Let’s look at the top five digital marketing trends that you should adopt to stand out in the crowd of online campaigns.
1. Video Marketing
According to HubSpot, 81 percent of brands use video as a marketing tool. The reason for this is the rise of video SEO. Your videos hosted on YouTube and other websites get listed on SERPs, which is why marketers are making video an important element of their content strategy. Since videos require passive attention for comprehension, compared to reading, their consumption has increased significantly.
Along with this, live videos, 360-degree videos and vertical videos are rapidly gaining prominence giving marketers new avenues to explore and be creative in their campaigns.
2. Voice Search
You’ve probably read the prediction that by 2020, 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches multiple times, to realize that voice search can no longer be ignored.
Google’s Hummingbird algorithm update promotes semantic search and since voice search is conversational, it is necessary that your website is optimized for voice.
3. Conversational Commerce
The growing adoption of social messaging apps, chatbots and digital assistants has ensured that 2019 will be the year of conversational commerce. Conversational commerce is an AI-driven technology that lets customers interact with brands via chatbots or digital assistants.
Digital assistants are already capable of helping us find stores, restaurants, classes, recommend products and deals and assisting with e-commerce shopping. And as predicted by Gartner, 25 percent of customer service will be powered by chatbots by 2020. Marketers need to capitalize on this opportunity to outrun their competition.
4. Micro-Moments
We all turn to our phones when looking for something and this has caused a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. Google calls such instances micro-moments. A micro-moment signifies an intent-rich instance when a person checks their smartphone to know, go, buy or do something. Analyzing voice search and conversational commerce data will help you understand how crucial these micro-moments are for your brand.
Google suggests following these steps to deliver micro-moments:
Anticipate the micro-moments for your brand
Design a digital experience that is essential to foster micro-moments
Create seamless CX across different devices
5. Native Advertising
The digital advertising industry is facing challenges such as ad fraud, ad blockers and customers becoming wary in the way they use the internet. This has made it challenging for advertisers to connect with their audiences. A great solution to this is native advertising — paid ads that are not intrusive and do not obstruct the user experience.
Native ads are primarily displayed in social media feeds or websites under the recommended posts section or in a way that blends into the site content.
