Technology and digital infrastructure play a pivotal role in putting businesses ahead of their competition. However, with changing trends, the technologies and strategies that were once integral to business operations have now become obsolete. The basic strategy of marketing still remains the same. Entrepreneurs still get powerful messages crafted to attract consumers. But, with advancement in technology, new digital marketing trends like SEO optimisation, search advertising, and more have been incorporated by businesses to ensure that they progress at a fast pace.
Some digital marketing strategies that could be incorporated in 2019 are:
1. Use of Artificial Intelligence for Profiling Buyers
Artificial intelligence is now capable of powering customer segmentation, retargeting, click tracking, creating content, and more. According to a study by Blueshift, 28% of marketers are using artificial intelligence for product recommendations and 26% of them are using it for campaign optimisation. Artificial intelligence can also be helpful in improving customer services, providing support to customers, and improving existing products and services. One of the main ways through which artificial intelligence can help businesses achieve their growth goals is personalisation. The use of artificial intelligence can help businesses in turning a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead. Artificial intelligence can also be used to deliver personalised headlines and advertising copy.
2. Installation of Chatbots
Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are popular tools of digital marketing. However, constant engagement isn’t the ultimate solution to coming closer to customers. Entrepreneurs can now install chatbots on their websites and allow them to interact with customers. Improvement in artificial intelligence has further led to improvement in chatbots, increasing their effectiveness to answer mostly-asked questions. Chatbots are cheaper and more effective than customer support services provided by people, as they don’t have to be staffed, and they can answer the questions posed in front of them almost immediately.
3. Omnichannel Marketing
Consumers are more efficient and sophisticated, and are capable of getting information through various channels. There was a time when multichannel marketing was introduced, such that prospects could communicate with businesses through various channels. Despite being better than single-channel marketing, multichannel marketing cannot solve the problems of consumers effectively. Thus, omnichannel marketing should be used by businesses. Omnichannel marketing provides a better experience to consumers, as it is a seamless and continuous interaction with prospects and customers across all channels. The main aim of omnichannel marketing is to ensure that the interactions made by the prospects are carefully tracked. This creates a positive impact on the customers and gives them an impression that the company cares about them, and keeps a track of previous interactions. Omnichannel marketing can be implemented by a business by finding a customer relationship management program that helps in keeping track of interactions with customers on various platforms.
4. Use of Accelerated Mobile Pages and PWA
About 60% of search traffic on Google comes from mobile devices. Google ranking of a website is negatively correlated to the load time of that website. Increase in load time of a website increases its bounce time, which in turn reduces the Google ranking of that website. Thus, companies should use accelerated mobile pages as they load in 0.5 seconds and create a lower bounce rate for the website. Accelerated mobile pages improve the website rank on Google, and increase the popularity of the website. Progressive Web Apps exist as a middle ground between native apps and normal responsive website. It offers the benefits of a mobile site and a native app. It offers various benefits, like an increase in loading time, better website experience, app development costs get eliminated, and more.
5. Email and Marketing Automation
Email has been a popular tool for digital marketing. But, with time, it has changed and it now gives a personalised experience to consumers. Nowadays, businesses send email to different subscribers on the basis of their interests, which they get to know about by analysing the type of content they engage in. Personalisation, therefore, makes email more effective. However, personalisation is not only applicable to email, but also to marketing efforts. Enterprises should focus on improving email communications and start repurposing it as a lead nature and consumer engagement tool. Thus, they should adopt marketing automation. It has many benefits. It eliminates time wastage, thereby, allowing marketing representatives to contact more leads without wasting man hours and money. Since marketing automation software has all the records, it can send alerts to help people stay on track. Marketing automation also increases collaboration between the marketing and sales department. It makes all the information about a lead or a customer available to any department that needs it.
2019 is a year of digital marketing. With new trends coming in, there are innumerable ways by which business enterprises can attract more consumers and provide them with satisfactory services.
Did you get something out of this article? Here are some more Marketing.com.au articles on trends in 2019:
Aditya Singhal is the co-founder of CrunchGrade, an online tutoring platform for students. It is his passion and vision to incorporate technology with education to help students not just thrive but excel through e-learning mediums and tools. He had worked with Kurt Salmon Associates, a reputed American Management Consultancy.
