Let’s face it – digital marketing is the oxygen of online businesses. And without using the right digital marketing strategies, you cannot expect to survive in the online world. After all, it’s a vast world and there is a lot of competition on it. That’s a given fact!

An effectively implemented advertising and marketing campaign can cater to the requisites of any business and improve the demand for the service or product that they offer.

The fact is you can have a visually appealing website with simple navigation, the best quality products and unlimited supply of money for marketing. But none of this matters if you are unable to reach your target audience and engage them. I cannot emphasize this enough that digital marketing is what makes your business stand out.

But time changes and so do the digital marketing strategies. What worked ten years ago may not work today.

The evolution of digital marketing is drastic. Those days are gone when you could drive qualified leads to your business by ranking on the first page of the major search engines. Of course, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it anymore, it’s more about doing it better and faster than your competitors.

If you want to be where your audience is, you have to be active and abreast with the latest digital marketing techniques. Every year, new marketing trends hit the market and 2019 is no different. 2019 is already shaping up to be a huge year with Google’s biggest announcements at CES 2019.

Let’s see what 2019 has in store for digital marketing:

1. Omnichannel Marketing

Consumers are more advanced than ever now. They search for information via many channels. Multichannel marketing was first used to enable potential consumers to interact with businesses via various channels.

For instance, a prospect can come to your business through Instagram ads, Facebook ads, Twitter or by walking into your brick-and-mortar store. In fact, there are many channels through which a customer can land on your business be it email, social media, website or reviews.

Let’s explore it with a live example –

Are you familiar with Dropbox?

I am pretty sure you are! It’s a multi-billion-dollar company and you might even have it installed on your system.

When it was first launched, they used only Google adwords to drive customers. It cost them more than $200 to acquire one customer where Dropbox cost only $60 per year.

Quite shocking right?

Spending more than $200 dollars on one customer who will spend only $60 a year does not make sense. Soon they realized it and started using growth hacking where they encouraged their existing customers to invite people to Dropbox. This marketing strategy helped them grow into a multi-billion-dollar quickly.

Similarly, Facebook grew into a multi-hundred-billion-dollar by tapping into your email address book and sending invites to your friends. Even if you hated it!

This simply means you cannot build a company using one channel.

The fact is popular channels are quickly saturated and have a lot of competition. Therefore, it becomes crucial to make use of all channels. It’s the only option to grow in the long run.

2. Live Streaming

Live streaming is perhaps one of the digital marketing trends that has seen unexpected success in the past two years. It has managed to gain a huge popularity and user base.

As a matter of fact, the window to impress and engage customers is already short and crowded.

Live streaming has made it possible for a business to reach thousands of potential clients with just a click of a button.

When marketing strategies such as content marketing and search engine optimization take months to deliver results, a business has to find an alternative to get faster results.

Moreover, live streaming has become a part of almost every channel including Instagram and Facebook except for few. Using live-stream channels requires less efforts and no investment to generate more revenue for your business. Moreover, it has more potential to create engagement as more people prefer watching videos than reading plain content.

Live streaming marketing tactic is growing at an alarming rate and is expected to become $70 billion dollar industry by 2020. It is an impressive number and indicates how quickly it’s being adapted by businesses.

Twitch.Tv

It is the most popular live streaming platform in the world right now. It has more than 10 million active users who are live streaming an average of 106 minutes of content every single day.

Just imagine the possibility of targeting 10 million users in a click of button. Impressive!

Source – https://www.statista.com/chart/8237/users-watch-create-live-streaming-video-on-social-media/

According a statics by Statista, it was found that people in the age group of 18-34 are live streaming content on a regular basis.

3. Voice Search

Ever since the launch of Alexa and Google home, voice search is gradually gaining a lot attention. In fact, search engine optimization is slowly moving to voice search. According to Location World report, 2 in 5 adults made use of voice search at least once per day in 2018. And ComScore confirms that more than 50% of searches are most likely to be performed through voice search by 2020.

And it’s not just about people using their smartphones or laptops to find search via voice, about 30% of web browsing will not happen on a screen enabled device. This means people are more likely to search for information via devices like Google home and Alexa (which is already happening on a large scale.)

So how would you leverage from voice search trend?

Well, voice search is one of those marketing trends that majority of SEOs wish it didn’t exist and do not bother getting involved into it. This means you get can get an edge over your competition by integrating it into your digital marketing strategy. This way you can target your potential customers without fighting with your competitors.

4. Local Influencer Marketing

While influencer marketing has been around for past many years, local influencer marketing is relatively new. Unless you are establishing an e-commerce store or a global brand, chances are your target audience is based locally.

I know it’s cool to have an influencer talk about your product or service and share it with their millions of fans, it will not last very long. The best way to overcome this drawback is to team up with a local influencer and work with them on long-term promotions and campaigns. This way you are able to get attention of local audience and convert more.

Learn about your local influence and go through their social media accounts first to know about their followers. And then reach out to these influencers to get started.

5. Smarter chatbots

Chatbots are not new. They have been used in websites, apps and even games to make communication easier. The reason why I am including it here is because of its huge popularity and continuous evolution.

They have been growing for the few recent years and continues to grow even in 2019. More than 45% of online users prefer using chatbots when it comes to communicating with customer service as per a report by Grand View Research.

Chatbots can improve customer experience drastically and enable marketers to create better engagement with the audience – without having to put any extra efforts. They are best to provide real-time assistance, initiate proactive interactions and are considered to be a dedicated support.

For example, when a user lands on a site, a chatbot asks to help or provide more information about the product. If she chooses to get help, she will be redirected to a customer representative and if she chooses to get more information, a number of automated questions will be asked.

6. Instagram will continue to dominate the social media world

Instagram has become the most popular social media channel during the last year and a half. While it still hasn’t outgrown YouTube and Facebook, it gets huge engagement.

Instagram has around 1 billion active users which continues to increase every day. It is a tremendous number of users when it comes to advertising your business on instagram. Moreover, Instagram has live streaming, IGTV and stores, which make it a go-to channel for businesses to promote their products and services on it.

If you are still not using instagram, you are missing out tons of possibilities to grow and drive more prospects. By far, Instagram has shown the most engagement and has a lot of potential for new businesses to grow.

The bottom line

Expect 2019 to be a surprising year. It has a lot in store for digital marketing. And with technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning knocking at the door, it will be a rollercoaster ride for businesses and digital marketers.

But there’s nothing to be afraid of if you know how to mold these trends for your own good. After all, digital marketing is the only world where you can experiment and succeed.

What do you think will change in 2019 for digital marketing world? Do share your views in the comment section below.