Digital marketing 
trends

Digital marketing changes from year to year as new forms of technology create new opportunities for innovative strategies. Your strategy should grow and change together with these advancements, so you can stay ahead of the competition and predict what consumers want at any given time.

To prepare your marketing strategy for next year, here are the digital marketing trends every SME needs to know in 2019:

Personalised marketing will become a key trend in 2019.

Personalisation is changing the face of marketing, delivering individualised content to recipients through data collection, analysis and the use of automation technology. It brings consumers an element of feeling understood and results in a better overall customer experience.

It is projected that personalisation has the potential to deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and can lift sales by 10% or more.ⁱ

To stand out from your competition, ensure that your business has a coordinated strategy to know how to apply technology to engage your consumers. Content drives personalisation, so be sure to have enough content to manipulate. Also ensure that you have interesting and attention-grabbing calls to action with appropriate tone and language use.

More companies are leveraging on VR and AR to bring their products to life and improve brand engagement.

AR and VR empower potential buyers to picture themselves owning certain products. This makes the product more enticing with a simulated potential reality. It also allows consumers to access pre-purchase information more easily and conveniently.

By 2020, AR and VR industries are predicted to reach $29.5 billion.ⁱⁱ

Last year, Adidas partnered with emerging tech marketing agency, Somewhere Else, to follow the mountain-climbing journey of two extreme athletes. Viewers were able to follow the climbers on a 360-degree view of the journey, scaling the mountain of Delicatessen through VR handsets and sensory remote controls. The climb was sponsored by TERREX, a division of Adidas, to introduce viewers to an activity they would not have otherwise experienced.

By providing customers with the avenue to have this rare experience first-hand, Adidas managed to find an unforgettable and creative way to market TERREX, their line of outdoor apparel and accessories.

Consider leveraging on VR and AR technologies in the coming year to draw in your customers and provide them with an unforgettable experience. Once you manage to instil interest in an experience, your product and brand will become more appealing to your audience.

Although live videos have been around for some time, they have recently increased in popularity over social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram.

Live streaming is an interactive and engaging way for marketers to make their audience feel connected to a product or brand. It builds rapport and strengthens the relationship between brand and consumer.

Live streaming also provides a more authentic experience. To fully maximise on the potential of video live streaming, ensure that your content is rich and enticing to draw in a crowd.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has becoming increasingly popular to improve the customer experience and simplify data-based experiences.

AI facilitates pre-purchase decisions and streamlines processes. Programmatic advertising also makes the ad buying system more cost-effective and efficient, addressing issues such as manpower and rising labour costs.

The most commonly implemented AI technology is chatbots. They are becoming increasingly popular as a tool to help users access information better and faster.

An example is Hipmunk’s “Hello chatbots” that can be integrated with Facebook, Slack, or Skype and allows people to search for travel deals. The bot uses the visitor’s location to determine where they’re travelling from and sends them great travel deals from that location, which many of its users turn to book flights, hotels, rental cars, or packages.

Other examples are the Duolingo chatbot, which helps users learn conversational skills and practice what they learnt, and the Whole Foods Facebook Messenger Bot, which connects with users by providing recipes, products, and cooking inspiration.

These chatbots condense the search process into one conversation and proactively reaches out to visitors, providing them instant access to the desired information.

Expect an increasingly wider adoption of AI across the digital marketing landscape in 2019.

Voice and visual search is the future of search marketing.

By 2020, half of all search queries will be voice-based. More and more devices are able to support this functionality, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri.

Visual search is also gaining momentum, with this functionality being built into platforms such as Pinterest, Bing, Google.

Pinterest has reported that their users carried out more than 600 million combined monthly searches using Pinterest Lens technology in February 2018.^iv

To stay up to date with these new search functionalities, consider the tone of your ads and align them with how consumers speak, rather than type when making an inquiry. This will make your ads more accessible and conversational, which will engage better with your target audience.

Visual search brings enormous potential for retailers to sell products through image association. Make sure to focus on optimising your images to boost visibility. For 2019, competing in image search results needs to receive a greater SEO focus.

Whichever digital marketing strategy you choose to implement, make sure you capitalise on the new forms of content and technology available, so you can capture new audiences and improve brand engagement.

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ⁱhttps://hbr.org/2015/11/how-marketers-can-personalize-at-scale

ⁱⁱhttps://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/vr-marketing-examples

ⁱⁱⁱhttps://searchengineland.com/voice-search-explosion-will-change-local-search-251776

^ivhttps://www.searchenginejournal.com/visual-search-brands/260897/