Marketing predictions for 2019

Content, social, email, and sustainability (just to name a few)

1. Micro content is back.

Not everyone has time for longform, 2,500-word, SEO-heavy articles. What people do have time for is short stuff. Think: 500-word articles, recaps of stories, daily roundups, etc. Summaries will reign in 2019. When creating content, keep in mind that attention spans are short, and we’re in the golden age of multitasking. Abbreviate, abbreviate, abbreviate.

Examples: Sip by Product Hunt, the Reforge blog, New York Times’ The Daily, Quartz Brief.

2. A new social network will rise.

There have been many years where contenders for “the next big social network” came and went. Ello. Peach. Secret. The problem: We expected the Next Big Thing to arrive for the wrong reasons, either because social networks were popular and the market was huge or because social networks were huge and rife for disruption.

It’s not the size of the markets or the risk of disruption that will lead to the next big network. It’s the fact that public sentiment has shifted. People want a different sort of social network because the current ones aren’t cutting it.

Possibilities: Are.na

3. Plain-text emails will rule.

Check your inbox six months from now, and that email from Bonobos will look just like that email from grandma. Plain-text, personal. Ostensibly, the plain-text email will begin as a play to avoid Gmail’s Promotion tab, but marketers will find that these emails are actually just as, if not more, effective than the super polished, image-rich versions that get sent now. Plus, they don’t take nearly as much time to create.

Examples: Product Habits, Copyhackers, Intercom onboarding

4. Interactive content will become the new 10x content.

Blogging is dead, says everyone all the time. For the record, I don’t believe that blogging will ever die. I think blogging will continue to change and evolve. Whether you call the next iteration of content “blogging” or something else, I predict that the articles, essays, stories, and posts that stand out in 2019 will be the ones that you interact with. You’ll input information and the story changes. You swipe. You scroll. The narrative responds to you. We’ve seen this in the past with famous articles like “What is Code?” — a story before its time. We kind of see it with Stories content on Instagram and everywhere else. This is the future, this is now. Blogging is dead, long live blogging!

Examples: What is Code? and the Typeform’s conversation article. Everything the Pudding does. Fivethirtyeight data.

5. Sustainability will be a differentiator for tech brands.

Sustainability and tech? What? I blanched when I first heard it, too (“how does sustainability apply when no trees are harmed in the making of 1s and 0s”), but now that I understand the concept, I see the need. We consume a lot of electricity to run our websites. Jack Lenox of the Susty WP theme says it well:

The Internet uses a lot of electricity. For most of the world, producing electricity means the burning of fossil fuels, this in turn means that the Internet’s carbon footprint may have already eclipsed global air travel .

The Mozilla Internet Health Report 2018 states that, especially as the Internet expands into new territory, “sustainability should be a bigger priority” . But as it stands, websites are growing ever more obese , which means that the energy demand of the web is growing exponentially.

Example: Susty WordPress theme

What are your predictions for 2019?

I’d love to hear them!

Originally published at www.kevanlee.com on January 10, 2019.