As you develop your marketing plan for the year ahead, it’s key to understand where to focus your team’s energy. This blog explores some predictions of the tactics that we think will be particularly important for digital marketers in 2019.

Hopefully, our forecast will give you some food for thought on how to capitalize on some of this year’s biggest trends and create the most effective marketing strategy possible.

1) Conversational Digital Marketing

Creating personalized customer experiences and human interactions online was a huge focus for digital marketers throughout 2018, and continues to be a top priority. As discussed in our blog about how to build a better digital customer experience, personalizing customer communications based on their stage in the sales funnel and consumer behavior is a great way to build trust in your business and stand out from competitors.

The goal of this approach to marketing is to make communication with your customers feel like a one-on-one conversation tailored to their needs. Ideally, the result is a more authentic and enjoyable customer experience and shorter sales cycle. Regardless of your business size, industry, or whether you’re B2B or B2C, creating a more human buying experience for your customers pays off.

One way to start the shift to conversational marketing is to have an instant messaging feature for customer support on your website. If you already have a chat feature on your website, see if you can make it better. Chatbots and other AI-powered virtual assistants are great to a certain extent. However, if you can have someone on your team personally respond to incoming questions in real time, it’s generally much more effective.

2) An Increased Focus On Audio

People increasingly on the move, relying on their mobile devices means more opportunities to capture their attention via audio. Creating content that is actually interesting and useful for your audience will probably require some creativity, but don’t think that you have to reinvent the wheel.

Repurposing your written content that performs the best and adding in memorable sound bites with actionable takeaways can leave a great impression on your audience (and keep them coming back). Producing audio content is not just jumping on the bandwagon of what is trendy. The long term impact of having audio content that performs well over time is worth the effort. Also, having a transcript of the conversation full of relevant keywords related to the theme of the episode is useful for SEO.

Regardless of your podcast’s style or format, you can make your podcast interesting. We like Neil Patel and Eric Siu’s Marketing School podcast because of its predictable format, consistency (every single day) and brevity.

It’s important to keep in mind the primary goal of your audio content. Just like you write various pieces of content in different styles for different stages of the sales funnel, audio content should be consciously created in the same way.

3) The Use of Video in Every Phase of Marketing

It goes without saying that video will continue to be a popular form of marketing content in 2019.  The opportunity for more viewership and engagement that a video format offers is unmatched. We’re not just saying that “video content creation” is a trend on its own. Furthermore, it’s how marketers are strategically getting their different forms of video content in front of the right segments of their target demographic more consistently.

The more competitive landscape of digital marketing in 2019 promises to become a breeding ground for even smarter, more aggressive video content creation. Online publications from news outlets are increasingly including a brief video version of their news stories on the same page as their articles. Some digital publishing teams are stripping their staff to the bare minimum of writers and investing heavily in the most skilled video creators that they possibly can.

Video goes beyond just delighting consumers with entertaining content. It has a lot to being a more digestible format for informative content (especially satisfying the consumers who have less time or shorter attention spans). It’s no secret that PPC video advertising through Google Ads network requires a brilliant team of creatives and talented marketing strategists to make the ROI of a campaign worth it. The pressure to get the most enticing video ads with the best Quality Scores in front of the right people will push marketers to produce smart and effective video content in 2019.

To Sum It Up…

1) Try to approach your marketing interactions with potential clients and target customers in a conversational, personable way. You can expect businesses to continue focusing on creating the most personalized, data-backed marketing experiences possible in 2019.

2) Valuable content for your target audience in an audio format is an excellent marketing tool that will become more widespread in 2019. Target an audience of consistent listeners to get a marketing message that lasts.

3) Encourage your marketing team to invest more in video content creation (and start learning the skills yourself if you haven’t started already). Expect even better quality and more omnipresence video marketing in 2019. We’re predicting that businesses will compete more aggressively for attention with video content on their websites, in their email blasts, and in their PPC campaigns.

If you want to learn more about what we can do to help you improve your marketing in a sustainable way this year, reach out to us below. Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter for more of our digital marketing insights, too.