The white and black chequered flags have been waved as companies are racing through the final lap of the calendar year. This is also a call to prepare to gain a significant head start in the coming year. The accelerated development in technology and interconnectivity must be imbibed in future digital marketing plans – paving a direct passage to modern companies’ overall growth. The following key digital marketing trends can help catapult businesses in 2019.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) has always divided opinion: one side has embraced the ease offered, while the other has always been wary of how it may leave many unemployed. However, the merits have been particularly evident in applications like the development of chatbots, that is, software that aids online conversations. This has improved customer service drastically while reducing costs as well.
It is also faster than humans in addressing data-related queries, requests, and complaints. They have been designed in a manner where the element of humour is effectively used while on-demand services are offered based on personalization. The dependable software can also be implemented across many platforms including websites, apps or social media platforms. Another crucial benefit of AI is that the user information acquired can be analysed for planning future marketing strategies.
Augmented/virtual reality
Companies have understood the need to address consumer engagement and experience. The advancements in AR/VR technologies have thus aided the efforts in meeting these consumer demands. For example, IKEA has gamified the buying process by using VR since 2016. Their customers have the choice to analyse and observe company products using IKEA VR Experience, a shopping app, from the comfort of their homes.
In addition, Nivea, Starbucks, and Volkswagen have also famously experimented with AR in the past. The current worth of the market is speculated to be $27 billion with projections rising to $209.2 billion in the next four years.[1] The coming year will hence be an opportune time to experiment with the technology in order to create creative consumer experiences like never before.
Voice search
Many companies are still aware of the potential of voice search. Almost one-third of 3.5 billion searches conducted on Google every day consist of voice searches, assisted by personal devices like Alexa (Amazon), Siri (Apple), and Google Personal Assistant.[2]These technologies have a sharpened sense of recognizing human speech and thus they are increasingly being used on the internet.
Since half of all searches are expected to be voice-based in the next two years, this becomes an important sphere for marketers to enter. It is also crucial to understand that voice search isn’t like typical text-based searches. To elaborate, googling a query showcases hundreds of pages, whereas voice searches conducted by personal assistants showcase results in single digits. The reason is that there are minimal SEO (traffic generating marketing) strategies that cater to voice searches. The following year will be crucial to creating website impressions on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo among others, making it crucial for marketers to engage in this trend as soon as possible.
Micro-moments
The 21st-century consumer receives a massive amount of content, ads, offers, emails, and push notifications among other things. One is basically bombarded with advertising. This is causing increased difficulty in capturing the attention of audiences. Micro-moment strategies are thus one such route to solve this headache.
Micro-moments are those instances when consumers use their phones to act on particular needs like learning, traveling, purchasing, or action. These tendencies occur in these specific urges, and hence phones are picked up on reflex. They have also been described as the ‘I-want-to-know-moments’, ‘I-want-to-go moments’, ‘I-want-to-buy-moments’, or ‘I-want-to-do moments.’ According to Think with Google, Google’s content marketing team, users experience micro-moments on an average of 150 times a day. Hence, creating marketing strategies that address these criteria can be immensely beneficial for businesses today.
In conclusion
It is essential to adopt these emerging digital marketing trends in the following year arriving at a junction of company philosophies as well as consumer behaviour. Each trend must be assessed and adopted if it is suitable to a brand’s audience, as some remain whereas others perish.