Digital Trends For Marketers To Leverage In 2019

The digital world is huge, complicated and currently changing at lightning speed.

In order to maintain and expand your consumer base, it’s important that you learn everything there is to know about digital marketing and do whatever it takes to not just keep up with the latest trends, but beat your competition to them.

To make this task a bit easier for you, I’ve evaluated a few current trends and used them to compile a list of the digital marketing trends that you can’t afford to miss this year.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Voice Searches
• Vernacular
• Micro influencers
• Google Lead Forms
• Content clusters

The rise of artificial intelligence

The rise of “AI” is a term that frightens some people and excites others. The scary part is often seen as people losing their jobs to machines or even taking over the world and replacing humans. The good piece that others are embracing is taking away the drone work that dehumanizes workers. Artificial intelligence is becoming a necessity to enhance and scale repetitive and boring human tasks.

Why we need “machines”?

The content explosion is overwhelming.As the data volume has increased exponentially, the scale of the noise means that making sense of it needs artificial intelligence and machines with big powerful processors. Humans will need the machines to cope and make sense of the complexity and barrage of noise. This means we will “need” artificial intelligence marketing.

Artificial Intelligence Marketing can be distilled into 3 steps -> Collect, reason and act.

Collect: There is so much data that humans can no longer cope with the volume and we need computers to collate and collect it

Reason: Making sense of the data and gain insights needs “AI” to perform it at scale

Act: Then to need to use that insights to create messaging and content that influences the buying decision

How is it being used otherwise? Where is this artificial intelligence being used that maybe you don’t even notice?

Tagging of friends on Facebook with facial recognition. Deep learning technology that is woven into Facebook’s suggestions, Newsfeed algorithms and trending topics. LinkedIn uses “AI” to provide better job matching between business and candidate. News stories created by robots and humans: Washington Post is using an “intelligent, automated storytelling agent,” which they affectionately refer to as Heliograf. This smart technology scales the creation of accurate news stories to meet the 24/7 news cycle. And this is just scratching the surface. Adext lists 9 other ways AI is used in digital marketing.

Voice search

Did you know that Google is getting 28% of total searches through voice queries?  With more Indians joining the digital bandwagon, voice queries may even surpass type searches in a few years’ time.

The world is slowly moving away from understanding a user with their clicks towards having a conversation with them on voice mediums. The media horizon is changing and brands have a huge unexplored opportunity to get intimate with their TG by solving their queries in their language. Apart from home assistants such as Alexa or  Google Home, it is mobile voice searches that is making a rise.

 The classic use case for voice search will be about “what can I get here?” and “places around me?”

But how can you stand out with voice?

Since there is only 1 rank for voice to win, brands should be able provide value. Ensure your website is 100% Search engine optimized, only then would Google be able to get more structured data from your website and share it with their users. The more in-depth your content, the more Google gains from it and creates a structured answer for the user query. Making your business both mobile responsive and primed for voice search queries is going to be the way of the future in 2019.

Vernacular - The new road to success

 According to a recent report by KPMG:-

1. Indian language internet users are expected to grow at a CAGR of 18 percent vs English users at a CAGR of 3 percent.
2. 9 out of every 10 new internet users in India over the next five years are likely to be an Indian language user.

 With 88 percent of Indian language internet users more likely to respond to digital advertisements in local language over English, both domestic and international companies are fast taking steps to meet this growing need for Indic content. Tech giant Google has recently added voice search capability for eight additional Indian languages.Microsoft has announced support for email addresses in 15 languages.

 It is now more than evident that regional language internet usage is where the real growth will be in India and you need to ride on this wave.

Micro Influencers is the way to go

With some infamous macro-influencer stumbles, such as Cipla’s Berok Zindagi campaign with Priyanka Chopra, celebrity endorsements may not be the best way to go.Instead, a different star is rising to take their place: Micro-Influencers. These far smaller influencers on Instagram, YouTube, and other social channels may have follower counts in the single digit thousands, but their communities are much more tight-knit and their good engagement is based on sincere belief and trust in them.

These micro-influencers are not only comparatively cheaper to partner with, but they also help strengthen a brand’s customer lifetime value rather than creating a short-term buzz.

Google capture lead forms

There is a new Google AdWords beta on the block named “contact form extensions”. Contact form extensions provides a contact form directly in the search ad, which a searcher can fill out and the advertiser can then use in the future to contact that lead. It is very similar to a lead acquisition form, but this one is found directly in an expanded Google AdWords ad.

A super exciting feature that I really, really hope to see some good results from. To leverage this, ensure your ad is in the #1 position in Google for the contact form extension to be enabled.

Pillar Content for better SEO

Search engines have changed their algorithms and instead of favoring keywords they now show preference to clusters of content around particular topics.

This Pillar content is basically formed to show people on google that you are an expert within the category, and hence you are more likely to have the top spot.

The pillar content is basically an entire page which breaks down an entire topic, for example, “Diabetes in India”. The cluster’s around the pillars focus on specific long-tail key words (i.e. diabetes doctor in India, diabetes treatment in India, types of diabetes, diabetes diet for Indians and so on). The pillar links to each blog page on the sub-topic and each blog page related to the topic links back to the pillar with the same hyperlinked keyword. So when one page performs well, the entire lot of blogs hyperlinked will get a boost.

Digital marketing trends that are on the list every year but still deserve to be there:

Mobile first - Probably on every digital marketing trends list since cell phones first had internet capabilities, the relentless increase of users accessing the web through mobile means its importance continues.

In fact, this year there were two important markers for mobile: Google announcing a mobile-first web index, and the fact that mobile traffic has overtaken desktop for internet usage.

AR & VR- The progress is probably slower than people would like, as this is another trend that’s been on many a list. I do believe its use will increase, but it is unlikely to develop beyond a niche market in 2019

More Video - It feels like my entire social feed is filled with video, but guess what….there is always room for more! Facebook has been embracing video and is likely to continue. Instagram is banking on IGTV to boost their revenue. It seems like we cannot get enough of video!

 CONCLUSION

With digital technology getting more sophisticated all the time, the scope for brands and businesses to engage with consumers is endless, and it is going to prove even more valuable in 2019.

It is the year to take heed of the new and the developed digital marketing trends that are beginning to emerge. Start planning and gain the expertise you need now to ensure success tomorrow.