by Stuart Ross Hallam’s Managing Director, former Marketing and E-commerce Director at Boots, launching Boots.com
As 2019 approaches, the digital marketing landscape that encompasses SEO, social media, PPC, content marketing and more continues to evolve. There are many new digital marketing trends and strategies that businesses must embrace if they are to thrive in 2019 and beyond. In this article Stuart Ross, Managing Director at Hallam Internet, looks at seven key digital marketing trends expected in 2019.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now able to analyse consumer behaviour and search patterns, utilising data from social media platforms and blog posts to help businesses understand how users and customers find their products and services. For example, Facebook messenger bots can help you automate and optimise your customer service.
Artificial intelligence also offers information and tips to users by getting into conversations. According to Gartner, 25% of customer service will use chatbot technology by 2020, up from less than 2% in 2017.
Businesses who embrace AI in 2019 will be able to get an edge over their competitors through saving costs and accelerating growth.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising, a process in which automation technology is used to buy and sell online media, will continue to evolve in 2019. Next year we will see it encompass further online ads, video to digital out-of-home, voice and TV.
Using programmatic advertising, companies will use data and technology to make real-time decisions regarding the advert they wish to deliver to specific customers. The tool will provide guaranteed impressions and the ability to reach a different audience beyond continuous campaigns.
A great advantage with programmatic advertising is that marketers and business owners will begin to finally think of marketing as an omnichannel journey as we humans don’t just sit in one platform or see just one ad!
With lower barriers to entry driven by increased platforms and declining costs it is not surprising this technology is changing the face of digital advertising so rapidly that, according to eMarketer, almost 90% of digital display ads in the U.S. will be programmatic by 2020.
Personalisation
To stand out in 2019, you need to personalise your marketing. That means personalised content, landing pages, emails, and more.
With the availability of data like purchase history and links clicked, personalised content has never been easier. 2019 and onwards is going to be about capturing data about how your app is used and improving the user experience by driving the website to change and adapt to this by itself.
This means that, depending on the data available on a user, the application will be able to act like a chameleon and change itself to provide the ideal UX (User Experience) for them. This will create truly personalised sites that behave differently and show different features depending on the individual using it.
Personalisation is not just restricted to websites. Email continues to be a major channel of communication, with billions still using it for personal, commercial, industrial, legal, scientific, and academic purposes. In other words, email is here to stay, and email marketing itself continues to be important.
However, email marketing is evolving, with generic marketing emails not being effective as they once were. It is now a combination of automation and, more importantly, personalisation that makes email marketing important for 2019. When you can trigger your email marketing to something specific, such as a user browsing a particular product, and then follow up with a promotional price or demo video in a personalised email, this can be very effective. Email is often the final “trigger” to motivate an action, especially when combined with your remarketing techniques.
Visual Search
Visual search is another revolutionary development that is powered by Artificial Intelligence, allowing us to search by inputting images instead of text. Despite being in its infancy, visual search is changing the face of ecommerce and tech, while still showing vast potential. Visual search caters to our very nature, and increasing expectations for speedy results via less effort.
Google Lens, launched last year, makes the whole process even easier with the input of augmented reality. A photo doesn’t need to be physically taken just by pointing a phone camera will return one or numerous points of interest to explore, depending on how many places or objects are shown on screen. Alternatively, with visual search, users can upload an image to conduct a search and get more specific results, taking the user experience to a new level. As 93% of consumers consider visuals to be the key deciding factor in a purchasing decision (Kissmetrics), visual search engines are set to revolutionise the retail industry.
Pinterest has also jumped on the visual search bandwagon launching Lens, a new visual search tool that allows users to take a photo of an item to find out where to buy it online, search for similar products, or view pinboards of related items.
Content is Still King
People have been running away from traditional ads for years. A Nielsen study from 2015 showed that the top four most-trusted sources of advertising were: people you know, branded sites, editorial sites, and reviews. Ads are near the bottom of that list, and that fact hasn’t really changed.
Today, Business Insider predicts by the end of the year 30 percent of all internet users will be using ad blockers, meaning traditional ads now won’t even reach 30 percent of possible target audience members.
In 2018, we came to realise the importance of content in the online realm. In 2019, we predict that people will further put more trust in reputable content instead of relying on advertisements. This denotes that more engaging and informative your content is, the better your chances are to be noticed online.
Micro Moments
According to eMarketer, adults in the UK will spend 2 hours 14 minutes a day on their smartphone in 2019, meaning mobile devices will be the medium that gets the most minutes in the UK. This is changing the way brands must work to capture consumers’ attention.
Micro Moments is a “new consumer behaviour,” as termed by Google, that delivers your marketing message clearly and concisely in a way that is of interest to the consumers – all within a span of seconds.
People generally make instant decisions on what to eat, which restaurant to choose, what to purchase, or where to go, so Micro-Moments that every marketer should know about are:
Ultimately, the whole consumer decision journey is a combination of these micro-moments across all channels and devices. The successful brands of tomorrow will be those meeting their consumers’ needs in these micro-moments.
To take advantage of micro-moments in 2019, be where consumers search for information in the moment – such as Google, Google Maps, Amazon, YouTube, and anywhere else people search for information at a moment’s notice.
Take a look at how a variety of brands are using Micro-Moments in their marketing:
Voice Search
With 50% of all searches set to be voice searches by the year 2020, companies are rethinking their digital marketing strategies.
The advances made in recent years in the fields of natural language processing, conversation interfaces, automation, and machine learning and deep learning processes have enabled virtual assistants to become increasingly intelligent and useful.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Smart speakers like Alexa and Google Home are also on the rise. According to YouGov, the number of UK homes with at least one such device has risen from 5 percent in Q3 2017 all the way up to 10 percent in Q1 2018. It’s not quite as high as the Americans, but it’s still a pretty spectacular climb.
This has resulted in almost one-third of the 3.5 billion searches performed on Google every day are voice searches now, with personal assistant devices leading the way.
Voice search differs from the typical desktop or mobile search. When you open Google on your browser and type in your search query, you’ll see hundreds of pages of search results. It’s not that hard to be one of them.
When you ask Siri a question, it will give you just a few results. More often than not it will only give you one result. If your website is one of them, the CTR can potentially be much higher. However, it needs to be there in the first place. Therefore, tailoring your website and SEO strategy for voice search is crucial in 2019.
