The digital marketing landscape is witnessing a dramatic shift. What was effective just a few years ago is now an old hat. With increasing demands in the business, every year, new technologies come out, existing technologies get smarter & advanced, and this is not going to stop, but will continue to happen with a faster pace in future.
In 2013, 76% of those asked in Adobe’s Digital Distress survey felt that marketing had changed the most in the past 2 years than the previous 50.
In this high tech and internet-connected era, the top trends in digital marketing cannot be ignored. It is always going through innovation and one has to constantly keep experimenting and exploring to figure out ‘what’s fade and gone’ & ‘what’s hot and trending’.
Time is constantly changing, but the need for effective and productive marketing is still essential. As technologies get more sophisticated and the modern customer gets more tech-savvy, we can expect that the digital marketing realm will continue to remain competitive this year as well. So now, as a marketer or as a business owner, if you want to gain a competitive edge and go where the people are, you need to be active online. And not only active, but to market your products and services online, you need to know, prepare, and master the top trends of digital marketing in 2019.
“Digital marketing is the all-mighty gateway between electronic technology and marketing psychology. Knowing how to master and manage the information going out and into this gateway can be the difference between making or breaking your business.” –Cory Firth
If you are reading this blog, this means you are probably ready to take your company’s Digital Marketing strategy to the next level. Still wondering how?
Here are 8 Super cool and trending digital marketing innovations to watch out in 2019:
1.Artificial Intelligence-helping Businesses to Achieve Growth Goal
Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing Digital Marketing, with its numerous potential applications. We all can see this! But how to put AI to work for digital marketing success?
In order to reach the right audience at the right time, detailed customer profiling is required. To achieve such feat more and more companies are tapping to the cutting-edge, AI-Powered platforms to boost their customer profiling efforts. AI allows you to understand the desires of the consumers, using technologies such as Machine learning, Chatbots and Big Data Analytics. These tools gather data from all over the internet and help digital marketers to work on their projects. By 2020, we expect to see more marketer’s set-up predictive lead scoring, deploy complex trigger-based campaigns and invest in greater depths of dynamic content to serve customers at every phase of the user journey. Before moving ahead, let’s have a quick watch on some facts and figures:
According to a study by Blueshift, 28% of marketers are using AI for product recommendations, like Amazon, and 26% are using it for campaign optimization.
source- downloads.blueshift
According to Forrester’s Global State of Artificial Intelligence Online Survey, 57% of businesses are using AI to improve their customer services and support, while 44% are using AI as a means to provide the ability to improve upon existing products and services.
source- thestack
Artificial Intelligence can help the business to achieve their growth goals through Personalization. Business can now personalize their marketing to turn each lead from a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).
Effective personalization relies on three categories: data discovery, automated decision making, and content distribution. Data discovery to source the information, Automated decision making to define the probability of customer engagement and finally Distribution of personalized content to offer personalized messages, experiences, products, and services of genuine value. All in one will help you reach more people, and create a significant change through your marketing. Ready to make a move?
2.Chatbots to Offer Personalized and Outstanding Customer Service Immediately
Chatbots can be considered as one of the productive features of Artificial Intelligence to overcome the traditional ways of engaging customers. It can be used for engagement, customer service issues, general questions and even closing business. The fanciful thing about chatbot is, if you set up correctly, it's very tough to tell if you're talking to an actual person or a bot.
“The best thing about the chatbot is that they give you an automated cost-effective way to communicate with your customer in a way that is more direct and personal than ever before.” Brian writes.
Bots allow users to get personalized, and further focus interactions, primarily through the use of text chat windows or verbal interactions in real time, day or night, with your customers or site visitors. Chatbots can be programmed to interact with people regarding the brand benefits, discount, problem-solving, and other promotional offers related to your product or service by infusing personality into the conversation.
Before moving ahead, let’s have a quick watch on some facts and figures:
Almost 1.4 billion people are interacting with chatbots, 80% of savvy businesses are already using or plan to use chatbots by 2020.
According to Grand View Research, the global chatbot market is reaching $1.2 billion with 24 per cent annual growth rate.
Uber uses chatbot technology to communicate with customers making it easy for consumers to hire cars. Passengers can use the menu to choose the type of ride, make a request, track the location of the car, send friends a time estimate of their arrival, and even make payments.
source- businessinsider
Ask Julie, an intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) on Amtrak.com, was designed to function like Amtrak’s best customer service representative. Ask Julie helped Amtrak save $1 million in customer service costs in a single year and they generated 30% more revenue per booking and got 25% more bookings with Julie.
source: nextit
Chatbots are still evolving and improving to assist in this revolutionary digital age, but one thing will always be important for marketers and businesses that how are they integrating this strategy. In deciding whether or not to invest in a bot, then the future is clear and you must know the answer!
3.Video Marketing to Catch User Fancy
Are you ready to jump on board with video marketing?
Video has the power to appeal all your five senses. When you listen, watch and feel at the same time, it awakes your cognitive power to make decisions after viewing it. There are a lot of platforms that can boost up your video marketing goals. Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Facebook Live, is a big trend online that will continue to grow. Take a look at some of these video stats:
- 70% of consumers say that they have shared a brand’s video.
- 72% of businesses say video has improved their conversion rate.
- 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions.
- 65% of executives visit the marketer’s website and 39% call a vendor after viewing a video.
- According to Cisco, 82% of internet traffic will be through video by 2021.
source: impactbnd
With the increasing demand for video, many industry influencers can be seen to be proactively producing different types of video content in order to meet this rising need.
source: oberlo
The 2019 report shows that 87% of marketing professionals use video as a marketing tool (Wyzowl, 2019).
source: oberlo
In a 2017 Facebook earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “I see video as a megatrend. That’s why I’m going to keep putting video first across our family of apps.”
With coming years Live videos will continue to explode. To witness higher engagement with your video marketing, you can make a video post or start a live broadcast on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn. You can capture and convey a lot of information and your brand's personality with video. As long as you stick to the fundamentals of good video production, you are no longer far from making impressive gains.
4.Voice Interaction Is a Big Trend Online
"Alexa, what restaurants are serving Butter garlic prawn?"
“Hey Siri, what are the weather updates for tomorrow?”
Search is moving to voice search. Thanks to Siri, Google, Alexa, and a host of other “smart” devices. Smart speakers can be used to order items and control smart devices of your home through verbal command. Talking is simply the most convenient and preferred way of interacting. The increasing use of voice search in 2019, has made it important for businesses to rethink their digital marketing strategies. Take a look at some of these stats and figures:
50% of all searches will be voice searches by the year 2020
20% of mobile queries on Google are voice searches
According to a study by OC&C Strategy Consultants, voice commerce was a $1.8 billion retail segment in the U.S. and $200 million in the U.K. in 2017. This value is expected to rise to $40 billion in the U.S. and $5 billion in the U.K. by 2022.
According to research by NPR and Edison Research 31% of smart speaker owners have added an item to their cart to review it later to purchase and 29% have researched an item they are interested in.
To capitalize on this trend, you need to optimize voice search on your website. To do this, you must understand what your prospects will search for. Incorporate those questions and phrases throughout your website. Include a FAQ section and answer all the question you discovered. Always optimize your content for long-tail keywords and make the website content conversational. So, if you want to do well in 2019, you need to leverage voice search smartly.
5.Omnichannel Marketing for Customer Engagement
Digital marketing is moving to the omnichannel approach. You used to be able to build a business with just one channel. For example- Facebook grows by just telling everyone, they invite your friends, they would take your address book and invite all your friends automatically, without your permission. For now, those tactics don’t work at all as it was used to.
Marketing has moved to the omnichannel approach. Now in order to stay ahead of the game, you have to use tactics like Growth hacking, pay-per-click, SEO, content marketing, social media, banner ads, the list is never-ending.
Omnichannel marketing provides a better experience for your prospects through consistent communication process between prospects and customers across all channels. The main aim of omnichannel marketing is for you to be able to keep track of the prospect’s interactions even though they’re interacting with you through different channels.
Research by Invesp shows that companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain on average 89% of their customers compared to 33% customer retention rate for companies with weak omnichannel strategies.
The more channel you’re the better off you’re going to be, because most of these channels are crowded, with so many online businesses. If you don’t use all of them, you just won’t do as well in 2019.
Conclusion
To look forward, 2019 is a digital marketing year. While there are many other tactics, these are the five I am focusing on. To compete in 2019 and to stay ahead of the curve in the coming years, you need to be aware of the marketing innovations of your industry to shape your digital marketing landscape.