Digital Marketing Services:
What are digital marketing services?
The difference between marketing digital services in your business in 2023 and what you can achieve in 2024 is going to be a huge leap forward and it’s all thanks to AI.
But how do you use it right and do way more with less and avoid tanking your business by using it wrong in digital marketing services?
5 Digital Marketing Categories
We’re going to hit all five major digital marketing services categories where I’m going to show you the single tactic that’s working best for each in 2024, and the best way to use AI to help you supercharge it and do more in a whole lot less time.
I’ll even help you avoid the traps that most businesses fall into when they use AI the wrong way, so let’s start with our first category, content marketing.
Information On The Front End
Now here’s a truth that I’ve discovered over the past few years in a digital marketing services agency, the businesses that make it really take off in a big way do it by offering information on the front end, then selling on the back end, and what this comes down to is putting out helpful content on a regular basis that people and potential customers can find.
Then watch, listen to, or read and begin to form a little relationship with you, in the process that relationship can easily triple your leads and it costs about 62% less than traditional advertising.
Content Marketing
Now obviously I chose to go all in on videos for my content marketing, but there’s something that can work even better when it comes to relationship building and that’s podcasting.
Think about it, people usually listen to podcasts all the way through sometimes over an hour at a time and going long form like that lets you fast-track that relationship.
You wouldn’t believe it but there’s always been a big problem with podcasts, when you write articles people can find it through a Google search, when you make a video and put it on YouTube, they’ll find you an audience for it but with podcasts discoverability is notoriously hard.
Mostly because the platforms that host podcasts don’t care if people find your show or not, so your new podcast would have traditionally had a really hard time finding an audience.
But there’s a new player in podcasting you may have heard of, it’s YouTube they’ve been quietly dipping their toes in the podcasting arena for over a year now and they’re finally making it a huge priority for them.
The Video Podcast
So 2024 is the year of a kind of hybrid content type, the video podcast, so you can still upload the audio to all the traditional places like Apple Podcast, Spotify and all those but you can also upload the video version right here onto YouTube where you’re much more likely to find your audience because that’s what YouTube does best.
There are podcasts in every single business niche you can think of, but now comes the fun part, actually coming up with topics that you can talk about that would closely align with what you do as a business.
AI can definitely help you out here, this one’s not super surprising, Chat GPT, but how you use it is what’s going to make this such a powerful tool for you.
List 50 Topics
Just start with this prompt, you’re an expert content creator in the fill-in-the-blank Niche, list out 50 topics for a podcast about X for an audience of Y, then just keep track of the ones that make the most sense, that you’d want to talk about in a spreadsheet then take the ones you like.
And one at a time, just ask Chat GBT for a detailed podcast outline for that topic and then take one final pass at it yourself and add in your own bullet points highlighting your own experiences, opinions, and your own advice.
This is an incredible timesaver when you don’t have to start from a blank page and then you add in your own flavour as a final step.
You won’t be making that mistake that most people make when they use Chat GPT to create their content, it’s giving you the raw talking points.
But you’ll be delivering it in your own way in your own voice and that’s what makes this strategy so powerful, and yeah, you might be thinking easy for you to say.
Just A Smartphone & Mic
But setting up a podcast sounds hard, honestly, it’s not as hard as it sounds as long as you have a couple of key elements you can start a podcast using nothing but a smartphone along with an affordable external mic.
I happen to use the road podcaster and I’m going to leave a link to it below if you want to pick one up then you just need a nice-looking background.
Since this is a video you have to do better than a bare white wall, or sitting on your bed, and honestly, this isn’t any different from the background in a Zoom meeting.
You just need a semi-put-together well-lit setting with maybe some books and plants and that’s it, you know the advantage of video podcasting is you can create a lot of content without a lot of heavy investment on your end.
You can get away with a simple AI editing program and you can even look at your outline of a computer screen that’s just to the side of your camera and you’re golden.
There’s actually another hidden reason why a video podcast is so beneficial right now, more on that in a minute but for now, let’s just move on to our next digital marketing category, social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing:
If you’ve been paying attention to where social media in digital marketing services has gone over the past year, you’ll know that those short-form vertical videos are still where it’s at.
Short Videos
But what kind of shorts are working best right now for social media marketing across Instagram reels, TikTok, and YouTube shorts?
Believe it or not, it’s stuff like this that is absolutely dominating all the shorts platforms and if it looks familiar, it’s because these are basically just repurposed video podcast Clips.
Yes, if you went all in on video podcasting you get to double-dip into all these social media platforms too with pretty much no extra effort.
Once again, thanks to AI, now there are tons of AI tools like Munch and Video that will not only chop up your long-form videos into short social media-ready clips like these, but they’ll do the hard work of choosing which bits have the most viral potential in the first place.
So without any extra work, you could end up with dozens of TikTok or Instagram-ready-clips, YouTube, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest, improving your digital marketing services.
You can post these everywhere automatically and you don’t even have to think about which Clips are going to work best, my advice is having both short and long-form videos online is going to help you the most.
You know both types of video are going to be top-of-funnel discovery tools for your business in 2024, someone who likes one of your short videos might check out your podcast and suddenly they’re all in on your funnel.
When people see you in both places, you’ll essentially achieve what we call omnipresence, that being everywhere effect and that repetition helps you build deeper connections faster.
But what if you don’t have time to sit down and record long-form podcasts, or if you just know you’re not going to actually do it?
Vanessa Lao
Here’s a great tip from social media expert Vanessa Lao, she suggests creating a fake podcast, most times people who do this style don’t even have a podcast and their mic isn’t even plugged in.
They’re looking for an angle and they’re just talking as if they were talking to someone on a podcast that has been proven to work, especially when we look at the metrics of engagement and retention on these videos.
And so it is something that you might want to consider trying, especially if you are someone who’s not ready to have a full-blown podcast just yet.
So I’ll leave that up to you, just make sure that your mic’s actually plugged in or you might just get some trolls pointing it out and blowing your cover, that’s right.
You’re a big fat phoney, now I do recommend these clips being around 1 to 3 minutes long which is longer than I recommended in the past, and the simple reason is that all these shorts platforms are having a really hard time monetizing those super short videos.
You know, slotting ads in between 6-second clips is just really hard to do as it turns out so for 2024. The Sweet Spot is short but not too short in digital marketing services.
And you’ll notice the same thing everywhere, TikTok, YouTube, and even Instagram are starting to push videos longer than a minute long now.
If you want the biggest bang for your book, I recommend sitting down for those long-form video podcasts then letting AI chop them up into the best 1 to 3-minute Clips then posting them across all your platforms.
You know you may only do 1 hour a week but anyone watching your social media will think you’re practically doing content creation as a full-time job.
They’ll see you, they’ll appreciate your deep dives and they’ll start to trust you and that my friend is how you scale a business in 2024.
Now AI had a pretty unexpected negative consequence on digital marketing services this past year, used to be you’d create great content for your website, you’d optimize it for search and you just might rank your blog post.
Google & Bing Takeover
But now that Google and Bing have gotten their paws all over their own AI tools they’re actually starting to deliver search results in a new way rather than showing your article as an answer to a searcher’s question, they’re planning on just answering it themselves through an AI driven chatbot.
So when it comes to our third marketing category, search engine marketing, I would recommend a pretty big pivot here, so specifically in 2024, you need to be focusing on one of two types of search-based content.
Option one, you could go all in on deep experience-based written content, so I’m talking articles that go beyond answering a simple question, simply you know think about it like this if the keyword phrase you’re trying to rank for could be easily answered by AI.
You shouldn’t be going for that phrase anymore, the good news is though, many people are searching for answers that do go a little deeper and require a real human with all their real experiences.
Knowledge, and expert opinions, and those are the types of articles that you should now be focusing on, or, option two, stop trying so hard to rank in Google and try to rank on YouTube instead.
That’s right, don’t think of YouTube as social media, it isn’t, what it is, is the world’s second-largest search engine, so why not go all in on video content that AI is going to have a much harder time replacing.
Sure, there are AI generated channels, but I turn them off pretty quickly and I bet you do too, I don’t know a single person alive who would rather watch a video made up of b-roll clips and a fake voiceover than a real person with real experiences and an actual personality.
Human Experiences
So look through your content and then concentrate on the topics that only a real human can answer what’s the content that comes from your direct experiences you know create more stuff like that you can still use Chat GPT for your first drafts.
But if you want better performance in search engines you’ll have to do Chat GBT one better, so layer in your human experiences, include anecdotes from your life or work inject, a few opinions and take a stance on some issues.
Let’s say your business is selling personal finance coaching, you know you help people get out of debt so if you create plain old generic content you might have Chat GPT spit out some quick articles like five ways to get out of debt, inject your experience though and suddenly people have more reason to read.
You know, maybe you think the debt snowball method is superior to the Avalanche method and your article, defending the reasons why, and then relate them back to when you got out of debt yourself.
You know you can still use Chat GPT for your base content, but you’re also going one layer deeper taking a stance defending it and giving Google’s users something to think about not just a quick bite and of course all these digital marketing categories, up till now, all exist to move people deeper and deeper into your sales funnel and the goal for all these people you’ve connected with so far should be to get them onto your email list where you can take it even deeper faster.
Email Marketing
Yes, email marketing is still the king when it comes to converting interested prospects into paying customers, the only catch is, you’ve got to get them on your list in the first place, and we typically do that by offering a free lead magnet in exchange for their email address, but lead magnets are changing.
Lead Magnets
In the past you might have offered a free ebook or PDF and that can work okay, the average written lead magnet converts at about 22.8% but the conversion rate of people who take a quiz is almost double that at 40%, so that’s twice as many leads on your email list with one simple switch.
The problem’s always been that creating a quiz can be a pretty tedious and confusing process but AI can help you here as well.
AI Quiz Builder
Try interacts new AI quiz builder, just fill in some basic information and let them take over from there, and once it’s finished you can just embed the whole thing right on your website.
But how will you get people to your site to actually opt in for it that brings us to the last category on our list, paid marketing.
So for my money, there is no better way to spend my advertising budget than to spend it on getting people on my email list.
Facebook or Instagram ads are still the best way to do it but the AI solution for making these ads work extra hard for you is where this really gets good in 2024.
Wes McDowell – I’ve got the entire playbook for you right here, just click through to get all my best prompts so you can use Chat GPT like a personal ad writer and marketing manager because if you don’t learn it, someone else in your industry will by the time 2024 is over!
Digital marketing services incorporate many aspects of marketing under this umbrella.
