Digital marketing trends that will dominate in 2019: Nikhil Agarwal

Authored by Nikhil Agarwal, Co-Founder, Brandwitty.

Nikhil started his entrepreneurial journey by Co-founding Brandwitty, which is Mumbai’s fastest growing Internet Marketing Agency with diverse portfolio. Known for his sharp business acumen and an eye for detail, Nikhil has led Brandwitty from one milestone to another and today the organization is recognized as one of the most respected and trusted Digital Marketing agencies in the India. His first successful ‘campaign’ was back in the 7th standard by setting up a firecracker stall during Diwali. His return on investment was a 150% profit and that inspired him to start his own venture some day.

Influencer marketing

It is one of the oldest ways of promoting anything in market. Using someone’s face to reach out to people is the best way to build trust and increase brand acceptability. This form of marketing is known as influencer marketing and it focuses on influential people rather than the target audience. Earlier, film stars were the face of brands but now with the growth of social media, the focus has shifted to social media influencers. In fact, over the years, social media influencers have taken over the concept of ‘Brand Ambassadors’. Further, these days, it is believed that people don’t buy goods and services but they buy stories, relations and magic. Thus, it has become imperative for the brands to tell the right and interesting stories and here comes the importance of influencer marketing. So, reaching out to the bloggers, YouTubers and other popular faces on social media can definitely help you in creating your brand in 2019.

Chatbots to instantly answer up to 75 per cent of customer questions

Chatbots generally work alongside the existing marketing support team and use machine learning to interpret inquiries, answer customer questions and learn from new experiences. Chatbots can be used to qualify the leads in an automated fashion. General details like customer names, e-mail ids, phone numbers and purpose of chat can be easily captured via chatbot and redirected to the respective team. It can easily convert visitors on website to qualified prospects by asking pre-defined questions. Chatbots have come in existence only recently and will surely gain more popularity in 2019.

Video marketing for selling products and services in 8 to 15 seconds

Video has always been the powerful way of communication in advertising. Nearly 70 per cent of marketing experts across globe feel that video is the type of content which user can consume easily. Earlier, television ads were very popular but now with the people moving away from television to internet, video marketing on internet has become the norm of the day. So, whether you want to promote your brand on television or digital medium, effective video ads need to be definitely on the top in your content marketing strategy. It is important to remember that the average duration of video ad should be 8 to 15 seconds maximum. Overall, there is no doubt that the year 2019 would see plethora of digital video ads with call-to-action by most of the brands so as to increase leads and subsequent sales.

E-mail personalisation

What if you know minute details of your customers like…

1. Which device they use?
2. What time they open your email?
3. Which is the subject line they react on?
4. Which product/services they are interested in?

Well, if you know the answers to the above questions, then by using the above data points, you can send e-mails automatically five minutes before the customers usually open your e-mail with exact product/service they are interested in. This can help your e-mail to be on the top of unread e-mails in your customer’s inbox. By just being in the top five e-mails in the inbox of your customer, your e-mail open rate can improve by 40 to 50 per cent. What more? Personalised e-mails can also build trust in the mind of the user and lead to increased sales. Thus, given to the benefits offered by e-mail personalisation, it will surely become one of the popular digital marketing trends in 2019.

Programmatic advertising

When you have a big marketing budget and want to scale up the digital marketing campaign, then programmatic media buying is the best option. Programmatic advertising is the process of purchasing ad space via tools and relying on complex algorithms to deliver ads contextually. Without programmatic advertising, managing various publishers and tracking reports of each publisher can become a difficult task. In Western countries, many brands have already started to opt for programmatic advertising. In fact, it occupies a major share in the ad spends in countries like the USA and the UK. As for the Indian scenario, then the home brands have also started opting for programmatic advertising. However, at present, only 20 per cent of the ad budgets go to programmatic advertising in India. This is expected to increase by 70 to 80 per cent in 2019.

Dynamic Creative Optimisation (DCO)

When you're browsing online & suddenly you see an ad which says “Leave Early, Reach Home Safe”. You will be excited to know why is someone asking you to do that & a second message after that saying because it is predicted to rain heavy in your place. First time you may ignore & get stuck in the rain. But next time you’ll recollect the earlier situation and will not ignore the warning. There are greater chances that you may remember the company logo too, who delivered the message. Well, this is possible through DCO. DCO is a display ad technology that creates personalized ads based on data about the viewer at the moment of ad serving. You can convey various messages to the same user in real-time. Video ads can also be promoted through DCO which can give you 50-60 per cent increase in click-through-rate as compared to static ads. Hence, DCO would be another digital marketing trend to watch out for in 2019.

Omnichannel marketing

The line between online and offline is getting blurred as the consumer experience is becoming a seamless mix of the real and virtual world through omnichannel marketing. In simple terms, omnichannel marketing is the multichannel sales approach that provides the customer with an integrated shopping experience. The customer can shop online from a desktop or mobile device via phone or in a brick-and-mortar store. Over the years, searching for stores has become an integral shopping experience in the retail sector with a 50 per cent increase for searches like ‘store near me’. As per Google Search Internal data, there was an 80 per cent increase in searches for offline stores that sold smartphones and laptops. One of the case studies from Tata Croma states that the omnichannel shopper showed up to 33 per cent higher in-store conversion rate. Thus, in 2019, this omnichannel marketing trend is sure to attain further new heights.  

Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)

Search engines love websites which load faster and have maximum user-time spend. AMP helps in loading the web pages faster on mobile phones. AMP is an open-source custom web development framework created to speed up the loading time of web pages on mobile devices. As per KPMG/Google Reports, ‘By 2020, 500 million smartphone users will be connected to internet.’ Thus, it will become important for the brands to move content on AMPs for better user-experience.

User-generated content

With the change in user behavior and inclination towards digital medium, building the brand in the local space has become very important and this can be easily done by user-generated content which is the free content generated by the customers. Real life experiences of people about a product or service in digital space can very well affect the mind of the prospective customers. These days, be it deciding the food order in a hotel or the movie to watch in the theatre or best honeymoon destination to travel, everyone depends on the reviews which is nothing but user-generated content. Thus, keeping the old saying in mind that products are made in factory but brands are created in mind, brands in 2019 will have to focus more on positive user-generated content.

Conclusion

To sum up, an array of digital marketing trends will take 2019 by storm and brands will need to opt for the right marketing technology to scale their business to new heights. Brands will have to take help of machine learning and artificial intelligence to collect data and read and predict future and here the important role of digital marketing agencies will come to picture. Being well-equipped to understand your business needs and the marketing technology that is best-suited for your business, the digital marketing agencies would definitely help your business conquer new grounds in 2019.