Ushering in the New Era of Digital Marketing

We all have been listening to things like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, automation, voice assistance, but have you ever thought of how these futuristic things are going to change the digital marketing space?

We as users have evolved our behavior in such a way that we have become more demanding, search oriented, impatient and personalization is expected out of any products or services that we avail. Therefore every other brand has been working towards delivering a better user experience (UX). And all this has become possible because of the immense data available in the digital ecosystem.

These small devices which we carry in our pockets have provided enough data to businesses and brands which we had never seen before. And this developed the need for processing this massive data into meaningful information that can be leveraged further to enhance the experience. And this is how machine learning (also called deep learning) came into existence, where a machine can start learning on it's own without being explicitly taught to understand patterns, behavior and other factors.

The same technology had been adopted by businesses to enable their algorithms to better understand the user’s behavior and start predicting things according. And this is what you see when you are on a social networking site, news portals (reading some article) or buy something on a e-commerce website. Their algorithms are getting smarter in predicting things personalized to you and they can even predict the outcomes of those actions.

Now the question arises, how is this going to change digital marketing?

The digital marketing world has been discussing the change it's going to bring from quite some time and it is an existential threat to many agencies which are still running the campaigns in the old way where the majority of your time goes into changing bids and making reports. One of the dominating advertising platforms, Google has consolidated all its advertising products into Google Marketing Platform and made it a lot more easier for a small business owners to run campaigns by their own. They have started educating small business owners to leverage their smart bidding options to drive results.

Earlier, we used to prefer manual bidding over automated but the scenario has changed, as selecting a right bidding strategy is crucial, especially if you are running a performance specific campaign. Since these platforms have massive amounts of data and AI enables algorithms, their smart bidding options can deliver far better results than humans after a certain period as it takes time to learn initially. They have been tracking individuals and they have enough data about us so that they can outrank human capabilities. Their AI powered algorithms have developed capability to better understand a user's true intent (like when he's in the market searching for a product or a service) and delivering a relevant ad at the right time.

Another thing I want to discuss here is the adoption of Marketing Automation as a mainstream solution. Automation industry could be valued over $7 billion by 2025, which is a clear indication of how rapidly businesses are adopting automation tools to streamline their marketing efforts. If you want to be one step ahead of your competitors you should implement this. Here are the features:

• Scale your marketing
• Improve your customer targeting
• Measuring your results accurately 
• Manage your campaigns
• Understand your Prospects & Customers Better
• Increase your Revenue
• Qualified leads
• Cross-channel marketing
• Save time and Resources
• Improve reporting

**Recommended tools are Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot, Act-On, Elouqa, LeadSquared, GetResponse

The next thing that I would like to talk about is Voice Search. It isn’t the next big disrupter, but what is making it distinct is it's integration with AI. Voice search is a small component of conversational searches. Use of voice assistance products has increased rapidly and it's expected to grow by 20% upto the year 2020. Voice conversion had made a headline when Google announced Google Duplex (technology for conducting natural conversation) at I/O developer conference. This AI-powered technology of natural language processing enabled Alexa, Siri, Google, or Cortana much like talking to another human. Era of touch (as the primary user interface) is being disrupted by the amazing voice assisted technology.

But this has brought up another challenge to marketers about 0 (zero) position. When you type a query into a search engine (especially Google), you generally get multiple search results. But this isn't the case with these conversational devices as you would only get 1 answer and derived from “featured snippet” within the search results. The only opportunity here is to become that position 0 (zero), so you can win the traffic.

Now let's talk about organic search marketing, no doubt search engines have evolved tremendously in the past couple of years, especially Google. According to Google, they usually make more than 500 changes to their core algorithm to deliver better search results to their users and to fight web fraud. Google had released 2 significant updates, hummingbird (semantic search) and Rank brain (machine learning) which totally changes their way of processing search queries. With these significant changes along with other minor updates (which they have been implementing in their core algorithm) enabled Google to actually understand the real intent of a user and deliver the best possible search results personalized to an individual's interest.

Considering the extensive increase in mobile traffic, Google rolled out mobile-first indexing early this year. They had sent notifications around mobile-first indexing being enabled for websites, stating "we'll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they're looking for." The industry has also been emphasizing on the use of AMP to better perform in mobile searches.

In today's era, user experience has become the most prominent factor in any business and this what Google wants to provide to their users when they search for something. John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) has been emphasizing (in most of his webmaster hangouts) on below things:

• Create a Good Mobile Experience
• Make Sure JavaScript Works Well
• Make Use of Structured Data
• Proper Use of On-Page Elements

One of his recent discussion, he advised SEOs to learn JavaScript, as JS frameworks are becoming more common and it’s going to be necessary for SEOs to have a more thorough understanding of JS.

Your future SEO would rely upon 2 major factors, Content Development and User Experience (UX). Content has been the prime factor of user engagement and this will remain and grow. It's not important how often you post (at least search engines won't judge you on this). Rather, what you post and how much engagement it gathers is more important. It's recommended to create long form content as it generates higher online visibility, more proof of your authority and industry expertise. If your users are consuming and appreciating your content, search engines will automatically do the same. Give your uses a reason to stick around and come back whenever you post something. Leave the rest to search engines as they are capable enough to notice engagement signals and appreciate your content pieces in search results.

Conclusion: AI enabled smart technologies have reformed the digital marketing industry, therefore the sooner you adopt (these new technologies) the better you can serve your end users.