Looking at the upcoming year and beyond, marketing is set to presents a different face due to the principles of marketing known to be dynamic given the ever-changing technological environment and customers’ behavior. Digital marketing will be on the frontline of this revolution with trends that help in changing the way brands interact with their audiences.
Recent Trends such as AI, AR and Voice search are the future trends that are anticipated to shape the entire marketing conceptualization. Sustainability and ethical marketing are also emerging, as consumers are now more concerned about the transparency and responsibility of the brands. On the other hand, the integration of data analytics will help marketers to be in a better position to get more insight that will lead to more efficient and effective campaigns.
As the world and its business advance into the future it will be important to keep these digital marketing trends in mind to remain relevant and be able to capture the audience and market.
Top 12 Digital Marketing Trends
So, it makes sense for you to walk through the digital marketing trends that will shape your strategy to promote online business or applications. Here are some of the top digital marketing trends you should know about to get better results.
AI-Powered Personalization
From the digital marketing perspective, it is predicted that by the year, continual interaction between consumers and business will be in AI-Powered Personalized self-service. AI can explore incredibly large fields of data about consumers to identify trends as well as tendencies in making purchase decisions. This capability enables marketers effectively segment the customers and target them with products and/or content which they are more likely to buy or find interesting.
Personalization does not only include product offers but also content, the website layout, and text and/or communication. One of the areas that can be simplified by AI would be generating personal messages that can be sent to different customers, to make them feel valued and understood. Consequently, businesses that would ensure that they engage their consumer through Artificial Intelligence are bound to stand out given consumer needs and wants.
Voice Search Optimization
Due to the appearance of such devices as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, the people use their voices to search for the necessary information more often. Voice search optimization will become an important part of natural marketing.
Common voice queries tend to be longer and more conversational than text-based queries. Thus, it is crucial to provide content for natural language processing. Marketers will have to pay more attention to the long-tail keywords and structured data so that the content could be easily found by the voice search. Besides, answering frequently asked questions in simple and precise terms will make the page rank high in voice searches.
Short-Form Video
Dubbed short form video, from such applications as TikTok and Instagram Reels among others, has gained popularity among consumers. Specifically, short-form videos will remain popular in social networks and other digital communication platforms as highly shareable content.
Ads world will focus on the use of short-form video so as to grab viewer attention in the current fast paced digital world. These videos are perfect for the advertisements of products and services and can help tell brand stories effectively in short and catchy clips. Continued consumption of videos will be forcing the need for creating more short-form content that will yield engagement with the intended audiences.
Social Commerce
Social commerce that is the incorporation of e-commerce features into social media platforms is shifting consumer behavior when it comes to e-shopper. However, social commerce will continue to contribute to the overall sales, by 2025, buyers will be able to shop directly from social media.
Popular social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are improving its shopping tab for buyers to explore and buy products right from the notification. The highlighted trend is rather popular with the young consumer and enables them to shop directly from the platform. Social commerce will also present a challenge to marketers who will have to make posts directly clickable, interact with the audience and leverage influencers.
Hyper-Niche Influencers
Inconsistent with the previous trends, influencer marketing is moving away from celebrities to the micro and nano-level influencers. Focusing on the specifics of the forecasted future, importance of hyper-niche influencers in the strategies of digital marketing will be absolutely critical. These influencers, who have a very targeted audience in terms of demographic, can relay a message directly to a consumer group.
Hyper-niche influencers, in particular, are thought of as industry leaders, so their recommendations mean a lot and can cause more changes. These companies will also work with different marketers as they help them penetrate particular segments effectively and in a genuine manner. This lays down the idea that a country that brings out the quality part of its product, has the tendency to get better response from the target market base.
First-Party Data
With the changing global outlook on data collection regarding GDPR or CCPA, the value of first-party data will increase in the future. According to the latest trends, businesses will focus on first-party data, which is the data that they gather directly from the customers based on their experiences with the business.
Hence, by collecting the first-party data marketers are able to target the audience freely and design more effective and relevant campaigns. Using such information, companies and organizations can go ahead and make their customer relations more effective and timelier, thereby developing a good rapport with their target clients. To fully leverage first-party data, companies will need to invest in those systems used for data gathering and handling.
AR Experiences
Through it, marketers can enhance the range of different marketing activities by delivering engaging and interactive experiences to the mass audience. In the next few years, AR will become a very effective approach to interact with customers in a more innovative and revolutionary manner.
This can be used in virtual try on, awesome product presentation, and many product experiences. They not only entertain the customers but also inform them or at least give them a chance to get informed. Moreover, it will allow marketers to create applications for e-commerce businesses, which will help them to enrich the customer experience and stands out from competitors.
Smarter Email Marketing
In this case, email marketing is considered one of the most efficient digital marketing methods and with the help of AI and automation tools in the future, it will become even more effective. Advanced email marketing will allow the targeted and timely delivery of emails to consumers by business organizations.
With the help of AI, customers’ behavior and their data can be tracked and analyzed in order to determine whether it is appropriate to send them an e-mail or not and, if yes, then when and what should be sent. Further, there will be more segmentations as well as personalization that will make some mails to be more familiar to a particular recipient.
With the help of these technologies, marketers are able to achieve a higher percentage of opened emails, clicked-through rates as well as conversions, making email marketing as one of the most effective methods of marketing that can drive the growth of a business.
Purpose-Driven Branding
Thus, to meet the societal and environmental concerns of the consumers, the purpose-driven branding will be a significant contributor to brand affiliation. The consumers’ needs will change over the years, and this will mean that they will only spend their money on brands that are beneficial to the community and the environment.
Customers’ needs fulfilling is the process of enhancing the image and message of the company and its products through the implementation of its mission and values in all its marketing practices. Customers are in need of products from companies that uphold social responsibility, sustainability as well has other ethical conducts. In this context, it means that businesses should establish optimal ways of expressing their mission and actions in order to stand out on the marketplace and increase the engagement level.
Using Chatbots
You will be able to handle customer queries with a chatbot better than with a representative. It is an AI-based software that interacts and answers queries of visitors, mimicking a customer care executive.
It is a cost-effective strategy that saves a considerable amount of money. With a chatbot, you can do away with hiring someone to monitor the website and interact with the visitors. As a chatbot is informative and unbiased, visitors can get the impression that they are being responded to by humans. Visitors can also make faster decisions interacting with a chatbot.
So, if you are yet to incorporate a chatbot on your website, do not delay further. You can base your decision to use a chatbot on the expected complexity of the interactions and your budget.
Personalized Content Marketing Strategy
You should keep in mind that digital marketing exists in a highly competitive landscape. There is no end to the competition in the digital marketing space. All businesses are on the lookout for new ideas and more impactful marketing strategies. In such stiff competition, you cannot take the role of content lightly.
It is engaging and valuable content that will play a decisive role in not only generating but also closing leads as well. Consumers today prefer to buy from those businesses that understand their tastes and preferences. And they continuously assess the depth of your understanding. So, you should be extra careful in focusing on highly personalized content that reflects the tastes and preferences of consumers.
Consistent Audience Targeting
The trend of PPC advertisers focusing on targeting their audiences through remarketing lists for search ads is becoming obsolete. The emerging trend involves targeting audiences at specific touchpoints throughout the buying journey.
Marketers will adopt a prudent approach. Instead of sending a message for making a sale, they will try to interact with the prospects strategically. The interaction will be at the right time and in the right way so that the prospects transform into customers.
As consumers today tend to purchase from businesses that understand their needs, marketers will direct their efforts to understand the tastes and preferences of consumers. And as a result, the marketers will orient their campaigns to customer wellbeing.
So, the focus of marketers will be targeting their audiences in consistent and strategic ways. In other words, marketers are shifting their attention to the consumers in their PPC campaigns.
Usage of Multiple Platforms
With the growing prominence of multiple online platforms, PPC advertisers are expected to experiment with platforms such as LinkedIn Ads, Amazon Ads, and Twitter Ads, ending the duopoly enjoyed by Facebook and Google.
Their experiments will bring to the fore whether or not a particular platform will be advantageous to their marketing strategy. At the same time, they will also not only be able to include a wide variety of targeting options but also reach a vast audience worldwide.
Social media is not only the sole PPC network. There are several specialized platforms, such as Bing, Bidvertiser, RevContent, Advertise.com, etc.
Conclusion
The latest digital marketing trends are all about personalization, AI implementation into automating processes, and the ideas of immersion. This is because marketing experts will incorporate AI and machine learning techniques to offer specific content to our targeted consumer to improve consumers’ loyalty.
Moreover, augmented and virtual reality will change the way brands communicate with their target public and share memorable experience. Long-term and ethical marketing concepts are also emerging as crucial because customers have learned to ask where and how their products were made. On the legal and regulatory front, preservation of consumer data privacy and security will force marketers to shift more of their focus and efforts towards building consumer trust and openness.
These digital marketing trends resonate with current issues of flexibility and creativity in digital marketing to ensure that the customers and the target market is reached effectively.
