What’s going to change in digital marketing in 2019?

Here are some trends that may make you even more unique in 2019:

Establish a permanent relationship with your customers

Social networks have made transparency a marketing standard. By associating a face and personality with your brand, consumers will feel more comfortable interacting with it. 2019 is therefore the right year to step into the limelight. By showing your excitement when describing a new product, or by expressing yourself naturally and spontaneously, you combine two crucial elements to make your brand grow: authenticity and proximity.

To do this, you can broadcast a live video on your site when you announce a change in the company or a new product. Or, spend a few hours a week to personally respond to comments on Facebook. Lastly, try sending a newsletter written and signed by you. In other words, don’t just talk to your employees, talk to your customers too.

It is therefore easy to understand why so many brands focus on integrating stories into their digital marketing. Most often, this concept is used to talk about the history of the company or to narrate the genesis of a product. Social networks are perfect for this, not to mention broadcasting other company highlights. A new member in your team? Make a fun publication to share with your community. An event within your company? Announce it live to get everyone involved. Internet users love this transparency. It’s a way to create a bond and establish a relationship of trust with your brand.

Personalise content

Knowing your audience and making proper use of the data in order to customise content will be crucial this year. Let’s remember that the difference between content marketing and context marketing lies in the degree of personalisation that the latter requires. It’s very human to love stories, especially when they’re well told and relevant to you.

Personalised marketing is not new, but thanks to big data, mass personalisation has huge scope. It is now possible to refine your message very precisely according to the target audience. Companies can adopt a mindset that puts the customer at the centre of their strategy. Customers will tend to show more confidence in a company that uses such an approach, helping to improve customer loyalty.

Put mobile marketing at the centre of everything

With smartphone owners who use their phone as their main source of internet access growing at a gargantuan rate, the way in which content is searched for and consumed is greatly affected. That’s why the time per session is reduced. In many cases, the user expects to be able to consume content in a fast, enjoyable and simple way.

In an environment governed by the micro-moments we dedicate to information and leisure, fast content is presented as one of the most important digital marketing trends in 2019. A good dose of creativity is necessary to keep an audience that is increasingly difficult to captivate, moves at great speed and devours content. Attractive and fast content boosts brand presence and the Click Through Rate (CTR).

It goes without saying, therefore, that digital marketers wishing to stand out will have to adapt their sites to mobile, providing their online store and services with a simple interface and keeping loading times in mind. Without a mobile store, there are no mobile sales. It’s that simple.

Indeed, websites developed into mobile versions, and therefore having a particularly fast loading time on mobiles, have a better referencing on the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Pages).

Native ads

It’s an advertisement that blends perfectly into its environment, so is difficult to detect in editorial content. To give you an example, Facebook and Instagram sponsored posts are native ads and the idea is to make them as discreet as possible.

This trend is gaining ground because it simply gives the consumer a break. Today, more emphasis is given to subtle promotion that fits into the target audience’s media consumption habits.

In this sense, native advertising is a really interesting tool, but we must be careful. Transparency will be increasingly necessary in these formats, in a system in which the user increasingly rejects advertising disguised as content. Again, appropriateness and creativity will be the key when it comes to presenting promoted content on social networks. It’s necessary to always keep the context in mind so that the user accepts it naturally.

Voice research – a new challenge for content marketing

One of 2019’s digital marketing trends expected to have the greatest influence in coming years is voice marketing. The fact that users’ requests are made by means of a voice order will mean that the response they obtain, at least in the first instance, will also be spoken. Your brand must prepare for this from now on, looking for a personality that is transmitted through voice, creating a sound brand and working in positioning for voice search.

Internet and mobile users are increasingly enthusiastic about voice research and audio content. If you want to follow this trend you will need to optimise your website and adapt your SEO strategy to meet voice search requests. In terms of content, you will need to integrate audio formats and pay attention to the words used, even in your articles and ads. To do this, choose your keywords based on what a person is likely to say out loud in addition to what they could type in the search bar. But when you ask Siri a question, you will only get a few results. Sometimes even a single result. If your website is one of them, the CTR can potentially be much higher. But the website must be there in the first place. Therefore, adapting your SEO strategy for voice search is crucial.

However, this technology does not replace text. At the same time, with well-structured content and HTML code, and an established SEO strategy, search mechanisms will be more efficient.

Social media as advertising platforms

While Facebook is now used less and less by young people and more so by the over 55-year-olds, with 8 billion messages exchanged between individuals and companies each month, Messenger should be present in your marketing plan regardless – both as an advertising medium and as a way to develop your conversational marketing strategy.

Social purchases are a logical evolution of Internet shopping and that’s why they’re positioned among 2019’s top digital marketing trends. Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest have specific e-commerce functionalities, such as purchase buttons and personalised marketplace. They have ceased to just be intermediaries, favouring a change in the way consumers buy. Now brands, in addition to using social channels as a showcase, can use them as a trade.

Micro-influencers

Collaborating with influencers followed by millions of followers is great. But a collaboration with several ‘micro-influencers’ is even better. The growing disinterest of Internet users in traditional advertising and the increasing use of AdBlock have led advertisers to find new strategies to reach their target audience. Micro-influencers are therefore digital personalities followed by 1,000 to 10,000 people on social media and address a very specific audience. Micro-influencers spend time maintaining and exchanging with their community, which allows them to create closer and more authentic links with their followers. They often talk about specific topics and are considered experts and reliable sources in their field, which is why micro-influencers often have a high engagement rate.

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It’s not always easy to know where to start in this pool of constant change, that’s why we’re here to help. Whether you want to focus on one of these elements or an overall marketing strategy, get in touch via the form or reach us at 01603 252555.