for years now, international SEO is also unbelievably confusing.

There are a lot of “it depends” in this area, so I did my best to collect clear answers to a few possible cases.

How to optimize for multiple regions and multiple languages?

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Google clearly lists all the options we have:

[To add to this, in both #1 and #2 cases, it can be quite difficult to build up the domain authority, so it’s another serious con Google is not including in the chart.]

A few DOs and DON’Ts here though:

Country-specific domain

• DO try and keep content on each domain unique and localized (including generic pages like “About us”). It does take a bit of work but it’s just safer
• DO choose this option if you sell different products in each country
• DO choose this option if you have enough resources to build the domain authority for each country
• DON’T use “International targeting” tool inside Google’s search console. That feature is only useful if you have a generic TLD or a local subdomain targeting a specific country
  

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Overall Google says that a country-specific top-level domain is the strongest signal you can send (another strong signal is the language, obviously). If you go this route, Google won’t need any more hints.

Beware that Google treats some seemingly localized domains as generic. Here’s the full list:

Perceived as generic domains by Google		Perceived as localized domains by Google
.com .org .edu .gov .eu .asia	.ad .as .bz .cc .cd .co .dj .fm .io .la .me .ms .nu .sc .sr .su .tv .tk .ws	Here’s the full list of country code top level domains

Page level targeting

• DO use hreflang tag OR XML sitemaps to point Google to where you are targeting which region (mind that only Google and Yandex support hreflang tags)
• DO ensure your site consistent performance globally. Using a Content Delivery Network is probably the most reliable way to do that. Besides, you can use Pingdom to monitor performance in your important countries.
• DO choose this option if you have enough resources to build the domain authority for each country
• DON’T use automated redirects or IP identification: Let your users choose their language
• DON’T use automated translation for each page
  

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Subdomain targeting

• DO use use “International targeting” tool inside Google’s search console
• DO try and keep content on each subdomain unique and localized (including generic pages like “About us”). It does take a bit of work but it’s just safer
• DO ensure your site performance in all important countries
• DON’T use automated redirects or IP identification: Let your users choose their language
• DON’T use automated translation for each page
  

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What if the language is the same but the countries are different?

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This is a common issue. Lots of businesses target multiple countries that speak the same language, so how to optimize for each one without running into duplicate content issues?

Use the best possible combination of the following:

• For each local entity, create unique localized content (using localized spelling, slang, etc.)
• For page-level targeting, use Hreflang tags
  or localized HTML sitemaps
• Use localized keyword optimization (all the English language is not made the same: UK keywords may be different from US keywords. Use tools that can localize your keyword research, like Serpstat and similar tools)
• If possible, use localized NAP info (Name, Address, Phone Number),
• Use local currencies,
• Verify local Google My Business profiles
• Localize navigation and home page features that cater to specific audiences
• Localize images and image info (alt tags and file names)
• Obtain links from local resources and news outlets
  

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What if the country is the same but languages are different?

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This is another confusing issue that brings more questions that answers:

• Most countries include huge audiences that speak a different language: there’s Spanish in the United States and French in Canada
• Those localized alternative languages may be different from their original countries: e.g. US Spanish is said to be quite different from Spanish in Spain
  

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So what to do?

Generally speaking, this type of targeting is similar to any multi-lingual optimization minus regional targeting. This basically means:

• Page-level targeting is mostly the only option (it doesn’t make sense to buy a local domain, since the locality is the same)
• There’s no setting Geo-targeting inside Search Console as Google states it pretty well:

Don’t use this tool if your site targets more than a single country. For example, it would make sense to set the target as Canada for a site about restaurants in Montreal; it would not make sense to set the target as Canada if it also targets French speakers in France, Canada, and Mali.

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What you can do:

• Create each language version
• Give your users a clear way to switch from your site primary language
• Focus the alternative-language version on that audience’s needs, e.g. mention which is the best method for that language support.
• Localize keywords and images
• Use hreflang annotations to help Google search results link to the correct language version of a page.
  

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Finally, to validate your hreflang tags, do use Screaming Frog. Hreflang tags are incredibly easy to mess up.

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