One of the things I find interesting when I meet a potential client is their idea of how to best use our services. New prospects often fall into two categories, those who are placing an order and those who provide only a piece of the information we need to best serve them. These are the two most common mistakes people make when hiring a consultant.

Order Filler

This usually starts with someone saying “I don’t really know much about marketing but here’s what you need to do”. One example is of a person who informed me they needed an email campaign. I said, that’s fine but let’s take a step back and tell me know more about your company. During that discussion, I discovered what they were saying was very different from what they had on their website. The messaging was all over the place.
In this instance what they really needed was a clear message across all platforms starting with their website. Once that was in place it was time to discuss an e-mail campaign. As it turned out, they had fewer than 50 contacts. Our next step was to build up their database before initiating a campaign. I could have simply set up an e-mail campaign as requested but that would not have been in the best interest of the client.

Silo Creators

The second challenge we face as consultants are the silo creators. These are the people who provide you with only a piece of the whole picture. When working with manufacturing clients the first series of questions I ask include:

• What’s your capacity?
• Which product line is most profitable?
• Are you fully staffed in the area you want to grow?

I often get some strange looks, after all what does a marketing consultant need with this information? The answer is simple, I need to know what to promote.

That said, let’s look at those questions again…

• What’s your capacity? – There’s only one thing worse than having product with no customers and that’s having customers and no product.
• Which product line is most profitable? – Why would you want to sell product that doesn’t make you the most money?
• Are you fully staffed in the area you want to grow? – With manufacturing employees so hard to come by, are you prepared to manage growth in the face of employees leaving?

Many years ago I was working with a manufacturer. We increased their orders through marketing and some direct sales. After a couple months I was in a meeting with the owner discussing the success of the campaign when he said “yeah we have more work but we hate that kind of work.” This is information that I could have used in advance. It’s important to educate consultants about your entire business so that they can make sound decisions on your behalf.

 

As a small business owner, you’re always playing catch up. You no sooner step in the door and hang up your cape – you are a superpower, after all – and the onslaught begins. It’s nearing the end of the year, and your newest mission requires a focus on what’s ahead.

Being prepared for what’s coming in today’s fast-paced, changing world means knowing what to expect in marketing. So leave your cape on the hook and take a look at the predicted trends for 2017.

1. Video and Visual

Using video is a huge trend that every marketer should consider in their visual storytelling plan. It’s a strategy that you can build on to create important ongoing messages.

In other words, don’t expect a “Chewbacca Mom” viral sensation, but focus on a visual program that reveals something unique about your company, product, or service. Video content rules the internet, with video enjoyment increasing purchase intent by 97% and brand association by 139%. Stay responsive to consumer trends by budgeting for video in your marketing strategy.

2. Immersive Experience Marketing

Who would’ve predicted that Pokemon Go would be so popular? At its high point, it was earning $10 million a day. Although the excitement has faded, the app shows us that augmented reality is a viable option with real potential for earning revenue.

The prediction is you will see more VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) games and ads from brands. VR is a computer-generated simulation of a real life situation where the user is completely immersed and feels the experience is reality. AR involves layers of computer-generated enhancements that blend into the real world so that reality and AR enhance each other but are easily differentiated.

VR requires the use of headsets, like Facebook’s Oculus, which is equipped with VR technology, and is used for training flight simulators for pilots. You’re already seeing AR technology on score overlays for televised sports and in pop-out 3D text messages. Expect to see the use of AR holograms increase in the future.

Both give the user an enriched, immersive experience that delivers visuals in what was seemingly only science fiction just a short while ago. AR is evolving much faster than expected and will be used more in all mobile devices as a way to communicate at a whole new level. By 2017, IDC (International Data Corporation) predicts that more than a billion people worldwide will regularly access apps, content, and date through an AR/VR platform.

3. Live Platforms and Live Video

The attraction of “being in the moment” in live streaming is going to push live platforms and video into greater use. In the past several years, we’ve seen these technologies emerge as a popular way to interact with customers. There will be new live platforms like Meerkat and Facebook Live, where more brands will be willing to try out the latest in content offerings.

Live video streaming has had its shortcomings with technical difficulties, and its television competition won’t be easy to beat. However, the opportunities for brands to host live webinars, workshops, and other events where the appeal of instant gratification and immediate feedback will rival the TV audience.

Experiment with 360 videos to give your audience a three-dimensional experience with YouTube 360° or Facebook 360, and expect to see new apps and platforms adopt the technology. With a faster internet and the expansion of mobile phone use, this is a trend that’s not going away.

4. Optimize for Mobile

For several years this has been a trend that’s made the list, and for good reason. It’s still making the grade because the impact continues as mobile use overtakes desktop in retail use for the first time this year.

Putting mobile first as you optimize your website makes sense when Google is working on the same thing. They will be indexing so that your site’s mobile version will be indexed first. This mobile-first indexing means you need to have a responsive site where the primary content and structured markup is “equivalent across mobile and desktop.”

Making your site content easily digested on a mobile device is more important than ever with this major indexing shift from Google. What was a mobile-friendly concern is now more of a mobile-centric requirement if you don’t want serious problems in your search engine ranking.

5. Cross-Device Marketing

The typical digital consumer now owns 3.64 connected devices. The number of laptops, smartphones, wearables, and consoles gives brands the ability to reach an audience on multiple devices and in manifold environments.

Because of the ability to find your audience wherever they go, in essence making them a moving data target, brands have an even greater opportunity to produce and distribute content that is customer-focused. Embracing the customer experience as the heart of your marketing strategy will give you an edge over the challenge of cross-device tracking.

Because transactions are often occurring in an app, and cookies are no longer sufficient to track users, it’s a balancing act to identify the audience. What you can do until there are innovative solutions out there is work to make customer service your mission.

Listen and learn from your customers and let them determine the experience that your company needs to adopt. Then make the changes in your services or product to address these concerns. Looks like some things don’t change after all.

6. Writing

Visual content may be on the rise, but text is as important as ever because most of our communication is still based on the written word. There’s a story to write that a picture (or video) alone can’t tell. Sometimes you need those thousand words.

The problem is that most marketers aren’t good writers. And bad writing is damaging for your brand. Your writing communication must be structured so it’s easy to understand and read. It must be free of errors – spelling and grammatical. Forget jargon and committee-speak. Say what you mean with clarity, brevity, and plain language, letting the lawyers revel in creating confusion for their readers.

Ask yourself “what’s in it for the reader?” When Samsung issued a press release on their Galaxy Note7, there was no mention of the serious nature of the phones catching on fire. It was a mere “incident” involving a “battery cell issue.”

We have to do better than this. Poor writing not only makes you look unprofessional, it can destroy trust. As the amount of content keeps growing and readers filter out the white noise by skipping posts and skimming articles, you have to make every word count.

Perhaps writing is more important now than ever before.

There’s a new penalty coming in January of 2017 from the search engine giant. While it may sound like a rare and deadly condition acquired from eating undercooked beef, intrusive interstitials will be potentially lethal only to your website’s traffic.

Google revealed its latest news on interstitials in an innocuous-sounding blog post entitled “Helping Users Easily Access Content on Mobile.” The penalty on intrusive interstitials, or pop-ups, is another change affecting search engine rankings.

Like this latest move, Google has made other algorithm changes to improve user experience of the search function. In 2014 it added a label to mobile-friendly pages, indicating those sites with content that’s optimized for mobile. Mobile-friendly websites have text that is readable without zooming or horizontal scrolling, and links are spaced enough apart to avoid tapping incorrectly.

Two years later and Google has removed the label now that 85% of mobile search results are already optimized for mobile, while continuing to apply mobile-specific ranking criteria. Two years ago they also began boosting rankings for sites that use HTTPS encryption in an effort to improve security for users.

What’s an Intrusive Interstitial, exactly?

Google will suppress rankings by punishing sites that publish annoying pop-ups. This includes anything that pops up between the beginning and end of an article that blocks immediate access to site content and forces interaction with the screen. It also includes intrusive ads that come at the beginning of the article, pushing the content further down the page.

So far, it appears this will affect only mobile applications where the interruption to the screen is much greater. In its post, Google gave these three examples of intrusive interstitials:

• A pop-up that covers the main content, such as a full-page ad. This could occur immediately after navigating from search results to a page or while looking at the page.
• A standalone interstitial that needs to be dismissed before getting to the main content. Many sites currently have interstitial email captures that will have to go.
• A layout on the screen that’s above-the-fold and looks like it’s an interstitial, with the remaining original content underneath the fold. An example is when the top portion of every page or post has a large email capture or promotion.

What this means is there’s more to pop-ups than just the technology, which is why in the post, Google used the pop-up term twice and used interstitials eight times. According to Wikipedia, “interstitials are web pages displayed before or after an expected content page, often to display advertisements or confirm the user’s age (prior to showing age-restricted material).”

The goal is to make sure your visitor sees the searched-for content right away when on mobile devices. No blocking, no scrolling, no having to find and press an “X” or a “No Thanks” button.

When are pop-ups okay to use?

There are exceptions, however, to Google’s new penalty. Your site will remain unaffected by the new algorithmic signal if “used responsibly,” where the end result for users is an unobstructed path to content on mobile devices.

Here are three exceptions to what Google considers disruptive to the user experience:

• A response to a legal obligation. This could be cookie usage for age verification on a liquor company site.
• Login dialogs on content that isn’t publicly indexable, such as email other content behind a paywall.
• Banners that take up a “reasonable amount” of space on the screen. An example is the app install banners used by Chrome and Safari.

There are two alternative pop-ups that are still okay to use, both which are not displayed immediately. One is the two step pop-up. This is when the pop-up only appears if the visitor clicks on a call-to-action placed on the site. The second is exit intent pop-ups. The pop-up is only shown when the visitor moves to click on the back button. Sometimes this doesn’t work on mobile devices because it pops up at the wrong time, so it should be tested out.

As you read this, software programs are undoubtedly being written to help business owners tackle this new issue. Call your web hosting company if you need assistance, or attempt to handle it yourself with a new plugin.

What does it mean for businesses? In order to avoid losing any SEO traffic, it’s important to figure out other ways to make money that don’t disrupt mobile user experience.

51% of digital media takes place on mobile devices, with an average of three hours of internet use a day per adult user, versus less than one hour a day just five years ago. Instead of invasive pop-ups that will lower your SEO, create content that will draw visitors to your site. Give them the information they’re searching for and create leads through embedded forms and calls-to-action.