Last Updated on September 6, 2024
The beginning of the year is a perfect time to start planning your online marketing strategies for 2019. As you know online marketing is way more effective than offline. Besides, it allows you to reach a large number of people at the time, choose your target audience and show your ads to only those who are potentially interested in your product.
There are a lot of other advantages of online marketing, and when we talk about trends, it’s essential to mention social media and SEO. Whether you have started planning or want to start, here we have collected 10 the biggest digital marketing trends which you can’t ignore.
Here you are going to find the latest hottest digital marketing trends along with examples and statistics which will help you to develop your marketing strategies this year.
1. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a type of ‘word-of-mouth’ advertising method widely used by brands around the world. Companies find influencers and pay them for sponsored posts and videos. This way influencers earn thousands of dollars by recommending some product or service to their followers.
Since influences with millions of followers aks too high price for their sponsored posts, medium and small companies find micro-influences and ask them for the ads. This is a perfect way of connecting companies with a tight budget and influencers with micro-influencers interested in earning money.
Even a person with about 50k followers on Instagram can be a perfect choice for a brand if the influencer has a proper audience. For example, it may work for a small sports brand: it is better to pay a rising influencer with 30k followers, then a popular influencer asking 20 times bigger than their budget.
2. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence plays a vital role in today’s digital marketing and business. With the help of artificial intelligence, companies can utilize data from social media, analyze customers behavior and their search queries.
This way, a business owner can understand how consumers find their products and services. Also, AI allows to reduce costs and analyze sales more effectively.
Numerous studies proved that by the 2020 year 85% of interactions with consumers would be made without a human.
Here is a chart showing the benefits of artificial intelligence for business:
Artificial intelligence gives birth to another digital marketing trend chatbots.
3. Use of Chatbots
These days many companies found automated messages and bots useful for their customer service. When you have an issue with any company, you want to send them a call or message, and be heard.
There are many reasons for using chatbots, among which are experiencing long waiting time when you talk to a customer support representative; besides, companies should pay money all their customer support. Here are other potential advantages of using chatbots:
With the growth of artificial intelligence lately, chatbots improved their ability to hold the conversation and answer simple questions like a real human being. However, it’s still quite challenging to predict as many customers questions as possible. Brands can set a bot who keep their customers satisfied. Just like a chatbot “Julie” by Amtrak saved the company about $1 million in customer service email costs.
4. Video Content
Latest studies by Forbes shows that YouTube is America’s most popular social media network with over 73% of engagements. It means that more than half of people living in America is watching videos on Youtube.
However, Youtube is not the only site to use videos; you can incorporate videos into other social media strategies for Facebook, Instagram, and others. A video is a better way to convey your message and engage more people with it. Besides, Instagram and Facebook launched their features allowing users to watch live videos.
For many companies, inbound marketing is the number one priority. And producing amazing content for your blog every time can improve SEO and boost engagement. So that, use videos as interactive content for blog posts to increase time visitors spend on your site.
Forrester has another research showing that one-minute video is worth 1.8 million words. Many companies can use live video for product reviews, showing workers and manufacturing processes, “behind the scenes” of events, unpacking of products, demos, tutorials, and more. People would rather watch a video than read an article about the same thing.
5. Social Media Stories
Talking about live videos, stories is a visual content which lasts 24 hours and then disappears. Initially, it was created by Snapchat and then, copied by Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and even LinkedIn. Since that time, it was turned into a big digital trend for social media users.
Due to Brandwatch infographics, 300M people watch Instagram Stories every day! Besides, about 20% of users swipe up to follow links attached to the Stories which is a perfect opportunity for the brands to drive traffic to their websites and increase sales. 
Why are Instagram Stories so successful?
- fun and engaging;
- allowing to sneak peek for people you like;
- easy to create and share;
- disappear in 24 hours.
Knowing the facts and statistics, it’s important to use Stories for your business in 2019.
6. Visual Search
Visual search is growing in popularity and is already used by many brands. With visual search, you can upload an image and search to get similar or specific results. Google has this feature for years, while many businesses realize it can be used for their consumers.
For example, a favorite online store Asos allows you to upload an image of an outfit in order to find similar clothes on their app.
Pinterest is also using visual search successfully. They came up with Lens features which let you snap a photo of an item and easily find where to buy it online, (or similar find similar products).
Google Lens is another fantastic tool with surprising features. It allows you to do the following things with a photo:
- learn about plants and animals;
- find similar clothes or home accessories;
- identify landmarks and buildings;
- save phone number and address by a business card;
- learn more about a painting in a museum.
Recently they improved the app, and instead of taking a picture, you can use Google Lens through your smartphone camera.
Future is here. This trend won’t be suitable for everyone, but maybe your business is one of them?
7. Personalization
Personalization is another trend of 2019 which you can’t ignore. To stay up-to-date, you need to personalize your emails, products, content, recommendations, and anything you can.
Since generic emails are not valid anymore, and most people ignore them, personalized emails have way better chances to succeed. For instance, knowing consumers browsing history and search queries, you can follow up a person with a promotional price or a discount for a specific product. Or notify them, when a particular product is again available on the website.
Netflix has already personalized their user experience. Almost all Netflix homepage is personized from the banner, carousels, order, artwork, text to search.
They help users to find the content they like faster and minimize search time.
8. Social Messengers
Do you use social media apps just to send funny emojis to your friends? That’s not quite all messengers can do. Due to Techcrunch, the Facebook messenger has over 1.3 billion active monthly users, and 55 billions of messages are sent on Whatsup every day.
Considering the numbers, businesses should think about advertising on the space all people are actively hanging out. Social messengers can be used with chatbots to answer questions, send personalized messages to customers, or to improve users experience.
9. Voice Interaction
With Siri, Alexa, Google, and other ‘smart’ devices with voice interaction, verbal interaction with gadgets is going to rise. This changes the way people search, shop, and browse the web. Many companies rethink their marketing strategies for digital marketing in 2019.
However, voice search is different to text search. When you type a search query, you get a list of mixed results, and you choose what you like. But with verbal search, you’ll get one (or two) results, and that’s it.
This means that voice searches require a new approach because people use this function more and more. For instance, meta description of the web pages would be changed to become more suitable for reading out loud.
By 2020 50% of searches will be made with voice. Besides, more and more Americans use smart speakers, like Googe Home and Alexa. maybe it’s time to thinks about keywords people will speak rather than type.
10. Marketing and Email Automation
As I previously mentioned, emails have been a favorite tool over the years. But generic emails do not work anymore. They need to be more personalized to make people open and read them. But personalization is not the only approach which will make emails more useful tool in 2019.
To improve your mail engagement and communication, you can use marketing automation. Cardinal published a post which says that email automation can enhance the relationship between a patient and a doctor. Automation has been a trend for a few latest years. There are certain benefits of using email automation:
- it minimizes errors, because people may forget to cope email address or some critical info;
- it reduces time and efforts, and as a result, money wastage;
- it improves collaboration between company departments and co-workers.
Over to You
As you see, there are many interesting innovative trends in digital marketing this year. You can apply some of them to your new marketing strategy, and they will help you to attract new clients and leads, improve sales, and drive traffic to your website.
Two thousand nineteen will be about AI-technologies, automation, and personalization. Also, make sure to use video and voice content to stay up-to-date with current trends.
