5 Digital Marketing Trends Experts Say to Closely Watch in 2019

With any newly developed business, a solid content marketing strategy must be in the works. What helps is knowing what trends are on the horizon as well as existing trends that can help a company increase its profit. We discuss many of these trends in our free webinar training. The goal of this article is to offer advice to boost a business strategy. We dive into some of the best 2019 marketing trends and discuss how to develop an effective plan for the coming year.

LinkedIn Will Grow

Susan Beebe from Social Media Examiner believes that in the coming year LinkedIn will grow. There will be an increase in user engagement, resulting in a robust website where a brand can have a strong presence on the web.

Distrust of social media will continue, and rightly so.

LinkedIn has grown into a robust platform that has maintained user trust. Conversely, LinkedIn has grown into a robust platform that has maintained user trust. No longer viewed as just an online résumé, LinkedIn will see growth in user and brand engagement. Due to the professional nature of LinkedIn, users experience a higher quality of conversation (e.g., less political arguing), which will encourage more screen time and ad impressions.

This provides a rich opportunity for brands to grow and leverage a presence.

Other key changes to watch for in 2019:

Alexa “voice search” is experiencing rapid growth. A lot of AI-powered devices were delivered over the holidays, translating to new opportunities for marketers to leverage this growing voice platform including tighter integration with eCommerce and delivery services.
Content strategy will shift even further from highly produced videos to story-format content. These short videos are easier and cheaper to produce, and benefit from real-time fan engagement.
Influencers will need to prove more value as brands question inflated vanity metrics driven by bots and sophisticated click networks.
Susan Beebe is a recognized thought leader with a background in technology, project management, and corporate communications on a global scale for Fortune 100 companies.

E-Commerce Will Influence Business Strategies

Marketing Dive discusses how e-commerce will influence business strategies. What does this mean for current businesses? They should consider the best ways to incorporate e-commerce to help their website grow and make money.

Outside of purpose-led creativity, e-commerce will become the centerpiece of many marketers' business strategies in 2019. The channel's been steadily rising to that status for years now, but Kantar Consulting and Profitero recently found that 76% of surveyed marketers are increasing their investments in e-commerce this year to capitalize on an estimated $3.5 trillion opportunity in online retail.

“We're seeing more and more categories here at a tipping point … when they go from just 2% or 3% [of investments toward e-commerce] to the potential of 10 to 15%,” Malcolm Pinkerton, Kantar Consulting's VP of e-commerce and digital insights, told Marketing Dive. “How do they start to properly cope with competing with the likes of Amazon? How do they properly cope with Alibaba, and how do they start building proper direct-to-consumer models?”

For traditional marketers in categories like CPG, meeting the consumer demand for e-commerce services will mean more than figuring out convenient ways to sell things online. More products and packaging will need to be expressly designed for these functions and for agile supply chains. Tide's Eco-Box, the first product out of Procter & Gamble's fabric care e-commerce innovation group, serves as an early experiment that will only become more common.

“P&G typically isn't seen as a leader in the e-commerce innovation space, but they sure beat many to the punch with this one,” Jon Reily, VP of commerce strategy at Publicis.Sapient, told Marketing Dive in emailed comments.

“Moves like this will get people talking … but ultimately will not be a huge leap forward for what CPG's truly want; a one-on-one relationship with the customer with a ‘No Amazons' sign out front of the tree house,” Reily said.

Personalization Will Make a Big Difference

Are you using personalization to your advantage? Business 2 Community argues that personalizing your brand is imperative in today’s day and age because it helps you better identify with your customers and learn what their needs are.

Generalizations are, well…boring. Your audience is made up of many different individuals who don’t want to be just another potential buyer. They want to be seen individually, especially by the brands in which they plan to invest.

With the creation of personalization technology, we as businesses have no excuse not to personalize each person’s experience. This technology allows us to refer to each person by name and to provide content that is tailored to their interests.

In one study from Salesforce, 57% said that they would be willing to give their personal information in exchanged for personalized offers and discounts. In the same study, 53% said that they would be willing to part with personal data for a more personalized shopping experience.

Bottom Line for 2019: Ditch generalities and tailor your strategy to give a more personal experience to your audience.

Voice Activated Search

This trend is fun to think about! Utilizing a voice-activated search will make it quick and convenient to learn more about a particular topic on the web as well as offer other benefits. Chief Marketer discusses this upcoming trend in more depth below:

By 2020, it’s expected that 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches, and by 2022, voice commerce sales will reach $40 billion. Next year, consumers will be able to do more in search with their voice, and mobile marketers should be prepared for voice activated search advertising. User interface platforms will become the new battleground for marketers (Alexa v Google Home, Siri, Bigsby).

As search engines grow more and more sensitive to user intent, it becomes increasingly vital that advertisers tag every image, video and piece of content appropriately with meta descriptions and alt-text. Search engines use these bits of information to promptly categorize and serve up content to users. Without them, marketers will lose traffic—more so in 2019.

Social Media Will Become All the More Popular

Check out this example from Mark Schaefer on Social Media Examiner. He says that in 2019 social media interaction will continue to rise, which means new companies need to get on the bandwagon! That means not being social for the sake of keeping social media profiles updated but using social media as a way to socialize and genuinely get to know your audience.

I’ve been fortunate to intimately observe the progression of social media marketing for more than a decade. But I’m not sure our recent progress has been positive. Instead of recognizing social media as an opportunity to strengthen the customer connection, companies have inexorably squeezed the “social” out of social media:

Companies have inexorably squeezed the “social” out of social media.

Conversations gave way to broadcasting “content.”
Social media became an IT function and was automated to the point of being soulless.
Humans with personalities and names were replaced by corporate personas and branded voices.
Success was measured in clicks and likes rather than relationships and loyalty.
Social media’s primary role evolved to become a place to weaponize influencers.

Rather than social media fundamentally changing how marketing works, over the last 10 years, marketing fundamentally changed how social media works.

So how do we renew, refresh, and reimagine social media in a noisy world where brand loyalty is fading and engagement is in freefall?

In 2019, it’s time to take social media marketing back from the IT department and drive a truly human-centered approach to our customer relations. Social media can be a vital and effective channel if we use it to:

It’s time to take social media marketing back from the IT department and drive a truly human-centered approach to our customer relations.

Provide relevant human connections.
Form reliable and trustworthy communication channels.
Express shared values.
Display human emotions like compassion, understanding, and empathy.
Create unique and entertaining experiences.
Demonstrate active involvement in local issues.
Offer a dependable way to respond in a moment of customer need.
Social media still provides an essential chance to connect to customers and serve them, but most companies are missing the opportunity due to an outdated focus on “me-centric posts,” random acts of content, and misguided attempts to manufacture engagement.

2019 is the year we start putting the “social” back in social media. We really have no choice.

Mark Schaefer is a globally recognized keynote speaker, educator, business consultant, and author. His blog {grow} is hailed as one of the top marketing blogs in the world.

Check out our free webinar training to learn more about some of the upcoming digital marketing trends and other trends that will benefit you and your business. We want to help you succeed on the web and increase your income — the more knowledge you have on how to do that, the better!

Sources: Social Media Examiner, Marketing Dive, Business 2 Community, Chief Marketer