In this guest post, Nick Brown dissects the digital marketing trends that will emerge in 2019 and reveals why your company also needs to change alongside an ever-evolving industry.
Last year was full of technology-wise improvements, taking the whole landscape of digital marketing across a tech boom. We could confidently say that the online marketing scenario has been disrupted, and from that disruption, some new trends were born and some older ones have finally found its rightful place in the future.
Don’t think that older trends have nothing new to offer. There’s probably no marketing tactics that ever really die. They just become more effective in the process of being revitalized, revamped, or reborn. Every digital trend evolves, so it all comes down to being aware of the changes so you can easily adapt.
What actually emerges is the new technology that’s reshaping older trend into a new one. Only if you’re aware of this you’ll be able to develop new ways to grow your business, improving the relationship with your existing customers and generating new leads. In other words, to gain a competitive edge.
Since the industry is constantly changing you need to change alongside it, and emerging trends are a way to go. Of course, you can let someone else take care of the whole thing, but, as guys from GWM SEO Brisbane constantly point out – the campaign is yours, professionals are there to provide you with all the information using their skills and expertise, but at the end of the day it’s your business and they need to follow your instructions. Going through emerging marketing trends, we’ll make sure you’re ready to point the way.
1. Personalization
We all know that one size doesn’t fit all, but with online buyers getting smarter than ever, personalized approach in your marketing has never been more crucial. You need to be able to target them with personalized content such as messages, offers, and recommendations. It’ all about matching their preferences and expectations, which means you need to know them well enough to understand what exactly are they looking for.
Visitors data is the way to delivering relevant content, relying on specific criteria such as behavioral, demographic, or geographic attributes, combined with highly targeted CTAs that will convert them more effectively. For example, if you ask your visitors to confirm their locations once on your site, your offerings will become geo-targeted and much more accurate.
We are aware that it can be quite tricky to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time, but it’s the only way to boost user’s engagement rates and therefore add important value to your entire marketing strategy. So let us sink deeper.
Increased Email Engagement
Some may think that email marketing is the thing of the past, but the truth is that it’s just getting a lot smarter. The trick is to target subscribers who are active on your list. There’s no point in shooting blanks – subscribers who haven’t opened an email for a certain period of time should be considered as dormant contacts who will no longer receive additional emails.
On the other hand, contacts that highly engage with your emails should be regularly nurtured with additional content and updates about your business up to the point when they convert into loyal customers. Another useful trick that will boost this personalization even further is to go back to plain text emails. That way they look more hand-crafted and therefore more individualized. Besides, emails that contain detailed graphics are likely to increase the potential for spam.
Data Enrichment
Going a step further, data enrichment will reveal more details about your leads, additional personalizing your approach. The biggest advantage of data enrichment lies in the fact that it removes any inaccurate or wrong information you might have about a specific lead.
At the same time, it obtains missing data – if you have an email of a lead it will fill in his name, street address, phone number, household situation, and job position. So after the optimization process, you’ll be able to send account-based emails which specifically address each of your leads, increasing the potential to convert them throughout the funnel.
Messenger Alternative
As you can see, it’s quite difficult to create a successful email marketing campaign, although not impossible. Luckily, there seems to be an alternative coming, in the form of Facebook Messenger. When you think about it, it seems quite probable since mobile messages undoubtedly have a much higher open rate than emails. On top of that, Messenger is able to boost your customer communication flow offering much quicker response rate to inquiries, so it becoming a key communication platform is a pretty safe prediction.
2. Conversation
Some years back this subheading would say ʽcommunicationʼ, but now, if you want your digital strategy to be a winning one, you need to establish a conversational tone. Without further ado, let’s see how communication has grown out to be a two-way one.
Voice-Ready
Since the beginning of the online business world, shoppers have been getting lazier. We’ve come to the point when they want to shop hands-free, they don’t even want to type keywords. So there’s no doubt that voice search is rising in popularity and soon everyone who hasn’t optimized for it won’t be able to stay in the competition. It is a very predictable future since using voice-enabled devices is more affordable, more users are searching on them, and they offer greater capabilities.
That means you need to focus your outreach efforts on using voice engine optimization. First of all, using more natural language SEO so you can create content accordingly. You should focus more on long-tail keywords since voice users are more specific when asking their questions. Requesting information about location, price, time and other details in one question certainly sound heavy for written search queries, but not at all when it comes to voice ones. Once you optimize for voice search you’ll be able to deliver more targeted and specific content and therefore increase your click-through rates.
Proactive Chatting
Your business growth is a good thing, but, at the same time, it gets increasingly difficult to manage all the customer inquiries in a relevant and timely manner. It seems that the only way to reach customers within the right context, in the right place, and at the right time, is to create an automated response system and streamline your communication channels.
That’s why chatbots are emerging as the most reliable when it comes to online communication. Only Facebook Messenger has more than 100,000 chatbots currently gathering information. When using chatbots, the most important thing is to make them come across as human and relevant. You’ll quickly create an adverse effect isolating customers further from your business if your chatbot isn’t able to stimulate a real and helpful conversation. Although they play a critical role when it comes to improving customer experience by allowing you to better engage with your audience, chatbots don’t really do much. It’s all about proactive interactions in which they ask questions to understand the problem better. This adds the factor of dedicated support to their real-time assistance.
Smarter Machines
When you look how much resources are invested by global leaders such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, there can’t be a doubt that the trend of AI and machine learning is only now truly emerging. These technological advancements are the ones that will make those chatbots even better, capable of more human interactions. But they also allow you to anticipate probable patterns of your customers in the future based on collected data.
Using this data you’ll be able to engage much better with your active buyers through channels such as digital advertising, sales outreach, or direct mail. Several industries have already started using AI – healthcare, life science, eCommerce, and food and beverage. When you look at food retailers, they’re using big data to determine the best delivery times, gathering it from different sources such as road traffic, temperature, weather, etc.
On top of that, big data allows them to determine the effect of all these factors on the quality of their food. eCommerce has also joined the game by using big data to predict the behaviors and demographics of their shoppers in order to create more personalized experience such as sending re-engagement emails or customized discounts. Machine learning and AI will soon penetrate various new areas and affect jobs like accounting, finance, banking, and even intellectuals jobs as teaching are not out of reach.
3. Multimedia
Everybody knows that having a good website is not enough anymore. If you want your business to thrive, you need to be present across a number of platforms. That’s nothing new, but let’s see why it’s mandatory in the year ahead of us.
Video Storytelling
There’s no doubt that storytelling is the backbone of digital marketing, but you know what they say – a picture says a thousand words. What about moving pictures, then? Interaction with customers precisely hides in that very movement – nothing can showcase your product with so many details as video. You can boost this strategy even further by sharing videos on social channels.
Yes, there is Youtube, but Instagram and Facebook have also played an important part in making live video content the fastest growing segment of video traffic. That powerful impact of live streaming comes from the fact it’s simple, quick, and free to produce, offering a real-time user engagement. That means they don’t use your content based on their time, but yours. If users chose to post videos to their stories there’s no doubt it will generate greater impressions than posts in the newsfeed.
Live streaming not only improves the relationship with your followers and allows you to reach a broader audience – it’s also the quickest possible way of engaging with your leads. All it takes is to be aware of how your audience is viewing your video content on each platform. We don’t need to mention that ensuring your video content is made for mobile is mandatory.
Social Fever
Social media marketing has already dominated the last few years and this one won’t be an exception. The power of social media stories can’t be denied since they have the potential to boost sales manifold. The trick is that they not only help you to grow the outreach of your brand – they also enable you to build the brand. Leveraging live videos together with interesting images and engaging content in social campaigns will surely generate brand awareness and propel the growth of your business.
And there are influencers, their diversity growing. If you don’t have many bucks to spend, simply go with nano or local ones. If you partner up with these local like-minded people with a decent following (between thousand and 10 thousand) and are willing to invest time to create campaigns, it can be just as effective for your local business. The advantage lies in the fact that these campaigns are based on honest relationships, and customers have already started to see through the ʽinfluencerʼ style of posts. Now they want honest connections and transparency, which is exactly what this authentic advocacy offers.
Radio Resurrected
Everything comes in style, sooner or later, reinforced with technology. Radio shows were turned into podcasts already in 2004, but only since 2014 have they started to gain prominence with some high profile shows. With the average listening time of 48 minutes for weekly listeners, it’s obvious people are interested to hear what you have to say.
The time for podcasts is yet to come when we realize all the opportunities they offer for creating entertaining, educational and informative content which can be consumed with no effort while doing other things. They’re definitely a great channel for branded content with numerous marketing opportunities, where you can even insert your brand in someone else’s content.
As you can see, all of this – personalization, communication, and multimedia – has been present way before. But new technology is tweaking trends from the inside and all the things actually emerging – are numerous new opportunities.