I sat in on a free webinar hosted by Clearscope and by Rand Fishkin: How to Stay Ahead of Marketing’s 5 Big 2024 Trends. A lot of interesting observations and thoughts. I’m not sure I followed it all. I’ll definitely need to review the workshop. Some of things that did catch my attention were, and forgive me if I didn’t quite get it right.
Martech Less Trackable
Martech is less trackable, and the recommendation is to test your own models. Everyone is blocking things resulting in less trackability for marketers. This obviously makes it harder to determine where customers are coming from.
Dark Traffic
Dark Traffic is a concept I had never heard about until today. If I understood the idea behind this is, someone hears about a product or company through a video, podcast, webinar and then later goes and searches for that product or business online, or maybe the person directly types in the URL. This is now a visitor on your site, but it’s classified in Google Analytics as organic search or direct search channels, neither or which is quite accurate. So, when looking at your organic and direct traffic channels, a lot of real information is being hidden in there and some of it is this “dark traffic”. What I took away from this was, being visible on podcasts, webinars etc. is valuable.
Less Ad Spend can be Good
Less Ad spend can be good for traffic and business. This seems contradictory but from what I understood from the great pizzeria example, these platforms that people put ads on, they already have a good idea of the journey a customer is going to take to reach you, so at some point in that journey they post up your ad and charge you. The thing is, the probability that the potential customer was going to go to your site anyway, was already high, so why bother with an ad? So the moral, is test this by shutting off your ads for awhile, or part of your ads and seeing what the difference is, if any.
Less Competitive Channels
For this next one, what I understood is that some of the harder to measure channels like social media, etc. are the least competitive, most affordable, and most effective. Invest and make an impact on these channels because your competitors may not be doing so.
Zerio Click World
Zero click world. The idea here is platforms want to keep you on their platform. i.e. Linked in wants to keep you on LinkedIn; Facebook wants to keep you on Facebook; YouTube wants to keep you on YouTube, etc. As a result content on these platforms that don’t take users away from the platform are rewarded more. Very few platforms send referral traffic. There was a great graph where the few platforms that do most of the referral traffic are only a small percentage of the channels where most people spend their time online. Social is the largest channel where people spend most of their time online and social doesn’t do much, if any, referral traffic. So, the take away is, figure out what channel your potential customer is using, figure out what that channel does, referral traffic or not, and tailor content to that channel.
Email Marketing: “Last Channel Standing”
The final piece of knowledge I got was that email marketing is the “last channel standing”. What I took away from this was that eventually everyone uses email. Even the younger generation grows up, gets jobs and uses email! Other channels and platforms may die out or plateau over time, email marketing is still going strong and will continue to. There was mention that acquisition of other businesses because they have a good email list may be valuable for some larger businesses. Building your email list is vital when you’re starting out. Good to know!
All in all a very interesting listen this afternoon and I’m quite pleased with my first Clearscope webinar. I also Googled Clearscope after so I could sign up for future webinars!
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