In today’s day and age, no one can dispute the power of effective digital marketing. With the ever evolving digital trends, entrepreneurs and marketers need to be informed of the rapidly changing landscape of digital marketing that has and continues to encompass the SEO (Search Engine Optimization), content marketing, social media, PPC and more. And if businesses need to stay ahead, they need to adapt to these ever emerging technologies, which will help them gain a competitive edge over others. An effectively executed marketing and advertising campaign can increase the demand for the product or the services they offer, generate leads and improve the relationship with their existing customers.
Another critical point to be noted here is that, along with the swiftly changing cyber space, while the need for marketing is still essential, where that marketing is most effective has changed tremendously.
We have listed out 5 digital marketing trends that you can take advantage of to improve and boost your marketing strategy and meet the desired outcome. Let us determine where the digital marketing trajectory is headed over in 2019.
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence will allow the marketers to anticipate and analyze the probable consumer behaviour and search patterns, utilizing data from the social media platforms, and blogs, to help them determine how better to engage with their active consumers using channels like direct mail, digital advertising etc. AI also offers information and tips to users by getting into conversations through enhanced customer support. AI and Machine Learning are expected to penetrate new areas in 2019 affecting jobs like banking, finance, accounting and more.
2. Chatbots
Chatbots have been around since sometime now and they still continue to be very important part of digital marketing in 2019. A large chunk of end users prefer to use Chatbots as a major means of communication in customer service. Chatbots allow users to get personalized, focused interaction without pulling too much from limited human resources. This AI based technology uses instant messaging in real time to interact with the customers or site visitors. Many customers prefer interacting with Chatbots because they answer promptly, are more responsive, accurately recall the user’s purchase history and never lose patience. These virtual assistants offer outstanding and dedicated customer support and meet their expectations and automate repetitive tasks.
3. Micro Moments
With more and more users processing their online activities using their smart phones, marketers continue to take advantage and leverage these micro moments to attract their audience/potential customers’ attention and meet their buying needs and fulfill their instant decisions.
Whenever, a customer searches for a store, bank, restaurant or any service, he / she looks for a nearby option, wants to either make a purchase or wants to finalize a task. While all this is happening, marketers take advantage of these types of micro moments to create targeted content and advertising. Subsequently, ‘near me’ searches have grown 2 times in the last two years. Stores and other businesses have optimized their locations on their websites and apps. They have created ads for their store or restaurant’s location or their popular products to improve their visibility in search engines to reach their full potential and existing customers at an appropriate time.
4. Email Marketing and Personalisation
Email continues to be the most widely used channel of communication, with a gazillion people still using it for personal, professional, academic, commercial, legal and scientific purposes. Businesses know that if they have to stand out in 2019, they need to personalize their marketing- and that means personalized content, existing, new and upcoming product marketing, emails, offers, give-aways, promotions and more.
With the availability of data like browsing history, purchase history, links clicked, deriving a pattern of a given customer and generating custom content has never been easier. Businesses have seen humongous growth due to this personalization and it has only made the business – customer relationship more robust.
5. Live Video and Video Marketing
All thanks to Instagram and YouTube, live content is the most rapidly growing medium today. With fast decreasing cost of film and camera equipment and the increasingly high quality smartphone cameras, businesses and marketers are heading for personalized videos and video messages rather than phone calls or emails. Live video is gaining popularity and more and more businesses are using it for ‘product demos’, ‘interviews’, ‘making of a product’, ‘curtain raiser’ etc. Live streaming content is effective because its free, takes a short time to create and produce, and it offers a real time user engagement. Moreover, it generates better impressions than posts published in the newsfeed or on blogs. Although, video is not a new concept, but now the videos are paired with incredibly precise, accurate and valuable user metrics of digital media to provide much more useful data on how certain actions or specific efforts are performing.
Businesses can capture and convey a plethora of information about their brands and their products through good looking and good quality video production and make impressive gains out of it. Businesses are hiring popular influencers to market their products through videos on You Tube, Instagram, Facebook or their own personal channels. These are incredibly useful, high profile form of digital marketing right now. Consumers love quick, honest, spontaneous reviews and live interaction through these videos. Live videos and videos are undoubtedly a BIGDRAW when done right.
