Digital marketing is an ever evolving landscape. Technologies in the industry are advancing quickly, and will leave us behind to sink or swim. This can make it hard for businesses to thrive online, with the new best practices and trends that seem to change month after month. Here are some digital marketing trends to look out for in the year 2019.
Authentic Content
Marketers and advertisers can be distrusted by consumers, because of the stigma that marketers are just trying to take their money or lead them on. Because of this, content that is customer focused, and most importantly, does not sound like a sales pitch, is vital. Making sure that your customer feels as though your product is going to do good for them is important to the authenticity of your content.
Many companies have found ways to create authentic content, including influencer marketing and user generated content. This content, by people who have actually used the product, can resonate with consumers who are interested in your product. No matter how you choose to market your products, being focused on benefitting the consumer is the only way to truly create authentic content that will make potential customers trust your brand.
Social Media Strategy
Social media is now one of the most integrated parts of consumers’ lives, and as such businesses need to stay active on social media as part of their engagement and branding strategies. Not just one platform should be dominated – every platform requires authentic content with customer focused messages. Popular trends in social media are influencer marketing, video marketing, and social stories but the most important part to any social media campaign is staying active for your customer or fan base. The more they see your product, the better chance of a long lasting relationship with the customer.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) has now developed to the point where it can perform repetitive and easy tasks as well, or in most cases, better than humans can. It can understand how specific consumers search for products and use that to a businesses advantage when implemented. A widely used form of AI is in customer support chatbots, however their use spans way beyond just customer support. AI is vital to programmatic advertising, as it gives marketers an understanding of how best to run efficiently timed and targeted ads, with the most success. All of this may sound too good to be true; but the truth is that AI saves companies money, and does a better job than a person could.
Visual and Voice Search
Methods of search are constantly evolving, and with that growth enters visual search and voice search. Consumers are now able to verbally ask Apple’s Siri, or Amazon’s Alexa to search for items online, without the hassle of searching through many hundreds of search options by hand. These voice search bots are now able to show you the best results for your question, and if businesses are optimizing for search, these voice searches could help them profit.
Visual search is also on the rise, as there are many instances of customers being able to visualize a product they need, but not remember the name. This is a form of search that is not completely developed yet, as it is still difficult for an algorithm to understand an image and be able to provide text-based information about that image. However this could revolutionize the industry, as it could provide customers with the exact product they are searching for right away, instead of having to comb through all of the text-based search results they receive now. Google and Pinterest have both implemented a “Lens” for visual search, which will only get better with time, and can no longer be ignored.
No matter what trend enters into the digital marketing landscape in 2019 and beyond, you can trust that our team at Nova Advertising is staying on top of the trends, and learning how to utilize them to best the of our ability for our clients. Contact us today to see what we can do for you.