We’re already into the third march in 2019, and we’ve seen some significant changes taking place in the digital marketing space. The dramatic shift in the digital marketing landscape now encompasses social media, SEO, PPC marketing, content marketing and a lot more sophisticated technologies.
The technologies are now being integrated with the mainframe digital marketing, enhancing the strength and outreach of the marketing campaigns. Moreover, big data and insights on people have enabled a broader perspective into people’s lives, allowing highly targeted campaigns to be run.
Digital marketing strategies have also evolved over the course of the last decade, only to grow more and more complicated every day. Now marketers have to handle data, analytics, analyze customer patterns and a lot more to ensure that they target a specific group of people with similar interests.
For marketers, digital trends play a significant role too. The digital trends can help target the campaigns with pinpoint accuracy and see where the world is headed. This enables the marketers to know exactly how to go about with the marketing campaigns to ensure maximum return-on-investment (ROI).
With that being said, let’s look at some of the digital trends in 2019 which you must follow in order to gain maximum ROI from your marketing campaigns.
1. Conversational Social Media Posts
There’s a slow, but steady shift from one-way conversations to a two-way or multi-way conversation in social media. An average person spends more than 2.5 hours of the day scrolling through social media, indicating that there are higher chances of interactions that can be done online. Businesses that listen to the social media trends and pays close attention to the online activity of the target audience performs better than the ones that don’t.
Businesses are also leaning towards a more personal relationship with their customers by including a public relations officer working online. These officers mainly:
a) Reply to customer’s comments on posts
b) Handle queries and suggestions
c) Come up with exciting and engaging content
d) Promote the brand online
e) Enhance the brand’s visibility online
2. Social Media Stories Are Engaging More People
The popularity of social media stories has been on the rise since it was first introduced, and it has not gone unnoticed by top-tier marketers! Marketers can now use graphical imagery, videos or other types of digital promotional material to feature their product and/or service to a massive audience.
These stories, being simple and organized, have been considered a breakthrough for digital marketing. Most social media platforms now have the ‘story’ feature and have seen large engagements in this feature.
3. Videos Are Redefining SEO
Videos have always been highly engaging. More than 52% of the customers say that videos help them become more confident in their purchases. Along with that, more than 65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video (Forbes, 2010). This upholds the importance that videos had on a brand’s image.
Now, videos are making another major breakthrough. Once you search for something, you’ll find that search engines now suggest videos that may relate to your search queries. This indicates that videos are redefining SEO tactics.
More and more businesses will recognize the power of storytelling through the use of videos, and the popularity will continue to rise until there’s something else.
For videos, SEO is now becoming more important than ever. This is mainly because there are millions, if not billions, of videos online and it is particularly hard for web crawlers to know which video represents which topic. This is why marketers have to focus really hard on the SEO of the video. For starters, they must be sure to use relevant video title, description and slug URL. This will help the video to get a higher exposure.
4. Geo-Marketing Will Be On The Rise
The more people open themselves up to the internet, the more information is gathered from them. This includes everything, including their name, email and even their locations. Business can use such data to specifically target customers. New and advanced technologies such as geo-fencing have enabled businesses to truly personalize their products and/or service by targeting specified locations.
Such geo-fencing technologies can genuinely enhance the way marketers reach out to the targeted audience. To put that into perspective, imagine a person who’s walking into a targeted location set by a company. Every time the person walks into the location, an ad pops out and entices the customer to click on it. This might potentially spark interest in your brand.
Such techniques mean that companies can highly personalize and target specific personas of their customers – a phenomenon that has not ever been done before.
5. Personalization of Marketing Campaigns
The digital space has become more complex and saturated than ever before, and it has been truly very distracting to the audience. There are thousands of marketers working tirelessly to gain attention, and this might sometimes overwhelm the end-user. This has caused the downfall of generalized marketing campaigns.
Marketers are now focusing on making their marketing campaigns more personal. Knowing the customer persona and their behavior while specifically targeting a niche helps marketers to make the campaigns a lot more personal.
For email marketing, the inclusion of names, companies the targeted audience works for and other personal insight may help enhance the credibility and acceptance of such campaigns. Optimized emails are able to generate more leads and close more deals than conventional ones, resulting in a higher ROI for the campaigns.
6. Influencer Marketing Is Still On The Top
The rise of social media has resulted in the increased popularity of influencers. Such social media influencers tend to have millions of followers, making it an attractive option for many marketers.
Although influencer marketing has been going on for a decade or so, the number of influencers online is more than ever before. This enables the marketers to pinpoint exactly the audience they want to target, and can use the influencer to promote their product or service to the people.
This type of online marketing has been proven to bring about high engagement rates and enhanced brand value among customers.
7. Visual Search Is Getting Traction
As we’re moving towards the mid-2019, we’re noticing people slowly embracing visual searches. Although the feature of visual searching was introduced a couple of years back by companies like Pinterest and Google (via Google Lens), these didn’t get much traction. With the latest integration of Google Lens with Google Assistant, people can search for images by simply asking Google Assistant. Such software enables the users to search for an object in real life by taking a snapshot or just by pointing the camera towards the object. It’s as simple as that!
Along with that, major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have also enabled more accurate search results. The technology is evolving every day, which means that we’ll be getting more accurate results as these advance. People, too, will embrace such newer technologies soon.
8. Voice Activated Search Is Maturing
Voice activated search is advancing every day; these can process human voice with greater accuracy and can detect various tones while serving their functionalities. You can now order products online, control electronics and do searches – just using your voice!
Along with that, more than 39 million Americans now own a smart speaker, while 65% of the people claimed that they wouldn’t revert back to life where they didn’t have such speakers. Moreover, it was projected that 50% of all the searches would be done by voice by 2020. This will create an industry of 40 billion dollars!
For marketers, it’s a tremendous opportunity. You can now easily set up such voice-activated commands to make sure that the customer sees your product and/or service when they search for such keywords. To do this, you must look at first select some keywords that people most likely will search for (reminder: always use conversational tone!) and focus primarily on getting featured on Google Snippets.
9. Chatbots are gaining popularity
Chatbots have been around for years, but it has not gotten off the shelves due to irreversible functionalities and tentative usability. With the advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning, these chatbots have received huge performance boosts and can tackle
chatbots will continue to be an important part of digital marketing in 2019.
This AI-based technology can take instant messaging to a whole new level, enabling autonomous systems to take over. This means that you don’t have to waste time replying to people. Now, there are more than 1.4 billion people who regularly interact with chatbots, with more than 80% of the business projected to be using chatbots by 2020. This is a true opportunity for marketers to get close and personal to the customers without wasting too many resources.
Most people, too, prefer interacting with chatbots mainly because these are responsive, can give answers promptly, accurately recall your shopping history and never lose patience. These automated assistants can provide outstanding customer service, and uphold customer’s expectations.
10. Programmatic Advertising Is Getting Some Limelight
With the advancement of modern artificial intelligence, most businesses are adopting the power of this technology to cater their services with higher efficiency – something that has never been possible ever before! Modern AI takes machine learning to a whole new level; it enables bots to learn personas and behavioral insights to better target ads. This type of marketing is called programmatic advertising.
Such type of advertising enables automation of the ad generation process and can make targeting specific audiences easier than ever. Although machine learning can take a bit to time to master through the analytics, it can give better results with pinpoint accuracy. This type of automation is highly efficient and fast, which indicates higher conversions and lower customer acquisition costs while retaining a high return-on-investment (ROI).
Programmatic advertising is growing so fast that it is projected that almost 90% of the digital ads in the US will be programmatic by 2020.
Conclusion
Marketing trends have always been fluid – evolving ever so often. This means that marketers always have to be sure to be updated with the latest trends occurring in the market. Knowing such trends can help the digital marketer to come about with the best marketing campaigns that bring about high ROI.
Other than that, the marketer can remain speculative and try to leverage the power of modern tools and technologies to automate and enhance the quality of the marketing campaigns. Keeping in touch with these modern tools and technologies also enable the marketers to gain efficiency and get more profound insights into the customers, which paves the way for pinpoint accuracy while specifically targeting customers.
Knowing about the trends lets the marketer to know which tools and technologies to use. This helps them to come up with excellent marketing campaigns that convert. Other than that, the trends can also indicate the shift in the market and where the marketing landscape is headed in the near future. In such cases, the marketer can adapt to the newer trends.
The trends are observed up to February 28th of 2019, and these are subjective to change as we go further into 2019. We hope that you’ve found this article useful!
