Brands have embraced automation to help them carry out a spectrum of everyday tasks.

According to a recent survey published by Social Media Today, 75 percent of marketing teams use some form of an automation tool. However, with growing popularity, there are growing concerns.

The same survey reports that 61 percent of marketers are concerned about the lack of personalization due to automation. Likewise, a global study by PWC found that as technology advances, most consumers want brands to use technology as a tool for increasing personalized support. 

Put simply, customers want more human interaction, not less.

That's why it’s vital that today’s businesses find the right balance between automation and personalization. Companies that go overboard on automation can come across as detached and generic. On the other hand, those that get too personal with customers can come off as intrusive and creepy. Brands need to get it right to maintain a trusting relationship with their customers. 

Here are ways marketers can successfully balance automation and personalization.

Offer Timely, Valuable Content

Email campaigns are an effective, low-cost way to leverage automation and personalization, but marketers need to be careful not to clog consumer inboxes. Instead, they should focus on offering relevant and valuable content that doesn’t involve using intrusive data.

Most consumers are familiar with receiving personalized content based on an action, such as an online purchase, that features a related product or service.

Using transactional data to send automated, personalized emails can be less intrusive since it’s a natural, and at this point expected, component of the relationship.

Marketers can also use geographical data, such as a customer’s zip code or address, to deliver personalized content, like creating a segmented list of customers and offering them discounts to nearby events. Although consumers dislike when brands bombard them with irrelevant, generic messaging, they also don’t like overly personal messages that infringe on their privacy.  

Respect Consumer Privacy

Research shows that 81 percent of consumers want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them, but not at the expense of their privacy.

There is a fine line between highly relevant content and tactics that take marketing personalization too far. 

For example, sending mass emails to consumers with the same promotions or offers isn’t an effective strategy. Consumer interests vary significantly.

Marketers should pay attention to their target audience and consider whether the interaction will make them feel special or unsettled.

Customer data can be used effectively, but content that’s too personalized can disturb customers, thus putting them off the brand. 

Enhance the Customer Experience

It’s crucial that marketers use technology to improve the consumer experience, rather than eliminate the human touch. For instance, British grocery chain Sainsbury’s delivered an exceptional customer experience with its “This Time It’s Ultra Personalized!” campaign.

The store used smartphone location data to provide personalized offers to customers through their mobile devices as they walked around the store.

Not only did the campaign promote in-store offers, but it helped the company gain insights about how people navigated the aisles. As a result, Sainsbury’s was able to make better merchandising decisions and improve its in-store customer experience. Marketers must remember that relationships are crucial in business and that automation tools provide additional support.

Combine Automation and Human Touch

There are many ways marketers can mix automation and personalization, such as inserting tags to add customers’s names in emails to make them feel like the message addresses them individually.

Going a step further, marketers can encourage team members to interact with potential customers by making calls, sending emails or requesting a connection on social media.      

For example, if a visitor downloads content from the brand’s website, it’s a good idea to have someone on the team reach out personally, immediately.

According to an oft-cited Lead Response Management Study, waiting more than 10 minutes to follow up decreased the odds of securing a lead by as much as 400 percent.

If automation and personalization are going to be effective, it's important to find a way to balance the two.

Overdoing automation can make brand messages seem robotic and irrelevant. Likewise, getting too personal can overwhelm consumers.

A successful relationship between consumers and brands ultimately relies on the right blend.

source: entrepreneu

Search engine algorithms are ever changing, which means that anyone with a website needs to stay up to date on today’s SEO marketing trends. Not only is new technology changing the way humans search, but search engines crawlers are using different criteria to rank your website.

Implementing these SEO marketing trends will help any business stay competitive in 2019.

1. Consider search engines other than Google.

While Google is inarguably still king of search, don’t forget about optimizing your content for Apple and Amazon’s search engines.

Amazon is the most valuable public company on the planet. This means that anyone with a product to sell should conduct Amazon keyword research.

Similarly, Apple’s App Store is increasingly important for driving traffic. Today, over 60 percent of online traffic comes from mobile. But 90 percent of the time people spend browsing on their phones occurs on apps. The future of mobile search could be the App store, not Google.

From a business’ perspective, the increasing importance of the App store means understanding its unique organic search algorithms. These value factors like app click-through rate, engagement and whether keywords match search queries.

2. Quality content is worth more than quantity.

One of the most important Google search algorithm updates in 2018 shifted the search engine’s attention towards content quality. This trend will persist in 2019.

Though backlinks remain important, Google is getting more sophisticated when it comes to determining how good your website content is. Of course, the amount of content you produce is still important. But one of the most significant SEO marketing trends of 2019 is prioritizing quality more than ever before.

Specifically, this means writing long-form content and not misleading search engines or the consumer. In 2019, entrepreneurs should place special attention to on-page SEO. Increasingly sophisticated crawlers are paying special attention to user-friendly URLs, optimizing images, and internal structure and linking.

3. Website speed affects UX and rankings.

Increasing website speed is one of the most important SEO marketing trends in 2019. Luckily, with all the SEO tools available on the market, it’s easy to check just how fast your website is.

Speed is more important than ever thanks to Google’s mobile-first index policy. Of course, website speed has always been an important aspect of user experience. Today, it’s important for Google crawlers, too. Ideally, a website should take less than a second to load, which can be hard to accomplish without the assistance of a qualified SEO firm.

And the faster your website is, the higher Google will rank it.

4. Voice search is no longer a novelty.

With the rise of technology like Siri, Google Home and Alexa, voice search already represents 20 percent of total mobile search. It’s predicted to reach 50 percent by 2020.

In other words, integrating voice-search optimized keywords is among the leading SEO marketing trends of this year. Voice search keywords are often shorter, more colloquial, and in the form of commands or questions.

5. Don’t dismiss linkless mentions.

As its name would suggest, a linkless mention is when your brand is referenced without a link being attached.

While backlinks are still an important factor used by search engines to determine content quality, linkless mentions are given more weight than ever before. This is partially due to the perception is that linkless mentions are more genuine, unlike black hat SEO techniques like paid links. Social media mentions are also playing an increasingly important role in evaluating website quality.

In a Google patent, the company even classifies “implied links” as a subset of a type of links.

6. Structured data is more important than ever.

Structured data is an overarching term for organizing website data. For example, information that you see included along with a website's meta description is structured data. The knowledge graph that appears on the right-hand side of Google is another type.

Its purpose is to make it easier and faster for search engines to crawl your website.

So whether you’re including online reviews or more detail about your content, structured data is one of the top SEO marketing trends to help Google classify your information in 2019.

7. SEO marketing trends for Google and beyond.

Virtually every business in the world is competing for Google rankings. On top of that, Google regularly changes its algorithms and the technology we favor for search will continue to evolve.

The biggest takeaway for 2019 is that mobile is more important than ever. This has a ripple effect: Entrepreneurs must optimize their content for Apple’s algorithms too, as well as follow Google’s mobile updates that prioritize speed and structured data.

Not only that, but other tech giants like Amazon and devices that include voice search are changing what ‘optimization’ means. But above all, a website’s overarching goal should always be to appeal to its audience. The better your content is, the higher Google will rank it.

source: Entrepreneur