‘Digital marketing’ – what are the first few things that pop into your mind?
SEO, social media, videos, ads, blogs…etc. As a business, you need to stay on top of the fast-growing marketing game.
These trends change constantly, and sometimes, they are hard to follow – that is why we are here to share some love.
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Yes, you must have seen articles about it everywhere, because AI is becoming more common, especially in digital marketing. As more businesses are going online, they need to analyse consumer behaviour, search patterns and more.
One key point is that AI learns, so the more data it collects from your business, the more accurate its results become. Leading businesses are harnessing the Power of AI to understand audience behaviours and leverage this knowledge to better serve (AND MONETISE) their customers.
2. Programmatic Advertising
Now, that is one hell of a term, it simply means using AI to buy online advertisements for your website. This advertising model will decide what ads to buy from different publishers that are most profitable to your company.
It determines the most suitable audiences to target based on conversion metrics – with each conversion the algorithm learns more about the types of people that are interested in your product or services.
These audiences are then grouped based on online behavioural traits, age groups, locations, gender, and more in order to reach the best audiences with the right messages. This AI model eliminated the long process, of manually finding ads, approving ads, and targeting them to certain groups of people.
3. Facebook is still on trend!
We all have been mocked by younger generations “Only old people use Facebook!”
WELL, according to Statistica – they are right, people of 25-34 years old use Facebook the most.
This helps you to decide which social media platforms you want to focus the most. If your business is targeting millennial or older age group, then it is reasonable to focus your ads and content marketing on Facebook.
4. Instagram is a YES for the younger generation
According to Statistica (again), young people of 18 – 24 years old use Instagram the most, and yes – the 2000 babies are now 19 years old.
Instagram is a great way to get personal with your audience. In fact, it can do both personal and professional. Because it has a story function, you can interact with your audience, share day to day life of your team members, giving out tips, etc.
At the same time, you can still maintain the business’s professional appearance by posting photos on Instagram. It is also a great way to start a campaign, such as a call to action, hashtag campaign, asking users to post their experience of your product – a great way to expose your brand to more people.
5. Chatbots
Don’t we all love it when someone solves our problems in a few minutes? Chatbot, a chatting robot – it talks to users and helps them answering questions, solving problems and more. Let’s take a look at the Babylon app, an online doctor consultation app:
It is reported that their AI chatbots are better than medical exams. Chatbots can give your customers a more efficient consultation experience because they don’t have to send an email on the website and wait a day or two for the reply.
6. Video is a MUST
85% of customers get involved in a brand after watching a video on social media, according to Brightcove. If your target audience is the younger generation, that’s even better, because 85% of Gen Z see YouTube as their dominating platform.
Social media videos are generally short and easy to digest. One key thing is to put captions or subtitles because people don’t normally watch it with sound. Keep your message short, use subtitles, good quality, good content.
7. Personalise your emails
Email is here to stay; it is one of the most important marketing strategies. It is still a major channel of communication.
86% of consumers like receiving promotional emails from companies they have engaged with.
Think about how we use the email inbox function – we tend to open emails which have actual names on top, we mainly read the text, instead of looking at images or videos in emails. Adjust your email campaign by simply considering how do you yourself approach emails.
Personalised emails are 26% more likely to be opened. Use a casual tone, greet them with a ‘hello’, use a simple design, and keep it short.
8. Voice Interaction
Siri, Alexa, Google – we have all heard of them. People are relying more on these voice assistants in their everyday life. They ask them questions directly – or even just chatting with them. That’s why it is time for us marketers to rethink our SEO strategy.
Written SEO is still important, but we need to take natural language SEO more seriously. What we need to consider are: how do people ask questions? What words do they use in a question? So, including question terms might be useful for SEO optimization, like ‘how do I cook a chicken?’
9. Virtual Reality Marketing
VR is innovative and fun because the users can have fun while digesting the message in the ad.
VR brings illusions in the advertisement to reality for the consumers, which make the whole experience more impressive and memorable, thus imprinting your brand onto the viewers’ mind.
Take a look at the Boursin’s Ad:
10. Influencer Marketing
Youtubers and Instagram stars are your way in. For example, GymShark collaborates with a lot of famous fitness stars on Youtube and Instagram such as Whitney Simmons – resulting in a £41 million sales in 2017.
Influencers have their own promotional code for their followers. And as they use and talk about the products in videos more often, its more persuasive to the audience.
As a digital marketing company, we often ask clients whether they have influencer we can contact for
11. Visual Search
Google made a ground-breaking search tool of allowing people to search by uploading images. I mean, we can’t remember the name of a dress or jewelleries, right? We only remember what they look like.
62% millennials love to search by images. We can add this function to allow customers to search by simply uploading an image. Right now, only 8% of retailers in the US have a built-in image search function. In fact, Target has just partnered up with Pinterest to integrate visual search.
12. Push Notifications
They have to be conversational, think about what kind of notifications we engage every day – messages. So, by making them sound more conversational, there is a higher chance the viewers will open it.
It’s a love-hate relationship with notification, have you ever deleted an app because it has too many mundane notifications? That’s why we need to find the balance. They must be informative, pop up at the right time and the right moment.
That’s it, now you are on-trend! We have thorough blogs about social media marketing and online adverts if you want to get your brand out there. Feel free to contact us if you need any help with digital marketing.
