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2023-New-marketing-trends
Search Engine Optimisation
10 Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in 2023

As digital marketing continues to evolve, businesses and marketers must stay up-to-date with the latest trends and strategies to remain competitive in the industry. With 2023 just starting, it’s time to start looking ahead to the digital marketing trends that will shape the coming year.

Here are 10 digital marketing trends to watch in 2023, based on personal experience and industry insights:

  1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning: AI and machine learning are revolutionizing the way we approach digital marketing. These technologies can analyze customer data, predict consumer behavior, and personalize marketing messages for maximum impact. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are also becoming increasingly popular for customer service and support.
  2. Voice Search Optimization: With the rise of voice-activated assistants like Siri and Alexa, optimizing for voice search is becoming more important. Marketers should focus on creating conversational content that matches the way people speak and answers the questions they’re most likely to ask.
  3. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR): AR and VR are transforming the way consumers interact with brands. Marketers can use these technologies to create immersive brand experiences that engage and entertain customers.
  4. Video Marketing: Video marketing continues to be a powerful tool for reaching and engaging audiences. From social media ads to explainer videos, video content can drive conversions and increase brand awareness.
  5. Micro-Moments: Consumers today have short attention spans and limited time. Marketers can capitalize on these “micro-moments” by delivering quick, relevant, and personalized messages across various channels, such as social media, email, and mobile apps.
  6. Personalization: Personalization has become essential in digital marketing. By using customer data and AI-powered tools, marketers can deliver tailored messages and offers that resonate with individual consumers.
  7. Interactive Content: Interactive content, such as quizzes, polls, and surveys, can increase engagement and drive conversions. This type of content encourages participation and makes the user experience more enjoyable.
  8. Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing continues to be an effective way to reach new audiences and build brand awareness. Marketers should focus on partnering with influencers who align with their brand values and have engaged followers.
  9. Sustainable Marketing: As consumers become more environmentally conscious, brands are looking for ways to market their products and services in a sustainable and ethical way. This includes using eco-friendly materials, reducing waste, and supporting social causes.
  10. Privacy and Security: With the increasing importance of data privacy and security, businesses must take measures to protect consumer data and build trust. Marketers should be transparent about their data collection and usage policies and comply with privacy regulations.

While these trends can help businesses stay ahead in the digital marketing game, it’s important to avoid some common pitfalls. Focusing solely on vanity metrics, such as likes and followers, can lead to poor return on investment (ROI) and high conversion costs. Instead, marketers should focus on metrics that indicate real business outcomes, such as lead generation and customer acquisition. Additionally, neglecting mobile optimization can lead to a poor user experience and lower search engine rankings.

In conclusion, staying up-to-date with the latest digital marketing trends is essential for businesses and marketers to remain competitive in the industry. By incorporating these trends into their marketing strategies and avoiding common pitfalls, businesses can drive engagement, increase conversions, and achieve their marketing goals.

by Adrian
761 Views0
ChatGPT
Search Engine Optimisation
Is search engine optimisation dead? – Asking a bot

The hype behind open AI latest release – ChatGPT is nothing but expected. We have been running tests on this tool all night long and believe that is has the potential of answering the holygrail of all marketing questions.

We asked ChatGPT is search engine optimisation is dead and this is what it told us. We have been asking this question to several marketing experts and in our opinion this answer is worth considering.

No, search engine optimization (SEO) is not dead. SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs) and improve the visibility of a website or web page in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO is an important part of digital marketing because it helps to drive traffic to websites and can be an effective way to attract potential customers.

There have been many changes and updates to search engine algorithms over the years, and SEO strategies have evolved as a result. However, the principles of SEO remain the same: to create high-quality content that is relevant to the user, to use relevant keywords in the content and website structure, and to build high-quality backlinks from other websites.

SEO is still an important part of online marketing, and it is not going away anytime soon. In fact, with the increasing importance of online presence for businesses, the demand for SEO is likely to continue to grow. If you want to succeed online, it is important to have a well-optimized website that is easy for search engines to understand and rank well in search results.

What will be the google’s answer to this powerful tool? Search engine optimisation is definitely not dead but we strongly believe these improvements in language processing will revolutionize the way people create and consume content.

by Adrian
847 Views0
localisation-for-google-search
Search Engine Optimisation
How to tune Google Search for Local Search

Did you know that Google search engine is localized? Yes, that means that if you are using the google search engine from different countries then you are likely to get different search results for the same keyword. This is great news if you are offering services within your region, but not so good if you have an international reach.

Localisation for search engines

If your main audience target is restricted to one particular location, for example, most of your services are for clients in your region example Malta, then localisation is a great thing to take advantage of. Focusing your search engine efforts on a particular region will allow you to compete with fewer websites and make your race for the top 3 keyword position an easier goal.

How to localise for search engines

There are various ways how to signal google search engine that you are mainly focusing on a particular region. For example, several of our local clients are based in Malta we often suggest several updates to the site and of the site so that we get better results for google searches when done from Malta.

Some of the most effective tactics include

1. Use a localised specific domain

Even if your main domain is a .com or .org, using a local domain TLD – for example .com.mt for Malta will help you rank better on the local search engine. Domains are a good return on investment when it comes to search engine improvements. As domains are cheap to buy in the region of €20 per year from any domain registrar like name cheap or go daddy.

2. Host the server within the local geographic region when possible

Other not so straightforward option is to have your hosting server located in the same region or at least close. This could be can be difficult to achieve as at webcalibrate we suggest going for a more reliable server than restricting your options to the server location. If you are using Azure hosting it is simple to change server region by changing a simple configuration, but the list of regions is limited

3. Fine-tune content by using “Malta” when creating new blog articles

This is the most effective way as when new content is added to the site it should take into consideration several SEO rules so that you make the best out of your content. At webcalibrate, we offer post SEO review services that will check any blog post for the right keywords, links, and HTML structure.

4. Localisation withing the region by writing content broken down further at regional level

This SEO tactic works when your services are purely regional. For example, one of our clients is in the Real-estate business we further grouped his property pages by region down to towns and villages. We used this grouping for specific region pages which gave us an edge for ranking keywords that were more region specific.

5. Tune your google business profile

Google business profile is a great tool for signaling google certain information about your business. We always suggest having a business profile updated, mainly the business location as this will allow you to signal the search engine that this is your main area of operation.

6. Inbound links

Getting inbound links is critical for any search engine ranking. What we suggest is that you make an extra effort to get links for local sources, this will give you more authority within that area.

by Adrian
922 Views0
digital-marketing-services-main
Search Engine Optimisation Web design
Digital Marketing and Cost to conversion

Digital Marketing and Cost to conversion

At webcalibrate digital marketing agency we believe that promoting your products and services is much more effective if you use multiple marketing channels. This is effective for traditional marketing like radio adverts, ads in newspapers, tv ads, and also on digital channels. Digital channels might include social media, youtube, email, SMS, and other digital ads like pay-per-click.

This is a no-brainer the more your audience is bombarded by how great your product or service is the more trust they will put and confidence when purchasing. Trust is a perceived belief and is hard to measure, yet there are ways to work out if a marketing campaign is indeed returning its effort.  

One important thing to do before you start burning all your marketing budget and contacting the various promotion companies is to think retrospectively about how you will measure the return on your investment. The first thing to do is to understand what the costs are, both direct and hidden for your marketing campaign. What is the durability of the campaign and how do you plan to measure the return also known as the goal.

Marketing Costs

To understand your marketing costs you need to factor in the initial cost for the advert, and also the hidden costs. These hidden costs might be related to design and management time for example to create the advert and any ongoing and recurring fees. Once you manage to convert the total marketing effort into an actual cost that will be your first step toward understanding the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.  

Conversion Goals

Next you will need a way to measure the campaign effectiveness. This can be tricky depending on the type of service or product you are selling. For example, if you are selling online your ultimate goal is the payment transaction and with tools like google analytics this can be easily tracked, but if you are running a consultancy business not all leads will turn into an immediate sale. In this type of scenario, a goal could be a contact from a lead like clicking on the call or submitting the contact form.

Actual Return

Using the conversion goals, you have a clear indication of what your campaign efforts are resulting in. This should be converted to actual profits, if you are selling a product the profits should be clear. In cases where you are selling a complex service like business to business or consultancy then you can use an average based on the value of the lead or the effort required to get such lead using other channels. For example, if your business to business lead is likely to secure 200K deal but converting such a lead will take much more effort you can assume that that lead is potentially worth a percentage of the business generated. Another way to calculate the return on such value is to compare it to costs from other channels. For example, setting up a stand in an international fair generated x number of leads and costs y. Thus, I can assume that a similar lead interaction would otherwise cost me Y divided by X.

Other things that need to be factored in are bonus costs and infrastructure. If you are giving a bonus to make your campaign more effective this needs to be taken into consideration and subtracted from your actual return.

Duration of the campaign

For us to measure the effective return on investment you will need a start and end date for your campaign. While some marketing channels like pay-per-click ads tend to give an immediate return other marketing channels like search engine optimisation and radio adverts are normally effective over a period of time. For such channels, we would suggest that you average your conversion goals over a longer period of time and then use that average as a monthly goal example 6 month conversion total divided by 6.

Cost to conversion

Once you have the actual cost and conversion return the cost per conversion is easy to work out this is the profit over costs. For example, running a Facebook marketing campaign capped at €300 per month plus agency fee and designer over 6 months. In total I paid €2700 and directly from this campaign I sold 60 products at a profit of 50 euros per sale.  

Understanding your Cost to conversion

Once you do this exercise you know your cost to conversion. If your cost to conversion is positive and high you need to do it more. If your facebook adverts are returning enough profit we would suggest spending more on such ads because it is likely you will increase your return. If you are experiencing low or even negative returns, don’t panic. Here you have learned a valuable lesson that will work to your advantage. The actions to consider are

  1. Should we focus on other channels that might result in a lower cost
  2. Should tune our marketing campaign to be more effective
  3. Are we underselling our product or service at the right price
by Adrian
543 Views0
map-malta-search-engine-optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation Web design
How to rank a website on google search Malta

Webcalibrate has been in the business of search engine optimisations for over 7 years. As our main base is in Malta most of our clients are local and normally, they target a Maltese audience. It is a fact that Google will deliver its results based on the location of the person doing the search, but to do so we need to assist the web engine to correctly identify the target location of the site.

The first step is to have your website registered on a local domain. In Malta we us we either use .com.mt or .mt. If you already have a registered domain you are using we would suggest investing in a Maltese registered Domain and having it redirect to your .com site.

On the website make sure you have a prominent local physical address, ideally in the footer and your business location mapped on a google map. When content writing one should focus on keywords that contain local variations like Malta, Maltese or specific villages or cities. SEO efforts to build Inbound links should be more focused on local sites to influence as much as possible local searches.

How cloudflare can improve your website and hurt your SEO

From our experiments, we identified that the location of the server hosting your sites also plays an important part. This can be challenging as several sites are hosted with international hosting companies having servers speared worldwide. The location of your server helps you rank better and having a near client-server will reduce internet latency when loading a website.

A common issue that happens to high-traffic websites that use cloud flare or any other caching services is that this could confuse search engines when identifying the location and target of the website.  Cloudflare target audience is mainly the USA so when setting up services like cloud flare one should keep an eye on the setup of the mirror server and keep it as close as possible. For Malta, an ideal server location would be Amsterdam as at least this is within Europe.

 Google business profile better known as google my business is a very effective tool that should be used to create short posts and make sure reviews are replied to immediately. Also from google business profile one can get very interesting insights on how your website is being found.

We at webcalibrate are experts at ranking sites in Malta and we are more than happy to help you increase your traffic and conversions.

by Adrian
880 Views0

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