Digital Marketing Trends For 2019

Digital marketing, whether you’re a huge business that has millions of customers, or a start-up/small business just getting into the market, it cannot be ignored. Digital marketing, when done correctly, can have a huge impact on your business and increase both traffic and conversions.

Whether it’s through social media marketing, content marketing etc. you need to ensure that you have the right strategy in place for your campaign to succeed. Fortunately, we’re going to be looking at some of the digital marketing trends for 2019 so you can ensure that your business is looking into all areas! And, if you’re already doing digital marketing, you can use this to keep up to date with the latest trends and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Facebook beginning to peak

Now the title makes it look worse than it actually is considering that Facebook is still the number one social media platform in the UK with a good spread of users across all ages and is still the platform of choice for businesses looking to promote their product or service through a social media channel.

However, Facebook had a difficult 2018, with a data breach that affected 14 million users and Mark Zuckerberg admitting that Facebook faced huge backlash after a massive data breach, it hasn’t been the most comfortable of years.

Using digital marketing through Facebook, you need to assess whether your campaign is suitable or not because Facebook can be unsuitable for some campaigns, especially as it continues to trend downwards with the younger demographic. Make no mistake, Facebook is still huge, but don’t assume your target market is present on the platform, otherwise, your campaigns will fail.

And of destination, this doesn’t affect the Facebook-owned Instagram.

Instagram is becoming a hit

Luckily for Facebook, one of their biggest threats, Instagram, is no longer a threat after they bought it a couple of years back. But this platform is on its way to top as it is optimised to make it extremely easy for users to share photos and videos from their phone.

Instagram is the most rapidly growing social media platform at the moment and most of its user base is the younger demographic, so depending on who your target audience is, it might be worth having more of a look into Instagram and see whether or not it’s worth your business being present on the platform.

Chatbot use will increase

Chatbots are a piece of software which communicates with users, assisting them in completing or getting closer to their desired goal. Chatbots interact with humans in a natural way, normally through the use of text chat windows, but it is also possible for verbal interactions.

If you’re familiar with Facebook, then you may already know that Chatbots are used extensively on Facebook to help complete thousands of different tasks, whether it’s providing someone with the weather to basic customer support. Bots allow customers to receive relevant, personalised information and reduce the time which would otherwise be consumed by humans.

They were extremely effective in 2018 with more and more businesses using them throughout the year and it’s predicted that this trend will continue to rise in 2019.

Videos have become a must

Previously, videos weren’t a necessity in business, but more and more people, thanks to platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, are watching videos. But just because one platform might be more popular than the other in regards to publishing a video, it doesn’t mean that any of the others should be neglected.

For example, you may gain more views on YouTube than you do on Facebook, but different people will be watching the video on these different platforms, so it’s worth ensuring that any videos you create and publish are made available through the majority of the platform’s you’re on.

Video digital marketing offers the best of both worlds. Videos are now paired with useful data so you can see how well videos perform. Videos are a great way to help capture ultimately what your brand is about and portray that across to your customers. As long as you can stick to the fundamentals when creating a video, you can make some seriously impressive gains.

Live videos

We’ve just spoken about how videos can make a huge difference to your business, well now we’re going to look at live videos. Live videos are one of the fastest rising stars in digital marketing, partly due to the massive demand for streaming services.

Live videos allow potential customers to ask questions and receive an immediate response which is huge. Not only that, they see who the person is behind the company and what their personality is like – it puts a human face to your business rather than just being a business who doesn’t interact with their customers.

Also live streaming platforms, such as Twitch have become massive over the past few years and can be incredibly successful when pairing digital marketing with influencer marketing. You can choose through a number of influencers who aim towards your target market and work with them to promote your product or service in a natural way, you don’t want to shove it down people’s throats otherwise no one will buy anything. But like everything, check the platforms demographics before going all guns blazing, Twitch has a very big skew towards the gaming niche.

Voice interaction is on the rise

Thanks to Google, Siri, Alexa and a host of other devices, verbal interaction is on the rise but to be listed as one of the options, you need to optimise the keywords you choose to between seven and nine perfectly matched ones so you apply to the search.

It sounds hard, but voice searches can’t be something that you ignore, because more people used it in 2018 and more are due to use it in 2019. You might need to optimise your meta description so it reads better out loud rather than the typical text-based search approach.

These trends are looking to be on the rise in 2019, so it’s best to research each area and analyse what’s needed from you to ensure that your business is able to benefit and increase the traffic and conversions you ultimately receive.