2018 was the year of new movement in the marketing sector. GDPR smashed into our lives on the 25th of May in generally anticlimactic fashion (as it turned out to be kind of what we all wanted anyway); KFC proved, with its anagrammatic apology, that print advertising wasn’t ‘dead’; and Facebook and Google faced the music for their poor handling of user data. 2018 was a mixed bag to say the least but we’ve moved into 2019 with positivity. So here they are, 5 Marketing Trends for 2019.
Ad blockers are rife. Consumers and professionals alike are losing patience with the out dated and intrusive nature of many advert placements. The popup is reviled, the display ad misplaced, the sponsored post misguided. That’s why the smart money is on native advertising to take a boost this year. Sponsored posts on social media and sponsored articles from publishers offer a less intrusive but more targeted approach to traditional display marketing. While the latter is by no means dead in the water, native advertising will offer more opportunities in 2019 than everbefore.
While voice will make leaps in 2019 we don’t think it will reach a saturated level of consumer adoption. Limitations in functionality will still make this a growing market as consumers adopt slowly but for B2C businesses voice search technology, such as Amazon’s Alexa, will start to move from novelty to necessity. Keywords still matter. Products will be optimised to be found not only from text searches but from voice activated search as well. Alexa Skills for example give businesses the chance to cheaply and easily provide value to their customers and prospects.
Facebook continue to push native video. Their adoption of stories from Instagram to Facebook highlights their intention to continue growing the market for vertical format video (to the horror of professional videographers).While organic social reach wanes Video engagement does so at a slower pace.Businesses that offer video content as part of their marketing strategy continue to outperform those that do not.
Businesses will remember their basics. Social media is about people. We need to create safe spaces from which to grow our audiences.Engaging with your target market should focus on what they want than what you want to say. It’s basic but sometimes it's hard to remember when you get over excited about your new product range. If we build communities first we will enjoy a longer, fuller relationship with our customers for years to come.
“Email Marketing is dead!” This click bait title has been hovering around the web for a long time (The earliest we found in a quick search was 2009) but email is still alive and kicking and delivering some of the best ROI in the biz. GDPR only helped our click through rates when it forced us to re-evaluate how we gather, store and deliver our marketing emails. Sure,it’s now a little more complex to gather consent but it has forced businesses to give real value to their customers through their email marketing strategy. Pre-ticked boxes are out and genuinely well designed, interesting, informative, exciting and engaging email is in. Hooray for email. Now all we need is for someone to set down some ground rules for email HTML standardisation. Some software is just less than helpful. We’re looking at you Outlook…
That’s it for our first blog of 2019 but if you need more hints, tips, advice or just a general chat about how we can help. Give us a call.
