Digital Marketing Trends 2019

Digital Marketing Trends 2019

The goal of marketing and digital marketing has always been the same: getting and keeping the audience's attention. Every year, new technologies are released and existing technologies get smarter, forcing customers to continue to be bombarded with marketing at a faster and faster pace each year. We have identified some digital marketing trends for you to look out for in 2019.

Content Marketing

Just a quick reminder that content marketing is, and always will be important. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their problems.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a hybrid of old and new marketing techniques. It takes the idea of the celebrity endorsement and adjusts it to fit with today’s social media, video and blog centric world.

Unlike celebrities, influencers can come from any background or industry, and they can have varying amounts of followers. One thing they all have in common is that they’re social media identities who have a large following and clearly defined audience.

Future trends:

  • Micro-influencers, who have less than 10K followers are making an impact.
  • Focusing on storytelling
  • Video content and live streaming
  • Honesty is a must!

Social Media Trends

Last year, algorithm changes and an increase in advertisers on social media platforms resulted in higher advertising costs and lower reach. This year, we should expect to see more money invested in paid campaigns and more growth in the influencer marketing sectors.

Future trends:

  • Rise of private groups
  • Conversational Ecommerce with chatbots
  • Rise of new social networks

Voice Search

Voice Search uses the power of speech recognition to search the web! Devices like Mobile Phones, Tablets or Smart Speakers like Google Home and Alexa are the driving force in the Voice Search evolution.

It’s hard to say exactly how many search queries are voice-based, since Google doesn’t publish that information regularly.

According to “Location World”, more than 40 percent of adults used voice-based search on a daily basis in 2018. And predictions by “ComScore” estimate that more than 50 percent of searches will be voice-based by 2020.

Some other interesting facts and figures:

  • 13% of all households in the United States owned a smart speaker in 2017. That number is predicted to rise to 55% by 2022.
  • Voice commerce sales reached $1.8 billion last year. They’re predicted to reach $40 billion by 2022.
  • According to recent studies 58% of consumers have used voice search to find local business information in the last 12 months.
  • Every major payment platform is currently working on enabling transactions through voice commands with voice-enabled devices.

Multi-channel to Omni-channel Marketing

Multi-channel marketing spans several different channels, like social, mobile, direct mail, and a physical location. Every channel is separate and independent from the others and works in a vacuum. Each with its own strategy and goals. The lack of integration with multi-channel marketing can be confusing and impersonal which often leaves shoppers feeling frustrated.

Omni-channel marketing focuses on delivering a consistent, personalized experience for shoppers across all channels and devices. The guiding principle of omni-channel marketing is that it’s shopper-based, not channel-based. The main goal is to make the shopper experience as easy as possible and that means consistent engagement no matter where or how a shopper is interacting with you.

An omni-channel marketing approach delivers a seamless experience for shoppers.

Multi-channel facts:

  • Over a third of online purchases span over multiple devices and channels.
  • Digital devices also influence a majority of in-store purchases.
  • Omni-channel marketing delivers a higher lifetime value for a customer.

Video Marketing

Video has been and still is an incredibly powerful medium that makes it easier than ever to evoke emotion and forge human connections at scale. YouTube is also the second most used online search engine.

Video facts:

  • They boost conversation and sales
  • Show a great ROI
  • Build trust
  • Are liked by Google
  • Increase the time spent on a website
  • Have appeal to mobile users
  • Are perfect for social media and encourage shares
  • Can explain everything
  • Engage even with the laziest of buyer

Virtual Reality (VR) Marketing and Augmented reality (AR) shopping

Virtual reality (VR) is a realistic three-dimensional image or artificial environment that is created with a mixture of interactive hardware and software, and presented to the user in such a way that the any doubts are suspended and it is accepted as a real environment in which it is interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way.

Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real-world are "augmented" by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory, and olfactory.

Virtual reality marketing now also enables companies to place their brand image closer to the eyes of consumers. VR provides offers users an immersive experience which allows them to connect with a product in a completely new way.

For the past years, businesses have also been exploring how (AR) / VR will change the way consumers shop. For example the IKEA Place app lets users virtually ‘place’ items in their space using AR.

Benefits for brands are:

  • Users can explore virtual showrooms
  • Customers can virtually visualise products
  • VR gives a user a new experience and reason to visit your store

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic marketing is a way to target what types of audience you wish show your advertising to. Which can include segments across demographics such as age, gender, social standing and locations. As with Paid Search you can also limit the ads to times of day and frequency. You can decide which publishers you want your ads to show on. This way you are only paying for highly effective ads, delivered to the right people at the right time. Its a change from traditional ad buying. No longer a buyer agrees to run a certain number of ads with a publisher and is locked in to the contract.

Programmatic media buying, marketing and advertising is the algorithmic purchase and sale of advertising space in real time. During this process, software is used to automate the buying, placement, and optimisation of media inventory via a bidding system. Automating the process means that it can be done in real time and doesn’t rely on the human touch, manual insertions and manual trading.

Benefits For The Advertiser

Uses real time data to find ad space – Since programmatic buying is done in real time, it can use real time data from users to match targeted ads to them. By using real time data, the likelihood of buying wasteful or incorrect traffic is reduced, once again saving time and money for the advertiser.

Efficiency – Programmatic ad buying will use the criteria the advertiser sets. And it will search and find the right traffic required to fulfill these criteria. If the advertiser sets a cost limit, then it will also find traffic within a chosen budget; this can help save on ad spend, all with the benefit that the ad has reached a target audience.

Allows laser targeting – Through the use of programmatic technologies, advertisers can be increasingly specific with their targeting; some services, like Facebook and Google, offer laser targeting. This allows targeting based on what these services offer as ‘super accurate’ details leading to increased user engagement.

Chatbots and Marketing Automation

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.

Chatbots are no longer a novelty for companies. Marketers have realised the technology’s value as they are a powerful marketing tool. In 2018 we were witnessing the rise of chatbot marketing automation.

The advantage of chatbots and marketing automation is that advertisers can target prospects and customers based upon their interest activities.

Chatbots can help with:

  • Lead generation
  • Data collection
  • Customer support
  • Customer involvement
  • Increase sales and conversion
  • Increase customer loyalty

Machine Learning

Machine learning is a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building. It is a branch of artificial intelligence based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention.

How can machine learning boost your marketing?

  • Help with customer segmentation
  • Through content optimisation
  • Optimise marketing automation
  • Regression Models For Dynamic Pricing
  • Dialog Systems For Chatbots And Customer Experience Automation
  • Power Voice-Based Search
  • Robotic Process Automation For Marketing Operations
  • Automated Data Visualization For Superior Reporting
  • And more

Analytics and Reporting - Data Driven Marketing

Data analytics can work wonders. Highly data-driven organisations are three times more likely to report significant improvement in decision-making, according to research. Yet, a majority of business owners still rely more on experience and advice than data to make decisions.

Keep in mind that:

  • Data is for everyone. Not only marketing experts and data analysts should look through data.
  • The purpose of data is not to reinforce decisions already made.
  • Collecting data is only one part of it.
  • Size does not matter. Even small data can be useful.

Future Trends

The internet was officially launched in 1989 and has changed dramatically since then. But reality is we are still at a very early stage of its full potential.

In the future the internet will be all around us. This will be a future in which data will power everything. Artificial intelligence will help us to manage our workloads.

The Internet of things will only grow. Devices such as vehicles and home appliances that contain software and connectivity will perform more and more automated task for us.

This also obviously will come with privacy concerns. But experts predict that we one day also will have much greater ownership over the data that belongs to us.

Implanted chips may replace credit cards and keys. Lenses in our eyes may make computer screens redundant. And experts say embeddable "phones" or devices that are implanted in the body that use wireless technology could be commercially available by 2023.

Enjoy the future of communication and human interaction.