Capture attention with Stories
Who has not heard of Stories in 2018? Do you doubt that it is an interesting tool for your blog or your business, especially if you can only publish something that will last a short 24 hours? To start with, do you know who your customers are? If your targeted audience is the millennial generation and you do not have a professional Instagram account yet, you should take time to read our article 8 ways to promote your company on Instagram. Indeed, there is already more than 400 millions of Stories users in the world!
Whether it is a story from Snapchat, Instagram or Facebook, this new communication channel became popular very quickly, mostly with younger generations. In addition to being a way of communication that works well with smartphones, a Story often takes less attention time than conventional publicity or publication. It is the images that speak in Stories; we do not need to remind you that a picture is worth a thousand words. Thus, since what you post is ephemeral, people will more look to know what is happening with your business to make sure they are not missing anything. Furthermore, have you noticed that Stories are always located on top of the page? Your targeted audience has more chance to see your publication than when he or she scrolls all posts and publicities from others. You now have no more excuses!
Siri, Cortana, Alexa: Voice search is changing the rules
Siri, Cortana, and Alexa are not top girls names in 2018 but tool that let people do voice searches. Indeed, whether it is Google’s Home, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana or Amazon’s Alexa, these technology giants bet on these devices to simplify your life. Do you need to know what will be the weather in Paris next week? Save yourself time and efforts: ask your personal assistant! According to the latest statistics, many marketing specialists estimate that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by the year 2020. It shall not decrease over time.
You might ask yourself what impacts these little devices will have on your website, your blog, or your online shop? To start with, when you look for something on Google, you have many pages of results, graded according to their appropriateness. A voice search offers most of the time only one result; your potential customer or visitor will not look for other answers if he or she is satisfied with what his or her personal assistant will find. Here is a little example: You are in Montreal and you are looking for a sushi restaurant in your area. Siri or Cortana will not tell you all the Japanese restaurants available but only one or two well-rated places. Moreover, the way a question is asked is different when written or when told; it may change the way we use keywords for campaigns or referencing. Thus, there will certainly a lot of work to do in order to become the result the personal assistant will choose to tell people. It will not be surprising if they become more and more expansive like for the Google Ads.
Look for and publish your users' feedback
As mentioned above, 2018 has been the year of fake: fake accounts, fake results, fake news… One of this year challenges will be to recover the trust of customers when most of them become more and more distrustful of advertising, brands and social media. One solution found to rectify this situation is to make your product or your company truer, more human and transparent.
How can we proceed? First, there are many basic rules to follow, one of which is to create honest content or products. Do not hesitate to ask your customers to leave a review, positive or negative, and then try to improve what is not up to date. You probably have been at least once on Trip Advisor; would it be strange to see only good feedback without any mention of issues or needed improvement? Did you hear about the false review affair in Europa? To summarize it briefly, the owners of an Italian business were condemned to jail because they were offering to write false good reviews for hotels and restaurants for money. Even if it might be less pleasant to have bad feedback, it is an opportunity to show that you care if you leave it and take the time to answer. If you do not feel comfortable to answer, please read our article How to deal with negative comments on social media.
To conclude, a new year often brings plenty of novelties and we hope that you will have many opportunities and projects with your WebSelf website. Our team wishes you a merry holiday season. We will be back with a lot of new articles in 2019!
