by Athena Dennis.
As the year ticks over into its second half, right now is a great time to consider future trends in marketing for 2019. No matter what industry your business operates within, it pays to know about the next big thing around the bend.
1. The diminishing power of digital ads
30% of all internet users are now experiencing the online world devoid of ads, thanks ad-blocking software they can install into their browsers.
This means that the Google Ad network isn’t perhaps as robust at reaching your audience as once thought.
Although that doesn’t mean you ought to abandon your AdWords campaign all together. There are still many ways to reach your audience through targeted ads, through social media ads as well as interactive content marketing. The latter provides your audience with valuable, helpful or entertaining content that they want to see.
2. Marketing automation, bots, AI, machine learning
The existence of AI in relation to marketing is nothing new, although in 2019 many businesses and their marketing teams will most likely implement easy fixes to business challenges by harnessing the power of marketing automation and AI. This will be done in several ways.
- Customer profiling
CRMs and most analytics platforms allow for a granular view into the demographic profile of the target audience. From this data, marketers can produce more relevant and high quality content that will resonate with the audience.
- Trend forecasting
Many analytics packages feature machine learning that can predict the likelihood of a result in a campaign based on past performance parameters and make an educated guess for you on how to proceed with marketing campaigns. Handy!
- CRM personalisation
By harnessing the automation power of a CRM like HubSpot or Marketo, it’s possible to completely personalise the customer experience with all touch-points and communications over email, phone, chat and social.
- API integration
Workflows and business processes can be automated through using Zapier and other process automation tools.
3.An alternative to Google
Search engine dominance belongs unquestionably to Google. And yet history shows that there will always be other search engines and tech companies waiting in the shadows for their big opportunity to shine. While Opera arose and then disappeared from our lives and Bing is almost laughable in comparison to Google, don’t write off other contenders too soon, the landscape is big and other players may still enter the game in 2019!
4.The power of voice
Voice-based Google searches are set to become more popular in 2019. Voice search is a helpful bit of functionality which arose out of mobile-first design.
As a result of an increase in voice searches on Google, the world of SEO and keyword research has to caught up. SEO’s new frontier is voice-powered search terms and phrases. These are going to be different to how people type written phrases into Google.
Key to note here is that:
- People speak in full sentences rather than a string or array of random words, as they do when writing search queries into Google.
- Key to findability on Google for voice-search is therefore writing content as though you’re speaking to someone rather than writing. That’s possibly going to become a new comms and copywriting art-form in 2019!
5. Interactive marketing and video marketing
Video is booming now thanks to countless mobile apps where you can tweak your face and add stickers and background, and even generate artistic wonders using a simple app.
Recently marketers have attempted to blur the line between normal video content and native advertising. This is possible on platforms like Instagram stories and other kinds of platforms.
Also, by generating interactive content like quizzes, surveys, polls and videos for the audience without necessarily declaring it as an advert, many advertisers are able to create interactive, fun and educational content that blurs the line between regular content and advertising.
6.Use outliers their strange creative ideas
In an obnoxiously loud online world with so many players vying for attention, it’s the most unusual and strange marketing campaigns that will get attention and stick. Work to push your brand outside of the norm and don’t be afraid to take creative risks with people who have strange and weird ideas that just might work.