Successful Business Leaders Tell All: Top Digital Marketing Trends for 2016

What would you ask if you could score an exclusive sit-down with a successful startup leader or entrepreneur? As a solopreneur myself, I’m always eager to learn about the marketing secrets that kick-start a company’s rise to success.

From SEO and mobile marketing to influencer outreach and content marketing, keeping pace with the latest digital marketing trends is a serious challenge. Gaining insight from someone who’s been in the marketing trenches before is invaluable.

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with four startup leaders. These successful visionaries shared their predictions for digital marketing trends in 2016:

What’s Next for Mobile Marketing?

Here’s what Andy Crestodina at Orbit Media, an innovation studio that’s been designing and building mobile responsive websites since 2011 has to say about UX:

“2015 was a tipping point in terms of smartphone usage for everything from mobile search to mobile ecommerce,” said Crestodina. “Now that Google has essentially made mobile-friendliness an SEO requirement, we’re witnessing a major push towards mobile optimization that goes beyond responsive design.”

“Optimizing for user experience (UX) is going to be huge in 2016. In order to stand out in the world of mobile, businesses need to provide their customers with a frictionless, memorable experience. Businesses need to ask, ‘What is essential content and what can be pared down or replaced for a more interactive experience?’ Micro interactions, for example, are an easy way to delight customers and add value to the mobile experience.”

Why Should Content Marketing Be Part of Every B2B Digital Strategy?

Brian Sutter with Wasp Barcode Technologies, a digital inventory tracking company, discusses why content marketing is essential at every stage of the B2B buying cycle:

“With so much hype around content marketing, it’s natural for startups and small businesses to wonder if it’s truly worth the time and effort, or if it’s just a lot of buzz with no substance,” says Sutter. “Content marketing is absolutely worth it, as long as you do it correctly. For small B2B companies, that means understanding how different pieces of content fit in the B2B sales cycle.”

“At Wasp Barcode Technologies, for example, we create a lot of informational content to help businesses better understand the different applications for our products as well as content geared towards best practices for using our products. These pieces fit the sales cycle differently. Information on different applications fits the early stages of the sales cycle when we are defining the buying vision and building awareness; how-to information comes later when we are differentiating ourselves from the competition. I recommend businesses list out each stage of their sales cycle in a chart and match up content pieces specifically for a customer’s needs at that stage. You can’t give customers what they want if you don’t know what they need.”

What’s Next for SEO in 2016?

Nadav Dakner, the co-founder and CEO of InboundJunction and an SEO expert, shares his predictions:

“SEO is continually evolving; the current challenge is to find that perfect balance between creating content for humans while also ensuring it's optimized for web crawlers,” says Dakner. "As a rule of thumb, you should always focus on providing added value to people through solving problems and answering questions". Google cares about whether a website page is useful content that answers search queries.

"Optimizing a website page for a specific keyword is only the first step. The magic comes when you deliver immediate useful content, incorporate relevant images and videos to lower your bounce rate and building a strong on-site infrastructure". It's worthwhile to create dedicated feature pages or landing pages in your site designated to rank for specific search terms and improve your sales and CTR. That'll also assist in building backlinks through better relevancy in your anchor texts and destination URLs.

What’s Next for Link Building?

Here’s why Elad Mor, the CEO at MarketAcross, a digital branding agency, says link building is far from dead.

“There’s been a lot of hype over the last year that Google has killed link building,” said Elad. “That’s not the case at all. Just like with keyword optimization, the key is quality, not quantity. Authoritative links are a critical part of Google’s ranking algorithm because they convey trust and credibility. It’s all about placement.”

“Contextual links are the strongest option for linking back to a website. A well-placed mention on an industry blog or high-quality resource page can strengthen the relevancy and authority of your website. Think of links as professional references: the best references are those with a wide network and a strong reputation that will convey credibility and recognition by the online community.”

Bottom Line

Understanding impactful marketing trends is essential to building a smarter digital marketing strategy in 2016. Technology is moving at such a rapid pace, it’s natural to feel like you’ve got a case of whiplash trying to keep up. From smarter mobile design and link building to a robust content marketing plan and the integration of videos into website content, focus on how each of these tactics fits into your overall strategy and execute from there.

Source :http://www.business.com

My 10 Best Pieces Of Career Advice For Millennials

Giving advice to millennials is extremely important to me because I am one of them and even though the economy was better back in 2006, it took me eight months to find a marketing job. I succeeded because I started six months before graduation, collected eight internships, seven leadership positions on campus and graduated with honors. I failed because I didn’t know how to build and leverage relationships. Either way, I learned a lot about what it takes to build a successful career over the years. Good career choices are extremely important early in your career because you can set yourself up for success later on. Even though you might end up in a completely different career, the skills you acquire and the people you meet, are what will open the doors for you. The following are ten things that all millennials should do to get ahead in their careers:

1. Think of your career as a series of experiences:

The most optimistic and intelligent way to look at your career isn’t how long you stay with one employer or that you focus on what you majored in at college. You need to collect experiences throughout your careers, whether that be with five employers or ten, with one business function or five or in one country or three. The idea is that you need to be a lifelong learner if you want to make an impact, succeed and feel accomplished. The experiences you have expand your world view, give you new perspectives and make you a more interesting person.

2. Don’t settle for a job you’re not passionate about:

 A lot of people are pushing college graduates to just get a job to pay the bills and that isn’t the greatest advice because research shows that you won’t last long there if you do. Furthermore, no smart company is going to have someone who is only there to make money because there’s always someone else who wants it more. When you’re passionate about your job, you’re excited, you work longer hours and end up accomplishing much more. Life is too short to settle for a career that you hate!

3. Focus on making a big impact immediately:

 The quicker you make an impact in a company the more attention and support you will get. Millennials understand this well because they won’t want to wait five years to get on a project where they can make this type of impact. Starting on day one, you have to learn as much as possible and start mastering your job so you can latch on to the bigger projects faster and prove yourself. By doing this, you will explode your career and become more valuable in your company, which will increase your pay, title and you’ll get to work on better projects.

4. Take risks early and often in your career:

 One of the important lessons this economy has taught us is that not taking risks is risky. There is so much out of our control and if we just keep doing what we did yesterday, we can’t get ahead. By taking a risk, you are putting yourself in a position to learn, whether you succeed or fail. You’re also showing to your management that you’re willing to put your reputation on the line to make things happen. As we become an ever more entrepreneurial society, those that take risks, both inside and outside of the corporate walls, will become more successful.

5. Spend more time with people than with your laptop:

 Students are plugged in and don’t understand that he strongest relationship are formed in person, not online. I constantly see students looking down at their iPhones and iPad’s instead of at people’s faces and it’s a missed opportunity. Soft skills will always become more cherished in companies so it’s important to drop your technology and actually communicate with people. People hire you, not technology and you have to remember that!

6. Measure your work outcomes and build case studies:

 If you look at any student resume, they almost always look the same. They have the same fields (education, experience, school activities). Under their experience fields, they list a company and then general information such as “Managed XXX project”. They dress up their experience bullets so they can turn menial tasks into something more marketable. The problem is that recruiters today, and especially in the future, are looking for outcomes. They want to know the numeric impact you’re having on a company through your work, which means increasing revenue or decreasing costs. Always think about measuring your projects and keeping track of the results because that’s what’s going to help you justify promotions.

7. Sacrifice today to position yourself for tomorrow:

You can’t have everything you want today so you need to work hard to put yourself in a better position in the future. From 2007 to 2009, I put in over one hundred hours a week working on something I loved. As a result, now I have the freedom to do what I want, when I want. While others would have used that same time to go out every night and party, I realized the bigger picture and you can too. The more you do early in your career, the more it will pay off later in life and you will be thankful just like I am.

8. Start your own website to centralize your work profile:

 You need a single place where you can store everything you accomplish and that should be a website under your name (yourfullname.com). By doing this, you can easily refer others to your work, whether it be hiring managers or for freelance projects. As you grow and develop your career, add new projects, education, skills and examples of your work to your website. Your website is a living, breathing resume that is always available to people even when you’re asleep.

9. Travel as much as you can, while learning about cultures and languages:

We live in a global marketplace now and companies are looking to expand and hire the best talent, regardless of location. The more you travel and experience the world, the better you will be at serving this marketplace and taking advantage of it. Furthermore, if you’re learning new languages, you are ahead of the curve. It’s hard for companies to find workers who are fluent in languages so if that’s you, you become more marketable.

10. Locate mentors who live your desired lifestyle:

 Most students aren’t selective about mentors and just feel fortunate to have them in the first place. I believe you need to choose the right mentor, who you can support and who has time to support you. That person should be someone in your industry who is living the lifestyle that you dream of. This way, they can tell you exactly what you need to do each day to get to their level. For instance, if you want to travel and do consulting in the future then find someone who has a job at McKinsey or Accenture to mentor you. Based on your meetings with them, you might even decide that the consulting lifestyle isn’t a good match for you after all.