7 Digital Marketing Trends on the Rise for 2019

Although it is hard to believe, we have only a few weeks left to go in the year, so it is as imperative as ever for digital marketing teams to know which trends, strategies, and technologies are at the forefront of the digital landscape. As always, this year is poised to see some dramatic shifts. From the integration of artificial intelligence to the use of chatbots and personalized custom content, 2019 has a lot in store for us. In this article, we will explore which digital marketing trends are on the rise, why your business should use them, and how they will help you stay ahead of your competition.

  • Voice Search and Audio Content is Popular: there is no doubt about it, smart speakers are popular and are here to stay with the majority of owners never wanting to revert back to a life without a controlled voice-assistant. As voice technology becomes more sophisticated and nuanced, we are going to see more companies creating monetized audio content and voice search for voice-assistant devices like Google Home, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa.

 

  • You Will See Shorter Video Ads: due to an abundance of video content out on the web, consumers are developing shorter attention spans, which means developers have a shorter amount of time to get their message across before the audience loses interest. This year, we will see shorter ads that are near or below the ten-second mark.

 

  • Chatbots Are Becoming Normalized: the novelty of chatbots are wearing off as more brands are using them for customer service roles. This is mainly because they offer a two-way communication channel 24/7 and are effective at producing mass communication. Combine this with the fact that they are relatively easy to make and are perfect for widespread use across multiple platforms like food delivery services, scheduling appointments, generating FAQ answers, and clothing store websites.

 

  • Video Marketing Will Continue to Trend: videos are practically everywhere and studies show that they account for a massive portion of internet traffic. According to Social Media Today, not only do videos increase landing conversions by 80% but 90% of consumers use video to help them make buying decisions. Marketers can use Youtube and Instagram to run video ads, partner with influencers for product placement, and get endorsements from social media influencers.

 

  • Don’t Forget About Live Video: with the rise of live streaming services like Instagram’s stories, Facebook’s live streaming, and Youtube Gaming, more internet users are gravitating towards watching these types of platforms. Consumers who has seen a live stream are far more likely to purchase a product, event ticket, or service if they know how it works or have seen its value in real-time.

 

  • Brands Are Leaning Into Brutal Honesty: unfortunately, marketing has a negative stigma around it, with a lot of company’s and sales representatives being perceived as deceitful due to exaggerated product promises or unethical advertising practices.  Beyond this, there is an abundance of information available online about brands, products, and businesses, which means more people are aware of the shortfalls of the services being provided. This has forced more companies to become purely transparent and brutally honest in what they are providing consumers. In addition to this, negative feedback is getting addressed directly and two-way communication channels are being opened up to help form better relationships between consumer and business.

 

  • Mobile Advertising is a Must: according to Statista, there will be approximately 4.68 billion people using mobile phones by 2019 with the majority of these users spending their time on social media and mobile phone applications. With that many people using mobile phones, mobile marketing is a must for digital marketers.

 

Beyond these seven digital marketing trends, look out for the rise of visual search where users can upload an image to conduct a search to get specific results and the subtle art of influencer marketing. Although influencers may not openly endorse products, long-term relationships are being forged to produce organic endorsements that are generally more accepted and well perceived by consumers. If you combine and use the above digital marketing trends, you’re going to be able to surpass your competition while catering to your audience in a more authentic and direct way.

Creating a Competitive Marketing Strategy

How has digital marketing changed within this year?

Any form of marketing progresses with time, but digital marketing has seen swift advances within the last year. It is crucial that you understand these changed changes in order to stay relevant and competitive with your marketing strategy.  

 

“Mobilfication”

This has become a popular buzzword in the marketing industry. Consumers use their cell phones for a variety of reasons, but when selling a product it is essential to have an aesthetically pleasing ad or website. You can do this by creating a mobile strategy that encourages a potential customer to engage with your website. This can include a text message, a follow on your business’s social media account, or an email opt in. These messages can include discount codes in order to create a new customer. Mobile is a field that is ever-increasing and it will continue to be a top priority for markets for years to come.

 

Video Marketing

If you are not using Facebook Live as a digital marketing resource, you should begin going Live as soon as possible. Many studies have been conducted and have concluded that videos are more effective in comparison with texts. I want to encourage you to create a goal, this varies for each person, but creating 5 live videos per month is a sufficient place to start. Begin to establish a habit of producing quality videos in order to connect with your potential customers. If you commit to your success you will see the results!

 

Creating a Chatbot

Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular and an effective tool for organizations. This strategy can be used to create engagement, customer service response, and answer general questions about your business. The power of this engine is the instant gratification of an answer to your question. Additionally, it is very hard to tell whether it is a live person or a bot when created correctly. The open rates for chatbots are incredibly high, which is why this method is increasingly powerful and should be adapted in your digital marketing plan.

Keep pressing forward to success!

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3 Marketing Tools that Every Entrepreneur Needs

As an entrepreneur, it can feel like there is not enough time in the day to accomplish all of the tasks at hand. There are a few tools that I recommend, to greatly impact your business while helping you manage your time.

Use Evernote to stay organized. When it comes to marketing your business, organization is essential.  You never know when a new idea will come to mind, and if you are not able to organize and prioritize your notes,  you may miss out on opportunities to grow. Evernote will assist you with capturing your ideas, trends, and inspirations, all while storing them on one easily accessible location. You can access this material on your phone, laptop, or tablet. This is a perfect tool to help capture your research and brainstorm ideas all in one place.

Buffer is helpful with Social Media Management. Buffer is a social media management tool that will help you establish your social posting efforts. Social media is extremely powerful within your business, this is why it is important that you stay active and relevant on different platforms. Buffer gives you the ability to connect on multiple accounts and then creates one dashboard to hold all of your platforms. With Buffer, you will be able to schedule and analyze the success of your posts. Buffer’s free plan would be beneficial for a new business that is looking to grow their social presence.

SurveyMonkey can be used to secure customer feedback. SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular free online survey tools. Surveys are a beneficial way to collect data from consumers in order to uncover trends and secure tangible insight on your business. This software is incredibly simple to learn and intuitive to use. Additionally, once you publish your survey, you will be able to analyze the results on the backend.

These tools can help you grow your business by freeing up more of your time, so that you can do more of the income-producing activities you need to do.

Keep pressing forward to success!

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Now is the time to start monetizing your ability!

Everyone has the ability to capitalize on their knowledge. You have a story to tell that can help impact an individual’s life!

I know that it’s human nature to suppress your confidence and tell yourself that you are not the current top expert in the field. While this may be true, if you do not keep pushing forward you will inevitably fall too far backward. As the saying goes, “the man on top of the mountain didn’t fall there.” -Vince Lombardi

The truth is, your business doesn’t remain stagnant. if we’re not moving forward, we’re falling back. So, we must continue to stretch ourselves, evolve, and continue to grow beyond what we are comfortable with.

To do this, you must make a decision that you want to step into your calling.  First, it is crucial that you define your knowledge and who it will benefit. Reflect on the core benefit of your ability. In other words, what problem are you helping people solve? For example, let’s say you need to get more eyes on your product or service so that you can scale your business.  EZMetrics helps people solve that problem by getting you more leads so that you can close more sales.

You will need to build a following. In order for you to be successful financially, you need to identify and attract your “tribe” who will eventually buy your product. You can create a community through social media. Your tribe will know, like, and trust you as long as you continue to provide them with valuable content. Eventually, they will be chomping at the bit WANTING to buy from you.  One way to stay in contact with your audience is to write a weekly blog. But beware… don’t get trapped in the content-creation cycle where that’s all you’re doing. Creating is great. But you must eventually ask for the sale.

Another great way to serve your community is by creating an online course to sell your expertise. This can be done by designing a series of materials that may include videos, PDFs, checklists, templates, and more!  

And lastly, consider hosting a live webinar which enables you to demonstrate your knowledge while engaging with your audience. During your live webinar, you will be able to provide advice to your audience while building trust. At the end, of course, you’re able to offer them the opportunity to work with you or purchase your product/service.

The bottom line is, no matter where you are now, you just need to begin. The world is a better place when people share their knowledge and expertise to help others learn.

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5 Ways to Position Yourself as a Public Speaker

We all have the ability to become a public speaker, but we all have different things holding us back. What is holding you back from becoming a paid public speaker? First you need to determine what differentiates you from volunteer versus a paid speaker. Your value is not the only thing that is listed on your Facebook and Linkedin, but instead the importance of delivery, branding, and the audience’s experience.

Here are 5 steps to improve your public speaking skills.

Solve a Problem: When going on stage, it is important to have a compelling story, but it is crucial to bring value. Therefore, you should ask yourself, “what problem am I solving?” As you begin to create content for your speech, always think about what you are going to solve.

Create an Appealing Visual Presentation: Studies have shown that 65% of people are visual learners. Your visual aid is not to help you as the speaker, but instead to help the audience understand your vision and story. A website that can be helpful to create a visual aid is Canva.com. With this tool you will be able to create infographics along with appealing slides in order to keep the audience’s attention.

Tell a Story: Your audience will be more likely to become intrigued by your speech if you share it as if you’re telling them a story. A story will bring the audience in closer, allowing them to relate to you, making it more natural for them to follow your encouragement and advice.

Have a Clear Ending: Instead of having a slide at the end of your presentation that says “thank you”, create a strong, clear ending that motivates everyone in the audience to stand up and clap. Additionally, avoid giving a Q&A after your presentation, but rather, encourage individuals to meet you in the back of the room to ask their questions. This gives you the ability to create a deeper connection.

Create a Speaker Fee: Now that you have created strong content and a presentation, it is time to put a price on the value you are bringing to the audience. When a customer pays you, you are not just being paid for that hour of your time, you are being paid for the change you are able to make in others lives!

You have the ability to alter people’s lives for the positive. Believe in yourself and you will be unstoppable. EZMetrics can help you achieve your dreams!

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Unwilling to Quit

When I first started my Digital Marketing Agency (EZMetrics, LLC) I would take every shot or opportunity presented to me; I still do. However, I learned very quickly that when taking every shot or opportunity, I would miss a lot of them. Big grand ideas would be crushed by the weight of failure and defeat; before I knew it, I felt like I had just gone 5 rounds with Mike Tyson.

So, I added a screensaver and lock screen to my laptop that said, “Unwilling to Quit”. It was my daily reminder that I, Jacob Salem, am Unwilling to Quit no matter how many times I fail.

One major key to success is failure. When thinking about success, it is easy to gloss over the numerous failures that you have had to overcome in order to get you where you are today. The more you fail, the more you begin to learn about yourself, your support system, and the flaws within your business.

We will all fail at something in our life at some point. We all have had a bad day that led us to make decisions that could have been altered, but that does not make everything a failure. It does not matter how many times you fail, inevitably, the feeling of worthlessness comes creeping up in the back of your mind. Please, let me remind you that you are not a failure. You are an expert, and you have something special inside of you that God wants to bring to fruition, but He cannot do it without your work, your effort, and more importantly, your commitment to push through your challenges and setbacks.

Zig Ziglar said it best when he said, “Failure is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night. Today is a brand new day…and it’s yours.” ~ Zig Ziglar

Through failure, you begin to learn. Failure by design is meant to give you skills to progress you to the next level.

First, you learn about yourself. When you feel defeated, you may begin to suppress your feelings, and try to immediately rebuild. It is important to understand the effects that failure can have on your emotions. It is crucial that you reflect on your failures so you can learn from them.

One of the largest challenges that entrepreneurs face is not that they don’t have the ability to succeed, but they ignore the failures that they will face. Failure will pave the way to you becoming successful.

You will need to have a strong support system to rely on as you begin to fail. It is important that you have people you trust, that will encourage you to get back up and try again. This support system can vary, this may be a family member, long time friend, or a mentor. Continue to pour into others for support as you go through hard times within your life or business.

Lastly, when you fail, you will find weaknesses within your business. Failures will open your eyes to areas that you need to improve on. It does not matter where you currently are in your life, you have to continue to try new things. You cannot stay stagnant in hopes to never fail.  The key to success is simple, learn to embrace and learn from failures to improve as a whole.

“Fail early, Fail Often, Fail Forward.” ~ Will Smith

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What is the difference between working on your business vs in your business?

Let’s face it.  You started your business because you love what you do, and you’re extremely passionate about it. Therefore, it can be extremely easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of your business. You may want your hands on every part of it. So much so, that it can consume a lot of your time.

While it is important to focus on your daily tasks, especially in the beginning, it is also crucial that you plan for the future. As an entrepreneur, you are the visionary of your business. You must keep your eye on the prize, your dreams within sight, and your goals written down.  If you don’t, growth will be a bit more challenging.

Ask yourself: what made you want to get into this business to begin with? Why do you continue to go to work?  If there were no obstacles like money, time, or personnel, what would your business look like next year – in 5 years – in 15 years?

Of course, it is important to be driven and feel like you have a purpose at work. But, the line between purpose and daily tasks can become blurred over time if you lose sight of your goals and dreams for your business and life.

In order to truly live out our purpose and calling, we need to feel fulfilled and well-rounded in both business and personal life. At first, this can feel awkward, even stressful to begin. With practice and discipline, you will become more and more proficient at outsourcing and finding great people to come alongside you so that you can spend more time in your zone of genius.  

So what is the difference between working ON your business and IN your business?  Working IN your business tends to be busy-work that do not necessarily require your gifts and talents. This could be things such as invoicing, scheduling, answering customer service, etc.  Working ON your business involves vision-casting, goal setting, automating processes, etc. Both are required. All is needed. However, you cannot do it all. Nor should you.

When you take time for yourself, you are able to reflect on what has gone well in your life and business, what areas need time and improvement, and come up with new ideas. When you dive into dreams you begin to see how you can make those dreams become your reality. When you are constantly working on the daily tasks, you constrain yourself and could potentially stunt the growth of your business.

Most people want to own their own business to be their own boss and have more freedom. While this is true that you become your own boss, if you’re not careful, you can also spend that freedom doing more work than you need to do.  

You and your business are both a work in progress, therefore, create time in your schedule to refresh!  

Balancing Family, Friends, and Your Business

Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, but it is hard to understand the impact that this will have on your friends and family.  When you take the next step of becoming a business owner, you can lose friends and your family relationships could weaken — without balance. This is because some entrepreneurs are so consumed with the role of creating a business that their business begins to consume their life.

Have you ever felt like when you are not at work all you can think about is what you need to perform in your business?

Have you begun to outgrow people as they do not understand your busy lifestyle?

Do you feel like you do not have time for small talk or to get caught up with friends?

A startup can consume your life — if you allow it to.  

You need to leave time for your own personal growth and spiritual growth. You can do this by prioritizing your time. You should create time in your schedule to spend in your faith and with your family.  

You can balance your family, friends, faith, and your business, and when you do, you will find that everything feels like it is happening with ease.  You will begin to see how the benefits of one area reflect in other parts of your life.

Zig Ziglar used a tool when he explained this concept called the Wheel of Life. In his presentations, he would hold up a wheel with 7 spokes.  Each spoke represented different areas of life one has to balance: Mental, Spiritual, Physical, Family, Financial, Personal, and Career.   When one is out of balance, it affects the other 6.

When you are spending time with your family, turn off your phone and laptop. Even though this can be extremely hard to do, it is important that you continue to build stronger relationships within your family and balance work vs. home in a way that is appropriate.

For your mental “spoke”, take for example your friendships.  You are in complete control of who engages with you. If you do not want to talk with someone, then you should not respond. If your friends are not encouraging you or celebrating your wins with you, you should eliminate them from your life. It is very easy to get run down within a business, therefore, you need to keep those around you positive and protect your energy as much as possible.

Even though it can feel challenging to make time for family and friends, it is crucial for your own growth and success!

Where did the time go?

3 Ways to Find More Time in your Workday

Have you ever felt like the time goes so fast during your work day, and wonder, “where did the time go?”  

Managing your time effectively can be the difference between success or failure within your business.

Here are three ways that you can you improve your time-management skills:

Avoid Multitasking

  • There will always be more than one thing competing for your attention. At times, it can be hard to focus on just one thing and seeing it through completion. Even though it can be difficult, it is very important to avoid multitasking! Single tasking is the most effective way to achieve your goal. When you focus on one thing at a time you are able to devote all of your knowledge to this task. Therefore, you are able to perform your best work.

Communication Within your Business

  • When you own a business, it is easy to take on every task instead of delegating to your team members. At first, it can be hard to let go of tasks, as you want them to be done a specific way. It is crucial that you hire the right team members that you can trust and have faith in their abilities. Delegate that which does not require your personality or your specific skill-set. As a leader, it is important that you communicate to your team members in order for them to realize the importance of their task, along with clear directions to complete the job.

Organize Your Business

  • Organizing and cleaning after a long day at the office is the last thing that most people want to participate in. However, when everything is organized and clean, it makes your team more efficient. Additionally, clients are less likely to fall through the cracks, which creates ease of mind for both the employees and the owner.

 

Of course, in today’s world of technology, it is easy to succumb to being distracted hundreds of times per day!  Think about how many micro-breaks you take each day to scroll social media or watch a YouTube video.


A majority of time wasted is in small increments rather than all at once. If you would add up the five minutes spent here and there performing small things like aimlessly scrolling on your social media accounts or playing an online game, it would amount to numerous hours wasted. This is time spent that could have been used to grow your business!

A great solution that many successful entrepreneurs and employees use, is to set a timer. On your phone, set a timer for 20 minutes and “go dark”. Don’t answer texts, messages, calls, etc. Shut down all other tabs on your computer, remove any distractions from your eyesight, and get to work on your task at hand for that 20 minutes.  It’s pretty incredible the amount of work you will get done when you just focus on a single task.


Let us know… what areas are you wasting minutes of your day? Have you found these tips helpful? We’d love to know what you implement and the results you have!

Growing Your Business

You have made the next step to create your business, but now what? Even if you have an amazing idea, product, or service, if you do not have people to buy, your business will not survive. How do I grow my business? This question is easier said than done, but it is important that you commit to following these steps.

Verification Through Testimonials: It is important that your potential customer can trust you and see how you have impacted other customer’s lives for the better. This means that you need to get video or written testimonials from customers who have used your business in the past. This gives the potential customer the ability to see how others liked the service or product. The customer will be more likely to buy if they are assured that your business will help them succeed. If you are at venue where people have used your business, grab your phone and ask them, “hey, would you be willing to give me a short testimonial on your thoughts regarding…?” These videos create PROOF that your business works!

Creating a Promotional Strategy: If you are just starting out, find one platform to leverage for marketing, and do it well! You can do this in a variety of ways. You can create Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Email Outreach, Create Partnerships, etc. The options are endless, but you need to commit to at least one strategy, consistently, in order to PROMOTE your business!

What is Your Core Product or Service?: You need to ask yourself, “are people currently buying this product from a different business?” If the answer is “yes”, you need to study what your competitors are doing. Observe what works, and what has failed. This will give you a headstart so that you do not make the same mistakes! Additionally, if you are just starting up, commit most of your productivity time to your core product or service. It is important to execute one service exceptionally well vs. three services mediocrely.

As an entrepreneur, it is important that you stay committed to your success! COMMIT to your core product or service to become the most reliable business in your market! Additionally, begin to grow your following through testimonial videos. This will give your customers a business that they can TRUST!