This is our 23rd year doing annual marketing trends report for the online and digital marketing industry.
Have a wonderful and very prosperous 2019.
Each year, we contact hundreds of online marketing industry leaders, and top 100 Marketing Agencies, as well as the top PR company executives to conduct a 30-min phone interview to ask questions about their predictions for the upcoming year, and what changes or transformations they witness during the previous year. We then compile the data and have an in-house discussion among our own leading marketing experts, each of whom have at least 20+ years of digital online marketing experience. Once all the data is compiled, we produce our report: this Annual Online/Digital Business Marketing Trends and Predictions.
AND THANK YOU IN ADVANCE, FOR YOUR TIME.
And we also like to thank all the people who were involved and provided their expertise and knowledge for us to put this report together, and express our deep appreciation for their support.
FINALLY, see if you notice how we tried to make key points
and avoided long and boring sentences, or pages and pages of reading.
Hope you enjoy it.
Thank you for visiting us.
Being a "technical" professional in marketing is now "modern-day marketing literacy" and without it marketing professionals are lost in a never-ending ocean of highly relevant data.
Marketing your products and services online in 2019 demands that you assemble teams of technical marketers who are also experts in digital design, data analysis, marketing tools, campaign automation systems, and integration engineering. Along with customer experience and user behavior analysis, it is the technical nimbleness combined with cross-disciplinary marketers that can support a growing ecosystem of purpose-built marketing strategies and tools allowing your campaigns to be successful.
Online purchasing is now an emotional decision, and engaging customers online requires a trigger of the right emotions that deliver happiness and wins their hearts.
Consumers are conscious of a brand's social impact and policies and this affects their buying behvior more than ever before. For instance, online behavior changed in the last 12 months, enormously, during the ongoing Facebook privacy and transparency investigation and the perceived negligence (or malace) on consumer privacy and data. The armchair talking point has changed to making purchasing decisions based on loyalty to responsible brands.
In a recent survey, 95%+ of marketers indicated that personalization advances customer relationships in the marketing-prospecting process. The future of e-mail is real-time, personalization, and consumer behavior targeting.
Small to medium size businesses and companies are finding out that offering a login account for each and every Internet visitor is a great way to personalize the interaction with potential clients and make them feel that they are receiving personalized attention. Prospecting by interacting with potential customers across social media networks can also help increase customer brand loyalty. It is possible to send highly personalized and relevant messages through marketing automation and collect responses and customer data to improve communication and drive conversions.
If you’re not already working with digital marketing experts on AI for gathering marketing intelligence, campaign optimization, product fulfilment, and delivery systems, you’re falling behind.
According to Forresters and other leading market analysts, more than 50% of marketers are using AI to improve upon existing products and services, increase data gathering on customer preferences, optimization of campaigns, provide new revenue streams, reduce customer turnovers, increase marketshare acquisition, find new business models and new pricing strategies, as well as improve customer satisfaction in all aspects of the support infrastructure.
Content marketing is the center of all successful digital marketing. Social Media Networks offer the most convenient and welcomed 'marketing engagement' process that promotes content while creating user experiences which convert.
According to a IDC and Forrester Research and other leading surveys, more than 80% said they are watching more online video today than they were a year ago. Overall, 65% have visited a vendor’s website after watching a video. Hubspot’s Consumer Behavior Survey confirms this trend. Over half (55%) of users say they consume an entire video (when distributed through Social Media), compared to 29% for blogs and 33% for interactive articles. If you want your entire message to be consumed, video tends to be the preferred medium. Still, many smaller businesses have no clear strategy for making Social Media work for them and say they need help with this form of content marketing.
User-experience based marketing and retargeting are critical and is now applied by all types of businesses regardless of their sector or size or marketshare strategies.
Accenture study found 87% of customers think brands need to put more effort into providing a consistent and better customer experience. Aberdeen Research Group study found that companies with multi-channel customer engagement strategies retain about 90% of their customers, as compared to 30% for companies with weak multi-channel strategies. Also mobile experience is key as 52% of customers are less likely to engage with the company because of bad mobile experience.
It's been said a dozen times in the last 12-months by industry experts, that the new sales and marketing "Rainmakers" are the "Subject Matter Experts". They are the ones customers want to buy from, not an order taking salesperson.
For decades long, there has always been the talk about some salespeople being simply magnificent at their job. Well, in almost all cases studies, that particular salesperson was an expert in the product/service field they were selling. People do not want to buy from someone who is selling a product. They want to receive an insight and they will continue to gravitate towards "Subject Matter Experts". That is why they are called the new "Rainmakers".
May be obvious, since you don't want to find a dentist 100 miles away when you have a toothache, but most things are going "more" local.
Local focus in Social Media interactions and their search results (localized social platform) in 2019 and beyond will continue more rapidly as this gives consumers what they keep asking for: local focus. This also gives local businesses the chance to compete with even the biggest brands for consumer attention, but they will certainly have to fight for it.
Over 60% of searches came from mobile in 2017, and are expected to be about 80% in 2019. Not only more mobile web browsing, there are more searches by mobile users than laptop/PC users.
For some time now the trend on the rise has been a strong emphasis on mobile. Advertising has een swiftly transitioning to digital and mobile advertising and businesses continue to shift their spending towards digital marketing, in particular in Social Media, since smartphones continue to proliferate and digital advertising continues to dominate. The newer generations (Millennials and Z-Gen) are so use to (and confortable) with smartphones that they find laptops/PCs as almost antiquated and primitive. Yes, mobile will continue to grow - even more.
As customers and buyers continue to do research online to find answers to their questions and concerns, smarter companies are positioning themselves to answer these questions as part of their marketing process.
Successful companies are quickly adopting a full integration between the front-line sales teams to identify topics for content marketing, and the content marketing team to develop content online to help sales professionals to effectively use this content in the sales process by answering customer questions and concerns and develop loyalty and reputation. Most of this takes place over the Social Media, where customers are relaxed and are enjoying interactions with their friends. Obvious.
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Grow in 2019, and even more in the years to come
2. Voice activation will continue to grow but it needs quality and context improvement
3. Video marketing, streaming, usage, searching, and viewership will continue to soar in 2019
4. Customer experience marketing will probably be a big marketing story in 2019
5. Marketing automation and email marketing will continue to grow and increase profitability
6. Subject matter experts - a phrase you will hear again and again
7. Everything mobile, mobile, mobile
8. Digital marketing heading for strong localization
9. Big Data (including market and customer insight and predictive analytics), a winner
10. Convenience and customization will continue to integrate and converge
11. Professionals need to maximize marketing opportunities
12. Strategic social media marketing will be the best method for winning customers in 2019
13. Marketing to Generation Z will start to take shape
14. Messaging on digital platform must be compelling
15. By end of 2019, mobile advertising to grow to 80% of all U.S. digital ad spending
16. By end of 2019, American adults are expected to spend about 4 hours/day on mobile media
17. Smartphone users spend about 80% of their time on social media
18. SEO services will have to start focusing on voice search ranking
19. About 70% of users say they won’t use/recommend a business with non-mobile website
20. Over 71% of marketers regard mobile marketing as a core part of their business
21. About 50% of millennials watch video on their mobile device
22. Just short of 50% of mobile searches are looking for local products/services/businesses
23. Content marketing is a very significant strategy for more than 80% of B2B marketers
24. 80%+ of mobile visitors who look up for a business on their device, visit them
25. 85% of mobile visitors use their mobile devices to have access to Web content from anywhere
26. Social media is the fastest growing trend in the history of the world
27. Social media growth faster that the Internet itself (1.4 billions users within first 10 years)
28. Social media influencers an essential part of social media marketing
29. Augmented virtual reality beginning to be embedded in social media marketing prototypes
30. Social Messaging Apps have 1.3. billion users (2 billion messages between people and businesses)