It’s time to change things up.
As you put together your digital marketing plan for 2019, consider the latest and most effective new marketing trends and tactics, determine which ones might be the best fit for your business and give ‘em a shot.
You may be surprised at how they ramp up results – traffic, engagement, lead generation and sales.
Here are 6 of the latest and greatest digital marketing trends that we think are worth your attention.
- Artificial Intelligence – Forrester predicts that by 2020, businesses utilizing AI to gain data insights will gain revenues of $1.2 trillion, while businesses that don’t will be left behind. You can power up your digital marketing efforts by using AI for programmatic search advertising, assisting with customer service via chatbots, implementing personalization techniques across multiple channels and gaining actionable customer intelligence through advanced analytics.
- Omnichannel Marketing – Gone are the days when businesses just sent out some emails or ran a PPC campaign and hoped for the best. Now, you need to be everywhere your customers are – social media, paid search, retargeting, email, website personalization, display, video, in-store, direct mail, etc. Omnichannel marketing allows you to reach your customers and reinforce your message in multiple ways. According to Google, omnichannel shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who shop using only one channel.
- Video Testimonials – Video has been on the digital marketing “trend” list for a long time now, but that’s because it continues to be one of the most effective marketing tools for engagement and conversions. Video testimonials perform better than other types of video content – ranking above tutorial and demonstration videos. Including a video on a landing page can increase conversion rates by 80% – and testimonial videos have been shown to help search, increase click-throughs, shares, lead generation and sales. So why not produce some?
- Programmatic Search – eMarketer predicts that by 2020, 86.2% of all digital display ads will be bought via programmatic channels. Programmatic display advertising uses AI and real-time bidding to purchase top ad placement, targeted towards your personas based on a data-driven strategy. Saving you the time and expense of manual trial and error, programmatic advertising uses behavioral data to determine which ad is best suited to which person at which moment on which device, delivering a personalized, one-on-one experience with your brand.
- Brand Advertising – You’re probably not going to see brand advertising on any other trends for 2019 list, but we want to include this here because a lot of companies are missing out on the long-term benefits of doing brand advertising online. While digital advertising tends to skew towards performance-based ads which are easier to track and measure, building brand recognition, awareness and loyalty online can go a long way to growing your business.
- Voice Search – With the rising popularity and acceptance of voice-controlled personal assistants like Amazon’s Echo, Google Home and Apple’s good ole’ Siri, it’s becoming more important for people to be able to find your products and services via voice search. The companies that optimize best for voice search will lead the way with this growing marketing channel in the new year.
Don’t keep using the same old stale marketing strategies – try something new in 2019 and take advantage of the latest advances in marketing technology.
Need help putting together a marketing strategy to drive real results in the new year? This is what we do. Let’s Talk.
Diane Callihan
With more than 20 years of experience writing for some of the country’s top brands, Diane helped to shape Roger West’s content strategy, lead generation, and PR efforts as Director of Marketing. She currently serves as President of Callihan Content Creation.