Digital marketing is rapidly changing. The rules are completely different in 2019. And no guarantee is going to be the same in the coming years.
Technology is the key driver of all changes in digital marketing today. Next is the fact that there is an oversaturation of websites on the internet, making it hard for companies to stand out from the herd. Digital Marketing is getting more expensive and competitive by the day.
Let’s look at what Digital Marketing looks like in 2019 and discuss where it’s headed in the years to come.
- SEO is not the same anymore
Alexa, Siri, and Cortana are game-changers in the landscape of digital marketing. People are moving from search engines to voice search.
In 2018, 2 out of 5 adults used voice search daily in 2018. It is just the start. 50% of all searches are going to be in voice mode as early as 2020, according to ComScore.
Another interesting trend is that people are no longer going to use their desktop, laptop, or even mobile phone to use voice search. Most people will be searching for what they want through Alexa or Google Home.
30% of web browsing won’t even take place on a device with a screen. People will no longer be speaking into their microphone on their cell phone or laptop. That means more people will be searching through devices like Google Home or Alexa.
They will no longer be going to a website to find for information when Alexa will be giving people their answer.
So where does SEO fit in, where it will not matter anymore if your website is on page 1 of Google or not?
Voice search will shape the future of SEO. SEO strategies have to be reinvented to optimize for voice search.
- Leveraging only one marketing channel is not going to work
It is going to be challenging to build a brand using only one marketing channel.
Popular marketing channels that are profitable are getting saturated pretty fast, and it’s getting hyper-competitive as well.
Your only option to sustaining your business, in the long run, is to adopt an omnichannel marketing approach.
You have to try everything to succeed – content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, paid ads, and email marketing.
One marketing channel is not going to make any business anymore. But you can grow your business by combining all the marketing channels.
Diversify and grow business should be your digital marketing mantra.
- Content Marketing has changed
There are so many claims that blogging is dead.
Well, traditional blogging is dead.
One of the reasons is that the internet is oversaturated with websites and content.
There are 1 billion blog sites out of the 1.8 billion websites in the world today. That’s crazy!
There was a time when content was king because Google would rate a website solely based on high-quality content alone.
Today, there is too much content available on the web for Google to choose from. It’s no longer about optimizing your on-page code, backlinks, or blogs for Google to rank websites. It’s what’s best for the user which is going to matter in the long run.
Review all old content, update them, and recycle it. It makes more sense than adding more content that is regurgitated.
Either recycle old content which is updated or produce fresh, original content which brings value to the end-user.
Your content strategy can no longer be to write lots of content. You have to plan on updating your content regularly and consistently. You will also have to spend a lot of time on research to produce original thought-leadership based content.
Traditional blogging will not be enough. Your blog should be much more than ever before. You will need to produce diverse multimedia content – blog posts, podcasts, infographics, eBooks, movies, etc. You should think in different content types, run mailing lists and newsletters.
Email Marketing is still hot. It has proved to be remained a time-tested, solid communication method to stay personally connected with users. So, it’s going to be very important to focus on getting your subscriber and open rates up and providing high value to your subscribers via your emails.
- Focus on new search engines, not just Google
The internet is oversaturated. It takes forever to rank on Google. Anywhere from a year to more. Companies aren’t willing to give SEO a year or more to rank on Google anymore.
There are other less-known ways which bring rapid results – from a few days to one month. YouTube search engine is one such effective method to rank at the top quickly. It also brings you massive amounts of traffic, views, and engagement.
YouTube or iTunes store for podcasts are not as competitive as Google yet produce good results.
You shouldn’t just concentrate on one search engine like Google. It pays to explore less saturated and common search engines like YouTube and iTunes. Not only do these mediums have higher audience engagement, but the users come from more affluent backgrounds translating to higher profit.
These channels are neither expensive, not competitive as yet. So, don’t just focus on Google, think YouTube and iTunes as well.
- Build a marketing funnel
More companies are waking up to the realization that the channel which produces the highest ROI is not SEO. It’s conversion rate optimization (CRO), and it beats SEO by leaps and bounds.
Marketing budgets will shift from SEO to CRO.
Although the chart shows SEO produces the biggest ROI, in reality, it is the second runner up.
As Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn ads get more expensive; you will need to run more A/B tests. Even that will help you only to a certain degree as more companies will be doing the same tests, driving the ad prices to go further up again.
One way to cope is to upsell and down-sell your visitors. One proven method of generating more revenue is not to get more customers but to get more money from your existing ones.
The only way you can do upselling or down selling is to build a marketing funnel. A funnel is not as simple as an email sequence. It’s much more than that. You will need to understand marketing funnels and how to build one.
If you don’t have a developer, there are easy-to-use solutions like Click Funnels and Samcart, which gets you started in minutes.
Final Thoughts
Sophisticated technology is driving a lot of changes in digital marketing. Instead of panicking, learn to embrace the change. Understand where digital marketing is headed, and start working on them now so you can stay ahead of the curve always.