Top 15 Trends That Will Storm The Digital Marketing World

Keeping up with the latest digital marketing trends in the industry is a necessity for professionals who want a future in digital marketing. 

With the pace of change rising every year, each digital marketer has to constantly invest time and energy to upskill and learn. 

Having a sound knowledge of the working algorithms, new changes or features gives you the first-mover advantage and creates the most effective marketing campaigns for you and your company.

Here are the top trends in digital marketing which are changing and are taking the DM world by storm:

1.Integrated Use of AI & AR in Marketing

Almost 60% of internet users have already interacted with an AI chatbot for solving queries across multiple apps and websites. 

Most of the content we acquire on our social media platforms is fine-tuned by AIs to make our stay engaged for longer period of time.

• 71% of B2B marketers were seen interested in AI personalization
  
  
• 97% of mobile users are already using AI powered voice assistants
  
  
• AI is growing to be a $195B industry by 2025

AI can serve many functions and act as an extension to every digital marketer who knows how to employ it. It is cost-efficient, precise, and extremely effective, every team must have a plan to incorporate AI in their array of tools.

Augmented Reality in Marketing

Augmented Reality is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information. 

It consists of 3 basic features

• a combination of real and virtual worlds
• real-time interaction
• accurate 3D registration of virtual and real objects

Augmented Reality is much more plausible from a marketing point of view. Brands are progressively using this AR technology to elevate the consumer experience and increase sales. 

2.Voice Search Optimization

Voice Search feature we all received with our smartphones. The adoption of devices that are fully voice search controlled is a big indicator of how people have started to get accustomed to this new behaviour since 2014.

With higher precision, Google claims that they have achieved 95% accuracy with their Voice Search. So, the ease-of-use factor for voice search has triggered its usage. Now with better accuracy to match what you ask for, and the ease of using your voice to get results makes the process more personalized and attractive.

3.Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic Ad Buying is the use of software to purchase digital advertising. While the traditional method includes human negotiation, requests for proposals, and quotes, programmatic buying makes use of algorithms and machines to buy ads.

Programmatic Advertising is when AI is used to automate so that advertisers can target more specific audiences which ultimately increases conversions and lowers the customer acquisition cost. 

Here’s how Programmatic Advertising works:

Step1: People click on the webpage

Step2: Page publisher puts up the ad impression for auction

Step 3: Ad’s marketplace holds an auction

Step 4: Advertiser willing to bid for most of the impression wins the right to display their ads

Step 5: Ad is delivered to the prospective customer

Step 6: Lastly, customer clicks on the ads and advertiser covert them into sales

Programmatic Advertising is rapidly increasing every year and is predicted to be used for a huge majority of display advertising in the next couple of years.

4.Chatbots

Chatbots are considered one of the top digital marketing trends in 2021 and in the upcoming years, the AI-based technology makes use of instant messaging to chat with customers, and with site visitors. It is designed to communicate with customers by textual or auditory methods. 

Businesses can leverage the use of chatbots to engage with customers. Since there are plenty of users visiting the website at once, it advantageous to have a technology that answers hundreds of users at once.  The benefits of having chatbots are 24/7 customer service, instant responses to inquiries, and answers to simple questions.  

More than 60% of people prefer messaging on chatbots to communicate with businesses or brands. This virtual support provides excellent customer services, this means a business gets rid of repetitive tasks and can focus on important work. 

5.Personalization

If you want to outperform your competitors and want to stand out in the market, you must focus on personalizing content, products, emails, etc. Personalization is the next big trend that will soon become an industry standard. Almost 90% of consumers claim that they find personalization appealing than ever.

The best example to understand the power of personalization are YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, they have personalized recommended movies for each user as per their usage and interests.

6.Automated & Personalised Email Marketing

Automated email marketing is sending emails to your customers automatically based on triggers or schedules you set.

Emails have always been the most reliable channel of digital marketing. Promotional emails are an amazing way to reach out to your customers and let them know what your organization has achieved or any sale you have coming up. 

Yet due to over usage of mass email tactics, most people have stopped responding to promotional emails. Personalized emails are a great way to bring back the attention of your customer, and create a far more engaged customer base.

Facts you must know:

• You are 6x more likely to get a click from an email than from a tweet
• Adding a call-to-action button in your emails instead of simply a text link can lead to a 28% increase in click-throughs
• 78% of marketers have seen an increase in engagements (including CTR) in the last 12 months

Making your customer feel special is important for every business. Personalized emails do just that, they give the customer the experience that the business is far more than an imaginary entity, rather a collective of individuals just like them.

7.Video Marketing

Video Marketing is also one of the top digital marketing trends and is likely to be at the top for more years to come. Here are some stats that will demonstrate the importance of including a video in your digital marketing current trends list.

Expert takeaways are:

• 75% of businesses say videos have improved their conversion rate 
• 70% of consumers say they have shared brands video 
• 54% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions
• Video content is 50 times more likely to drive users than plain text.

Simple trends you can adhere to go through a rightful customer intent:

• Livestreams on mobile
• Short-form videos
• user-generated video content
• Online Training & Educational Videos
• Video advertising 
• Shoppable Videos

8.Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is more of word-of-mouth marketing that concentrates on using an important leader or personality to amplify the brand to the market. Influencers could be famous celebrities or YouTubers, Instagram influencers with great followings who can help spread the word about the brand or business by social channels. 

Influencer Marketing could be the next big thing for sure! 

9.WhatsApp Marketing

WhatsApp Marketing is believed to be one of the biggest & must-use digital marketing trends in thr future to come. WhatsApp has completely changed the way businesses now reach & engage with their customers. You can now personally message on an app that is used by all age groups and always checked multiple times in a day.

And you will not be creeping out the consumer because you will reach them through a WhatsApp Business Account which helps them trust you and your business’ credibility.

10. Location Based Marketing

Location-based service marketing in which an app or other software program uses Wi-Fi, and cellular data to provoke a targeted marketing action like a text, social media advertisement, email, or an app notification. When the mobile device enters or exits a geographic boundary, it is known as geo-fence. It’s because

• Mobile ads with geofencing have double the CTR (click-through-rate)
• Geofencing is adaptable with 92% of smartphones.

Location based marketing can help elevate customer interactions, it’s undoubtedly one of the beneficial digital marketing trends and hence it is gaining popularity.

11.Hyper-local SEO

Hyperlocal SEO is a digital marketing trend that is very helpful for start-ups as well as small businesses. Never before has it been easier for small business owners to be able to use the power of digital marketing to get customers. 

It is the algorithmic push by Google which focuses on a person’s current NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number) to give very personalized results to daily queries such as “closest petrol pump near me” or “where to buy a drink?” 

The most amazing thing about this hyperlocal focus is that it provides the business with the ability to create a strong regional market for themselves. Combined with voice search results, people who type very specific queries can easily find a way to get to you. This is a great relief for traditional businesses and small business owners especially.

The algorithm update is massive yet very easy for everyone to be able to use and apply to their websites. 

12.Content Marketing

When it comes to creating content for websites, the term “Keyword density” is very important to digital marketers. Google can now comprehend what the content of the website is about and all the related topics it answers.

By understanding Google updates better, the use of language, Google can understand answers without requiring the main keywords to be necessarily present, it can understand the usage of synonyms. It also understands the context of a sentence by reading it about the previous sentences and succeeding sentences. 

Content writers can now solely focus on making articles and pages that provide a great experience for the user, without having to simplify it to make it easy for Google. 

13.Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel is a process of marketing across numerous platforms in order to have gained multiple touchpoints. It is certainly the most noteworthy digital marketing trend in the future to come. 

Omnichannel marketing strategies allow a business to use multiple ways of representing their brand or business in front of the target customer.

The demand for personalized products has increased more than ever, the need for browsing products online and purchasing them too has elevated. 

14.Interactive Content 

Interactive content is content where the audience actively participates instead of passively watching, reading, or listening.  

When it comes down to measuring effectiveness, interactive content has proven to drive traffic to websites, educate users about a brand and increase conversion. In this way, interactive content gives marketers the ability to track interactions and better determine success. 

Listed below are the Statistics that support the same: 

• 54% of all marketer’s report using interactive content.
• 92% of marketers agreed that interactive content is effective in educating its buyers
• 88% of marketers said that interactive content is effective in differentiating their brand from their competitors
• The number of interactive posts has increased by 35%

15. Google Ads Smart Bidding

There’s severe competition between brands and businesses to rank higher on google search results. However, in order to get indexed on top results through SEO demands a lot of effort and time. An alternative for this is paid to advertise, it makes it easier for marketers to rank on top, hence it is considered to become the trusted digital marketing trend in 2022. 

Speaking about Google Ads, one of the key features of it is “smart bidding”, businesses and brands should consider the Smart Bidding feature on Google Ads, as it helps a business to save time and ace its performance. 

Benefits of Smart Bidding includes:

• Advanced machine learning
• Wide range of contextual signals
• Flexible performance controls
• Transparent performance reporting

Advertisers can hand over their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to Google’s AI system, which will optimize their budget and maximize their ROI. 

Touchstone

The future of digital marketing is very promising and full of opportunities. With the constant developments in the technology space, digital marketing is evolving by leaps and bounds. Even for someone who is a business owner and wants to integrate digital marketing, the future will demand digital marketing as a necessity, and thus right now is the right time. 

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