2019 is upon us! In January you can examine all your efforts from previous months and plan all the challenges ahead of you. 

The beginning of the year is also a time to take a closer look at all the upcoming digital marketing trends and adjust your marketing tactics accordingly. 

Constant change is the beauty and the curse of digital marketing. On the one hand, your job is never dull, as you have to rethink and adjust your marketing tactics on a regular basis. 

On the other hand, it’s hard to distinguish real trends that will change the digital marketing landscape in a few years from long-term development of existing marketing strategies. 

Is the supremacy of Instagram a new digital marketing trend or just a natural course of things? I would argue it’s a result of a long-planned marketing tactics, not an emerging trend. 

What are the real new digital marketing trends that will set you apart from your competitors and which are just an attempt to write a well-positioned SEO blog post?

What Are Emerging Marketing Trends?

I’ve chosen 5 emerging digital marketing trends that will help you put your business in front of the competition and will help to boost your business. 

Ready? Let’s take a look!

1. Take a look at voice search

We’re slowly, but inevitably, becoming a cordless society, which means we make more and more searches on mobile devices than on desktops and laptops. And by mobile devices I mean not only smartphones, but also virtual assistants like Google Home, Alexa by Amazon, or Apple Homepod. 

The development of home assistants systems was possible thanks to the evolution of voice search assistants. According to many experts, half of all searches will be done by voice in 2020. 

oice search has a tremendous effect on digital marketing as it changes the way we look things up on the Internet in at least two ways. 

First of all, I know it sounds obvious, but people use different phrasing when they’re typing and when they’re speaking. For example, instead of typing “best yoga place in Amsterdam”, one will ask: “Where can I practice yoga?” 

That means you have to perform thorough keyword research and take a closer look at long-tail keywords. The phrases will be more conversational than traditional web searches. 

What’s the second difference?

Let’s take a closer look at our example. We have two statements:

• “best yoga place in Amsterdam”;
• “where can I practice yoga?”

Do you spot the missing part in the second sentence? Yes, it’s the location.

The GPS on our smartphones is almost always on, so the browsers know where you are and will show the results from your vicinity. 

That’s why it’s important to add your business to Google Maps and position it well when it comes to your location, especially if you’re a local business. 

2. Analyse the social media sentiment

Have you noticed the decline in trust in social media influencers? 

For a long time, influencer marketing has been the go-to strategy when it comes to promoting a specific product or raising brand awareness. 

That started to change a few years ago and reached its height at the end of 2018.

All the scandals caused by many Instagram celebrities caused a trust crisis. People are becoming more sceptical when it comes to influencers endorsements. 

That doesn’t mean, however, that an influencer marketing tactics are useless. 

Sentiment analysis is based on the NLP, which stands for Natural Language Processing. The process entails AI learning the ins and outs of human communication and analysing whether a statement made online is positive, negative or neutral. 

A few years ago, the technology had a problem with detecting sarcasm or irony, but the technology has evolved since then. Many tools can correctly recognize ironic statements and label them as comments with negative sentiment. 

Posts with negative sentiment usually generate high engagement rates, but you don’t want negative comments around your brand. And if you do, it has to be a part of the planned campaign and you need to have control over the situation, e.g. monitor the number of mentions or the social media reach of your campaign. 

3. Invest in chatbots

Digital age made us all very impatient. We want answers to our questions immediately, without any delay. 

An answer to this need is chatbot. Chatbots are quite easy to program and personalise, so you can use them for multiple purposes including:

• providing a quick answer;
• resolving a complaint;
• offering additional content, for example, lists of tools or newsletters;
• running competition. 

If you don’t have a chat on your website, you can add a bot to your Facebook Messenger. 

4. Personalise your message

We leave a tremendous amount of information online. In return, many of us look for hyper-targeted personalization. 

We want to see exactly the content we desire at the exact time we need it. That means you have to personalise your digital marketing message and deliver it at the right moment. 

I’ll dig deeper into the question of time in the next paragraph. Now, let’s focus on the messaging. 

Analyse the social media data and segment your audience according to their demographics, interested or geographical distribution. 

Your remarketing and retargeting efforts will be executed with surgical precision. Otherwise, you’ll be burning your money on ineffective advertising campaigns. 

5. Make use of micro-moments

The rise of smartphones shortened our attention span. We decide in an instant – what to eat, where to go or what to buy. 

Google calls these instants micro-moments and distinguishes 4 types:

• I want to know moments
• I want to go moments
• I want to do moments
• I want to buy moments

To meet this new, speedy decision-making process brands need to capture readers attention within seconds. 

Micro-moments are closely related to personalization and targeting advertising. You have to be present on precisely the platforms where your customers are present and invest in short ads, that meet exactly the question asked in that precise moment. 

Digital Marketing for 2019 – a Quick Recap 

AI and further development of social media algorithms will make our marketing experience even more personalised. Your window of opportunity to reach your targeted audience is becoming narrower, and the audience is growing more particular about the content they want to see. 

To restore the trust in social media and social media influencers, investigate the social media sentiment around the celebrities you want to cooperate with.