New Year brings new resolutions, trends, challenges and a feeling of starting afresh with a positive attitude. Businesses revisit their strategy, redesign and implement it to meet planned business targets and satisfy the ever-changing consumer market.
The “in-trend” buzzword excites all of us as we think that the new one will be more interesting and fulfilling. Many consumers who are tech-savvy keep replacing the old tech gadgets with the new ones to satisfy their geek passion.
The business world also sees the ever-changing trends like the product life. Here the scenario demands the replacement of obsolete strategies with the new and effective ones, for making a positive change in the working structure and business results. In recent years, we have seen the significant impact of digital marketing on consumer behavior which is going to increase in 2019 with a more strategized and innovative approach, as each of the businesses trying to outstand each other with unique digital marketing techniques. Many small businesses who have plunged into this enormous digital marketing platform are reaping the benefits of their efforts at a minimal marketing investment. The digital marketing process has become more sophisticated with analysis of the crucial inputs sourced from different businesses and organizations are able to understand their consumer with the integration of the analytics and predictive tools in their research prediction.
Every company functions based on their designed business model for generating the required revenues and profit. This also includes aligning the model with the disruptive consumer market so that they can meet their business target. The complex market scenario where businesses have to compete with each other requires special effort to make their brand visible to the customer, which is facilitated by different digital marketing trends.
Digital marketing is at an evolving phase and will continue to do so in the coming years, paving the path for more unconventional trends to keep the consumers on the edge of their seat. Some of the crucial digital marketing trends to watch out in 2019 are:
1. Augmented Reality:
Augmented reality is going to be the next big thing in 2019. Marketers will be using it in their content marketing strategy, for completely immersing their audience in the story-telling process of their brand. This technology which puts ups an interactive experience by generating a computer image of the real objects across different sensory modalities such as auditory, visual, etc. are going to disrupt the marketing trends in the coming years. Some of the examples are the “Pokemon Go” and the recently launched Snap Originals, one of the features that use augmented reality to allow you to interact and watch television programmes by Snapchat.
An image capturing the photos of real furniture objects and turning into computer generated ones
2. Voice Search:
Voice search is rapidly becoming popular among all the sections of the US population. It is enabling the mobile users to access information online like never before. The news published in Forbes report stated that in US alone the use of voice assistant is expected to grow by 128.9% in 2018 as compared to 2017.
Digital marketing experts can channelize this trend in their favor, by posting the optimized content aligning with the requirements of the voice search technology. The challenge here is that unlike in the web search where some search results are shown, voice search only shows up the first search result. Businesses have to generate high-quality content that exactly answers the consumer’s queries to come up in that top position.
3. Visual Search:
Visual search is same like searching a product on the web, but instead of typing the product name, the phone camera has to be used to tap the target object and explore more about it. Details will be displayed at the bottom of the visual search, and one can also expand their search further to find out more about the object.
Google, Amazon, Bing, and Pinterest have already developed their capabilities to provide services to their customers. Marketers have to optimize the content so that their products images are displayed when a customer searches for a similar product in visual search.
4. Search Marketing:
Google is popular in search marketing trend as in general customers looking for new services, or products scans the Google search results to get a better overview of the services. They can even compare the price range of different products before finalizing any specific product.
After the launch of Google marketing platform, AdWords was renamed as Ads and analysis tools like Data Studio, Google Analytics, and AB testing were integrated. An integral process in digital marketing is to track the Google speed update for organic search. Google speed implemented in July 2018 checks the speed of the website and penalizes it for slow speed. The speed update affects the user irrespective of the technology used in building the website. So it is necessary to make the website fast and relevant to rank higher in Google search results. One should also have a mobile responsive site as the majority of the smartphones users check the websites on their phones. The technologies like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) assists in this process thus making the website a user-friendly experience. One of the best examples is George at Asda which boosted its sales with 31% increase in conversions via mobile, 1.71x faster site speed, an improvement of 32% in click-through rate of organic mobile traffic and a whopping 15% increase in page views.
5. User-Generated Content:
User-generated content is going to become one of the popular marketing strategies for the marketers in 2019. The UGC social media content can be the summary by the user which explains the user’s experience with the particular brand. It can be in the form of a story, blogs, product reviews, videos, and much more which they share with their network. Your passionate customers can become vigorous marketers for your brand. Their positive user experience can be utilized to influence the purchase decision of potential customers.
As per the statistical report published by the Pew research center, 54% of the adult users post photos and videos on the internet which are original.
Product reviews make up the 29% of the user generated content which is hugely shared on the internet. The originality of UGC content makes it unique when compared to other online content.
6. Email Marketing:
The email marketing is one of the most familiar forms of marketing, but in real-time it has to be implemented with a highly strategized approach to yield maximum results. The established standard forms of email marketing which were followed previously might not work in 2019.
The new forms of marketing revolve around combining email and content marketing which leads to high-quality email marketing. Email marketing which was like reaching the customer at the right time and providing the required information about a particular product, service or offer can get the much-required boost from rich content. This means that marketing content can be revamped by the sales team and added in the email for sending to the potential customer. Marketers are experts in writing the content which improves the click-through rate and engagement ratio. 75% of buyers get attracted to content which imparts information about a product rather than a pushed sales message.
7. Social Media Trends:
Digital marketers have to follow the social media trends carefully, as marketers motivated most of the current purchase by the consumers through analyzing consumer’s behavior on social media sites. The top social media sites which are popular among the majority of the US population are Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
The content for all these sites is segregated based on the demographics. The main observation here is that all the social sites have a different set of the user population. Facebook has a static or declining number of users, the highest number of users is comprised of the population from the 55+ age group. Instagram has the majority of the users from the 25-34 age group followed by 18-24 age group. Snapchat has seen the highest usage increase by the 25-34 age group.
Few developments can be seen like Facebook ad spend grew by 40 percent in Q2 2018 while Instagram ad spend grew by 177 percent during that same period. This shows in the coming years, marketers have to target Instagram users to achieve their marketing objectives.
Summary:
Digital marketing has revolutionized the marketing sector in the recent years, and with the introduction of new trends in this sector, both consumers and marketers are expected to reach a new level of interaction in the coming years.
