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By Henry Brown

Marketing is a vital component in the growth of any small business. But digital marketing has currently taken a huge chunk of the marketing landscape, especially with the continual growth of the online world. Now, with digital marketing changing at a fast rate, small business owners need to learn to adapt to new marketing trends to stay in business and thrive. Your ability to implement new and relevant digital marketing trends can help your small business remain competitive in this modern business world. Do you want your small business to stay ahead of the digital marketing game this year? Then it will be best if you do not ignore the following digital marketing trends.

Going all-out for local SEO and Google listings

If you operate a small business, you can never go wrong with making your business visible on Google My Business listings and local SEO options. Many potential clients who are ready to do a business search for options within their locality. That means making your business locally visible will help attract the local market you need. If your small business is into the sales of goods, for example, you should be able to take advantage of e-commerce SEO to make your online store more visible to potential local buyers.

Video marketing

Believe it or not, video marketing is increasingly becoming the preferred digital marketing strategy for many small business owners. The stats show that video marketing is drawing in the numbers that business owners want to see with their marketing. Indeed, experts believe that a huge chunk of the world’s internet traffic by next year will be video content. So, if your business isn’t getting on it now, then you’ll be missing out. Furthermore, the cost and time involved in streaming, downloading, and watching videos online seem to be reducing drastically.

Maximizing social media channels

The social media world is home to close to four billion users – and that number is only expected to grow in the coming years. Social media channels are a great way for business owners to connect with their followers. But, ironically, culling social media channels is actually a smart way to maximize their use. It makes sense because trying to remain relevant on so many platforms is very time-consuming. The best approach is to focus on a few channels that target the demographics you want. Besides the need to declutter, you should also aim at using social media channels for direct sales. These platforms have developed beyond merely posting updates. Today, businesses can add links to their posts to make it possible for followers to make purchases directly.

The power of voice search

Many small business owners ignore the power of optimizing for voice search because it’s yet to feature in Google’s algorithm. However, this search option is still growing in usage. Companies need to optimize their content for voice search because voice queries produce different results to text search. And being able to take advantage of this search option offers significant SEO benefits.

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Henry Brown is an online marketing executive. When he isn’t talking shop, he’s roaming the streets of London, uncovering the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.