Digital marketing is a field that any business can’t ignore. No one can argue the results offered by an effective marketing. When a campaign is effectively marketed and advertised can fulfill the needs of any business and increase their products or services demand. Today, though marketing is still important, but the way of doing it effectively has changed a lot.
One thing about marketing is constant and that is, it always changes. New technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, augmented reality, natural language processing and facial recognition have become the mainstream and therefore, it seems like the marketers are always running after their tails.
If you want to follow the people, you should be active online. Since the 90’s the power of the digital landscape or ‘cyberspace,’ has seen a steady growth. Now, just after a few decades, it has created a major virtual environment for several people on the planet.
Internet has become the place to be with social media, streaming content and easily creating or consuming digital content. So, you might be thinking upon the ways to market your business to the audience that is online. Coming years are on the rise that means it’s time to review the top trends of digital marketing. Share on X
Social Media Has Taken Over
As per we are social, globally, there are 3.196 billion social media users, which is almost equal to 42% market penetration. With the numbers you can see that social media has a significant impact on the society, especially in the marketing world.
Since social media has become important in everyone’s routine life, it is important for businesses to understand the changes implemented in social networks. Video, automation and influencers are the most popular social trends currently, but there is even something more.
You need to remember that dominating a single platform isn’t enough today. The leads you see on Facebook aren’t on YouTube and those on YouTube aren’t similar to those that read your website content. Therefore, you would succeed when you repurpose your content on multiple platforms.
Social media plays a key role in any business. If you haven’t thought about your social media marketing strategy yet, don’t miss to start it right now.
Related: Social Media Trends That All Businesses Need To Follow
Programmatic Advertising will Show Up
When you use AI to automate ad buying for targeting more specific audiences, it is called as programmatic advertising. A good example of programmatic ad buying is real-time bidding or auctions. It is done to increase the chances of reaching to success goals of the marketing campaign and reducing the customer acquisition costs.
Marketers get a chance to deliver the promise of “right user, right message, right time, right place” with AI technology. This is done by predicting the users that might engage with an ad as well as quickly passing a bid opportunity in their media-buying system.
Chatbots Will Become A Common Thing
A specialized form of software that acts as a virtual “caretaker” that communicates with the users and assists them in reaching their goals is called a chatbot. The way chatbots interact with humans is natural and the interaction is done via text chat windows, but you can even interact verbally.
You will see the use of chatbots broadly on Facebook by several people for different tasks. Chatbots can easily handle things such as providing weather reports to automating some basic customer support functions. With bots, users can interact personally with complete concentration without dragging too much from limited human resources. In 2018, there has been significant increase in usage.
It is also expected to grow and become more generalized in the consumers’ eyes. In simple words, the originality will lose its color and those will be seen as becoming highly extensive and usable.
As coming year will arise, chatbots are expected to be the first place where someone will go to order food, select a mobile plan or maybe book a hotel room. Chatbots will help your users to do all this without the need to download a native app.
As per the data, chatbots will rule coming years. As per the study of LivePerson, only 11% of the people had a negative perception about chatbots out of 5,000 people. Furthermore, 33% had a positive mindset about chatbots and 48% were unresponsive till their problems were resolved.
So, don’t wait. Develop a chatbot for your brand. They are very easy to develop and might bring a difference between closing a quick sale and losing a customer to a service with an easy-to-use chatbot – specifically for food delivery.
Video Marketing Will Become Compulsory
The below stats display the value of incorporating video into your digital marketing strategy:
• As per 70% consumers, they have shared a brand’s video.
• 72% of businesses state that video has greatly improved their conversion rate.
• According to 52% of consumers, watching product videos increases their confidence in taking decisions while online purchase.
• 65% of executives check the marketer’s website and 39% of them call a vendor after watching a video.
To experience the higher engagement with your video marketing, you can create a video post or start a live broadcast on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.
Live video is becoming popular since large numbers of businesses are using it for interviews, product demos or “behind the scenes” glimpses of events, how products are made, life in the office, etc.
The cost of the film equipment is decreasing and the quality of smartphone cameras is increasing, and this is helping the businesses and marketers to convey messages through live videos instead of phone calls or emails. This is called as the 1:1 video approach.
SERPs display YouTube as well as other videos and therefore, video SEO is becoming highly important. It includes using text overlays and closed captions, title, description and file names.
Also, the 360-degree video content that offers a more interactive experience is rising.
Related: 6 Tried And Tested YouTube Marketing Tips For Startups
Voice Search Is on the Rise
As per the article on TheeDesign 2017, there are around 3.5 billion searches performed on Google every day out of which one-third are voice searches and those are dominated by personal assistant devices. People have increasingly started using Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant every day. This has greatly improved their capacity for understanding human speech and so, they can prove to be helpful in both searching for information on the Web and doing things around the house.
Don’t miss to check the below stats related to voice searches:
• By the year 2020, 50% of all searches will be performed via voice searches.
• On Google, 20% of mobile queries are voice searches.
• On Bing, 25% of all searches are voice searches.
Visual Search will Improve User Experience
User experience is been taken to a completely new level by machine learning. No, I am not talking just about voice search. There’s also visual search that’s on rise.
Visual search helps in identifying objects within the image and then searches for images that relate to those objects. For example, if you want to buy a bed of specific design, you will be able to use visual search to shop for that similar bed.
This sounds quite unbelievable, right? But the technology used by visual search is still limited. The reason behind this is, it is important that the machine learning recreates the mind’s image processing prior to it effectively produces a practical visual search application. It’s not just about spotting out an image. It is important that the machine recognizes a variety of shapes, colours, sizes and a pattern, similarly as the human mind does.
Users can upload an image to perform a search and also get more specific results with visual search.
Micro-Moments Are Taking Over a Consumer Journey
Today, content, ads, offers, emails, push notifications and everything else have become convincing platforms for consumers all the time. Businesses also have reached the point where they can’t find more ways to process information. Therefore, brands and marketers are finding it really hard to grab the attention of the audience. This is where micro-moment marketing comes into spotlight.
Micro-moment is considered to be a new type of consumer behavior that occurs when people automatically turn to a device. Generally, a smartphone is used to act on a need, to learn something, buy something, do something or get to know something. There are different types of micro-moments such as I-want-to-go-moment, I-want-to-know moment, I-want-to-buy moment or I-want-to-do moment. According to Think with Google, Google’s content marketing team, users experience “micro-moments” on average 150 times a day.
Do you know why micro-moments are so important? The reason behind micro-moments being so important is, people’s instant decisions on buying anything, going anywhere or selecting a restaurant for eating that allows you a second’s span to catch their attention. The strategy is working because it provides consumers with right information exactly when it is required.
For reaping the benefits of micro-moments, you will need to follow your consumers and track what information they search for in a particular moment – such as Google Maps, Google, Amazon, YouTube, and any other place where people search for information at a moment’s notice.
Influencer Marketing will Boost Up
In influencer marketing, key brand advocates are used to deliver your message to the larger market in an organic way. It isolates people with large social followers that influence your target audience and then runs marketing activities that feature those key influencers.
Basically, it is a type of word-of-mouth marketing in which important leaders help to drive your brand’s message to the larger market.
Influencers help in effective marketing that leads to attracting customers. They can either be celebrities and YouTube or Instagram stars to well-known bloggers and journalists that help spread the word about a business or product via their social channels.
Best example of influencer marketing is the ad of Colgate Super-Flexi in which Virat Kohli, the Indian cricket team’s captain influences to use the Colgate Super-Flexi tooth-brush to clean your teeth.
So, you might try something like this.
Content segmentation
Customers are segmented in many ways, which means they are targeted based on similar demographics and interests. Communication forms such as e-newsletters, news and updates, and offers and promotions are often segmented.
In addition to the standard opt-in/opt-out marketing strategies, brands should consider more detailed and considerate tagging of their email content that allows users to actually opt-out of specific kinds of content.
NFTs and crypto in social media ecommerce
It’s nearly impossible to miss the rise of online currencies and NFTs over the past few years, even if you don’t invest in crypto yourself. You might not think that it affects your marketing strategy at first glance, but that’s not the kind of passive thinking we’re looking for in coming years.
With social platforms like Twitter now integrating cryptocurrency payments, and display tools showcasing in-app NFT purchases on the rise, it’s time to consider how your brand can get involved. Facebook is already promoting the use of NFT display options and avatars, and we expect more companies to follow suit.
With NFTs and cryptocurrency, it is important to consider how to sell the brand beyond its products and services, and perhaps even its brand ethos.
Conclusion
Everyone is excited to welcome upcoming year and want to have a great business start with this New Year. Coming year will be the year of improved customer experience with automation, personalization and AI-powered technology. So, you will need to improve in terms of producing custom and conversational content – specifically the audio and video content for sharing it with your targeted audience. Doing this, will surely help you to stay ahead of the competition and also increase your conversions in the New Year.
