Digital Marketing Trends For 2019

 

As digital trends evolve every year, marketers should always be aware of the changes in order to easily adapt to emerging technologies and stay ahead in the market. This will help them gain a competitive edge and become able to develop new ways to grow their businesses, generate leads and improve the relationship with their existing customers.

Voice Search

Voice search is undoubtedly rising in popularity. By 2020, 50% of all queries will be voice-based according to Comscore.

There are mainly two types of voice search: Those that are implemented by smart speakers such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple Homepod, Google Home and Microsoft’s Cortana which give searchers immediate voice answers to their questions and those that are installed in desktops, and smartphones such as Siri and Google Assistant which display written search results.

Top brands are thinking about how to deliver their promises using voice-enabled devices because they are affordable and offer greater capabilities than ever before while more visitors are using voice search to interact with these brands.

Businesses should also focus their outreach efforts on using voice engine optimization. Marketers must use a more natural language SEO to create content accordingly. This requires them to think about what their target audience may use in their voice queries as well as focus on long-tail keywords because searchers are likely to be more specific when asking a question. For instance, in one question, a shopper may request information about time, price, location and other details that sound heavy for written search queries.

As a result, marketers can leverage these opportunities to deliver more targeted, specific content which leads to increase click-through rates.

Smarter Chat

Chatbots have been rising in the few recent years and still persists in 2019. According to Grand View Research, 45% of end-users prefer to use Chatbots as a major means of communication in customer service.

Chatbots play a critical role in improving the customer experience and allow marketers to better engage with their audience – without really doing much. They offer real-time assistance to the user, dedicated support and proactive interactions where they ask questions to understand the real problem.

For instance, a visitor landing on a website is contacted via chatbot and asked to request assistance or get more information about the product. If he selects the first option, he will be referred to a representative for help and if he chooses the second option, he will be asked a series of automated questions or redirected to their blog or FAQ page.

Another rising trend is Whatsapp Business Messaging, which has become one of the most used messaging apps worldwide according to Statista. Besides, it’s no longer restricted to personal usage; businesses are using the application on a daily basis for their daily activities.

Messaging traffic is expected to double by 2019. This is driven by over the top messaging Over-The-Top or OTT apps, going up from 31 trillion messages in 2014 to over 100 trillion by 2019 globally.

Micro-Moments

As more users are processing their online activities using their smartphones, marketers continue to leverage micro-moments to attract their audience’s attention and fulfill their instant decisions.

Whenever a customer searches for something, looks for a nearby store, wants to finalize a task or makes a purchase, marketers can take advantage of these types of micro-moments to create targeted content and advertising.

In order for marketers to succeed in using micro-moments, they should understand the basic practices of each one. Let’s take for instance the “I-want-to-go-moments”. Brick and mortar stores can take advantage of such a moment by capitalizing on “near me” searches, which have grown 2X between 2016 and 2017 according to Google. This requires storefronts to optimize their locations on their websites or apps. Furthermore, they can go even beyond that by creating ads for their store’s location or popular products to improve their visibility in search engines and reach their customers at the appropriate time.

Augmented and Virtual Reality Marketing

Augmented reality ads are one of the major applications that are now used by some marketers. It’s a way to bring static or unreal environments into a more realistic experience, something that would integrate the “offer” with the “reality” of the buyer.

Michael Kors is a successful example of augmented reality ads. They created an ad on Facebook asking their users to try and purchase their sunglasses.

Aside from AR ads, many businesses have been using augmented and virtual reality marketing for the purpose of creating brand awareness.

For instance, IKEA and L’Oreal managed to improve their customer experience with virtual reality by allowing them to visualize their products before buying them. Nivea, Starbucks, and Volkswagen are other examples of big brands that succeeded in augmented reality.

This trend which is not new is one of the most highlighted trends for 2019. According to Statista, AR and VR market size worldwide is expected to reach $209.2 billion in only 4 years.

Live Videos – More Stories

Thanks to Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, live content is the fastest-growing segment of internet video traffic due to the remarkable waves in the recent 3 years.

Live streaming content is effective because it’s free, takes a short time to produce while it offers a real-time user engagement, and viewers use your content based on your time, not theirs.

Moreover, it has the ability to generate greater impressions than posts published in the newsfeed, especially if users choose to post them to their stories.

Live streaming content allows marketers to engage with their leads in the quickest way possible, improve their relationship with followers, reach a broader audience and boost their social channels traffic.

AI and Machine Learning

With global leaders like Amazon, Microsoft and Google extending their resources in AI and machine learning, this trend is not going away anytime soon.

AI allows marketers to anticipate future probable patterns of their customers based on collected data.

With this data, marketers can then determine how to better engage with their active buyers using different channels such as direct mail, sales outreach, or digital advertising.

Several industries like food and beverage, e-commerce, life science, and healthcare have started using AI. For instance, many food retailers use big data to determine the best delivery times of their products. This is done by gathering data from different sources such as the weather, road traffic, and temperature… Furthermore, big data can help determine the effect of all these factors on food quality.

In the e-commerce industry, 86% of customers say that personalization is an important role in their buying decisions. Ecommerce companies use big data to predict their shopper’s demographics and behaviors in order to create a more personalized experience such as sending customized discounts or re-engagement emails.

According to technology experts, AI and machine learning are expected to penetrate various new areas in 2019 affecting jobs like banking, finance, accounting and even intellectual jobs such as teaching.