Trends in digital marketing

Simply put, digital marketing cannot be ignored. No one disputes the power of effective marketing.

An effective marketing and advertising campaign can meet the needs of any business and increase the demand for the product or service they offer. But times have changed, and while the need for marketing is still important, where it is most effective, much has changed.

If you want to go where people are, you need to be active online. The impact of the digital landscape, or “cyberspace,” has been growing steadily since the 1990s, and now, just a few decades later, it is the primary virtual environment for the vast majority of people on the planet.

Facebook can reach its maximum

The good news is that Facebook is still #1 social platform. So there is simply no better platform for marketing to older people.

On the other hand, Facebook had a challenging year in 2018, with data leakage affecting 14 million users, a reputation for being a platform of choice for armed political propaganda and continuing to fall in popularity among younger demographics, so much so that many people believe that the relationship between the public and Facebook can change.

It is important for future digital marketing professionals to take a real look at who their target market might be, because Facebook may not be suitable for some campaigns, especially as it continues to decline to a younger age.

Don’t be fooled, Facebook is still massive and many Americans continue to check it, but be more careful with who you sell to and make sure they are still on Facebook, or you’re targeting the wrong social media platform.

Instagram is a hit among kids

Fortunately for Facebook, their biggest threat hasn’t posed any threat since they bought Instagram. The image and video based social networking platform is optimized to make it very easy for users to share photos and videos from their phone, which is currently the most common computing device on the planet and is quickly becoming a popular computer for the general public.

The rapid growth of Instagram has already passed a billion users, which is an impressive achievement. This means that it is one of the fastest growing social networking platforms, and perhaps more importantly, most of its user base is the coveted younger demographic, especially under 30, that Facebook is losing because of its reputation as a social networking platform.

The use of chatbots will increase

Chatbots are just a specialized form of software that acts as a virtual “concierge”, communicating with users and helping them to achieve their goals. Chat bots interact with people naturally, mainly through the use of text chat windows, but verbal interactions are also possible.

Chat bots are already widely used in Facebook by tens of thousands of people for various tasks. Sophisticated software can easily handle everything from providing weather reports to automating some of the major customer support functions. Bots allow users to get personalized, targeted interactions without using too many limited human resources.

Their effectiveness in 2018 already shows a significant increase in usage, and this usage is likely to continue to grow for digital marketing in 2019.

The video is mandatory.

In total, most users interact with YouTube. This means that more than half of all Americans watch videos, and many of these videos are created in the digital marketing service. While YouTube may be the most popular way to consume video, even more so than Facebook, it does not mean that you should not post videos to Facebook or any other social platform in this regard.

Video digital marketing, in a sense, offers the best of both worlds. Actual budgeting and video production mechanisms are well understood and documented, as the video itself is a 20th century environment.

However, now video is combined with incredibly accurate and valuable custom digital media metrics to provide much more useful data on how specific actions are performed. Whether you’re creating videos for Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or even your own website, it’s a first-class, incredibly effective digital marketing tool.

You can capture and share a lot of information and personality of your brand with the help of video. As long as you stick to the basics of good video production, you can achieve impressive results.

Live video is a separate but important thing

Although video is a valuable tool, one of the fastest growing stars in digital marketing is the use of live video. Part of this is due to the huge surge in streaming services thanks to popular channels such as Twitch, which allow people to easily stream video games, or even devices such as the Sony PS4 gaming console, which has built-in streaming capabilities.

Live streaming, as it is called, is particularly important for digital marketing, combined with the impact of marketing. Whether it’s a new generation of influential people on social media or traditional sources such as celebrities, athletes and musicians, a live broadcast with an influential person who interacts directly with comments is a huge appeal to the audience.

Live and influential live is an incredibly useful, loud form of digital marketing right now. The spontaneity and interactivity of streaming can undoubtedly become a big draw, if everything is done right, with a well chosen personality.

Good content still matters

Content marketing continues to be an important component of digital marketing, although there is a growing focus on the nuances of content. Quality will always be important, but now there is renewed interest in better understanding the intended recipients. Having a deeper, deeper understanding of the target market and the ability to navigate that market more accurately is a growing trend in more effective marketing.

Thus, while content has been, is, and always will be, important for a broad audience, specialized material for specific industries or experts can also produce impressive results. This, combined with improved methods for measuring content efficiency, makes content marketing relevant and moving forward.

E-mails become more personalized

E-mail remains the main channel of communication and billions still use it for personal, commercial, industrial, legal, scientific and academic purposes. In other words, email is here to stay, and postal marketing itself continues to be important.

However, e-marketing is evolving, and the overall marketing of emails is not as effective as it used to be. It is now a combination of automation and, more importantly, personalization that makes email marketing important for 2019.

When you can initiate email marketing to something specific, for example, by viewing a particular product by a user, and then get an advertising price or demo video in a personalized email, it can be very effective.

E-mail is often the last “trigger” to motivate action, especially when combined with your remarketing methods.

Voice interaction is growing

Thanks to Siri, Google, Alexa and many other smart devices, verbal interaction with devices continues to grow. The real conclusion is that conversation is just the preferred way to communicate. And now machines are finally catching up with how people want to look for, shop and discover new things.

However, this presents some interesting challenges. For example, conducting a voice search is very different from entering a request, especially in results.

When a person performs a text search, the screen displays the results one page at a time. But when someone asks a device to perform a search, and the device responds orally, it can give you only a few choices, and often they provide only one option.