Because of the fast pace of the digital marketing industry, it's essential for marketers and business owners to always keep their finger on the pulse of what's new and trending year after year. Although some of these trends may remain the same as last year's, it's likely that many of their strategies and tactics have since been updated as more and more businesses get behind them.
If you're interested in what's popular in digital marketing in 2019, read on to learn more about each of these trends and how they can be used for your business.
1. Video Marketing
Yes, we've been preaching this for the last few years, but video marketing really is incredibly important for your business. Especially with the emergence of vertical video this year (like IGTV and Stories), you need to create a video marketing strategy for your business.
This doesn't have to be anything fancy, like hiring a full production team. You can have a team member use their smartphone to film themselves discussing industry news/updates, rent or buy a video camera to create editorial video content, and more.
Putting together a video marketing strategy that properly promotes your business and isn't too costly for your business is essential to making video work for your business.
2. Artificial Intelligence
We're a long way away from sci-fi versions of artificial intelligence (AI), but it is still incredibly prominent in digital marketing. We see AI in social media algorithms, audience targeting, and ad campaign optimization. And it's only growing.
Soon we'll be able to create even more accurate customer profiles, improve customer service, and increase revenue streams, all thanks to a little machine learning.
3. Chatbots
Also seen as a form of artificial intelligence, chatbots deserve a subheading all their own. They've exploded since Facebook's announcement of allowing bots to integrate with their Facebook Messenger. Chatbots are bots that interact with humans based on the way they're programmed. Businesses can use these in many different ways.
Chatbots can help businesses answer FAQs, sell products or services, and collect leads for your email list. There is available software to integrate with Facebook Messenger or your website to create a bot that works for your business.
Chatbots are a great way to replace live chats on your website by customer service representatives. They can automate tasks and save your business time and money.
4. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
An AMP is a webpage project that Google started as a way to improve load times on mobile and reduce overall bounce rates for websites. You might think, "Oh, that's a nice thing for Google to do for business websites," but it helps the search engine as well. After all, it looks bad on the search engine to have its users go back from every search result it generates because the website isn't loading fast enough.
To help improve Google's search results and the overall user experience, it's started its AMP website initiative.
Although these have been around for a few years (the first one appeared around February 2016), they haven't caught on as quickly as Google would like. We do anticipate seeing these continue to grow, though, as they're a great way to reduce your own website's load time and bounce rate.
5. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation continues to grow year after year because it replaces so many tasks that marketing teams used to have to do manually. This, in turn, makes marketing much more efficient, helping teams to bring in more revenue and focus their time on better, more effective campaigns.
There are so many marketing automation tools out there, from software to help with social media marketing, to integration tools, to email marketing automation, and more. Determine your business needs based on your digital marketing strategy and be sure to set aside enough of a budget to invest in necessary marketing automation tools and software.
6. Voice Search Engine Optimization
With the growing popularity of smart assistants like Google Home and Amazon Alexa, people are using voice search more. This changes the way that you're doing search engine optimization (SEO) on your website. Instead of focusing on search terms that people might type (i.e., "restaurants near me"), you'll need to think about how people actually ask things of their voice assistants (i.e., "what restaurants are nearby").
Some changes are subtle and some will be more obvious (i.e., "marketing automation tools" vs. "what are the top marketing automation tools on the market"). Considering how people actually ask things aloud will start to be very important when it comes to your website's SEO.
7. Augmented Reality
Augmented reality is one step behind virtual reality. It's where virtual things are put into the real world. Think back to the game Pokémon Go that came out in July 2016, where you could follow a map of your real world and catch Pokémon in your home, around your neighborhood, and in businesses around your city.
This was one of the first instances of augmented reality becoming popular, and although that was just a game, there are still many ways this tool can be used for business.
For example, retailers can use augmented reality to display what a certain piece of clothing or accessory would look like on a photo the customer uploads or what a piece of furniture would look like in the customer's home by overlaying it over the camera app.
There will be many more ways to integrate augmented reality into business in the coming months and years. We're certainly excited to see where these innovations will take digital marketing.
If you're interested in learning more about how these trends and strategies can help your business, contact us! We would love to talk to you about how digital marketing can work for your business and help increase revenue and grow your customer base.
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