The biggest lesson for marketers in 2019 was that for 2020, they must focus on improving the customer experience first and then strategize on prompt marketing solutions in the digital first world that is today.
With the flick of an eye the bygone year just went and we saw the rise of several new marketing channels like social media, video marketing and mobiles. Also issues surrounding the view-ability of ads and ad-blocking became major issues earlier this year. So, for the next year the marketers and advertising community must work towards satisfying all the parties involved, i.e. the publishers, marketers and especially consumers.
Top 10 Digital marketing channels we can use
Here are the top 10 digital marketing channels to grow your small business
1. Understanding customer behavior with characteristic trends:
The most important thing to take note of when devising a marketing plan is to pay attention to the changing needs of the customers. So, that is why you must start with a review of customer trends. The graph of waves below would showcase how the marketplace along with the customer behavior changes differently on varying timescales. While the different memes change almost every day, the altercations in tech and communication and commerce happen on a relatively slower rate.
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So when looking at different trends we must pay attention to the different timescales. Some of them are short-lived ‘fads’ while others are more long-term megatrends that go on gathering traction with people.
2. Growth of smart phone use and rise of messaging platforms:
The latest Global Internet Trends Review showcased that two major trends led to the increase of smart phone use amongst the people recently the adoption to the new technologies and the ongoing popularity of messaging platforms. While the graph below shows perfectly that the market has reached a plateau in places like North America and Western Europe; however, extrapolating trends from Asia exhibits room for future expansion of mobile markets.
The following stats further emphasize the growing demands of mobile marketing and related apps:
- 50% searches or more take place on phones
- 91 percent of daily Facebook users are mobile-based
- 80 percent of ad revenue from Facebook is from mobile phones
- 90 percent of time on media apps is spent on mobile phones and is the 90 percent of the time of mobile use itself
3. The tremendous growth of messaging app popularity:
It all began with Facebook messenger and with their acquisition of Whatsapp and a rebuffing of Snapchat to the popularity of other messaging apps like Wechat in non-Western markets; there is a growing need of customers to communicate directly out of the public social network pages.
This as per marketing experts of the digital world, is the last frontier of monetization of social media, thus we can expect to see some major changes in this sector in 2017 with new options becoming available for paid media on messaging apps. However, these efforts are guaranteed to be limited as the app owners have committed in the past to keeping the messaging service free of ads.
Hence, the shift of the users from public social media to one-on-one messaging is expected to remain as a challenge for businesses.
4. AI engagement will uplift customer service and help marketers:
Artificial Intelligence has made its way out of overly fantasized sci-fi movies and is now an active reality, where brands are employing bots that offer customers assistance. The names of Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, IBM’s Watson along with the latest one of Facebook’s Bot Engine for Messenger that went live in April this year, along with Google announcing their assistant service at Google I/O 2016 are not new.
These assistants chat with us in real-time and help to learn about our real-world with offering solutions for the things we seek. And this the avenue that marketers hope to cash in as well. Like this:
5. Online videos must be utilized as the New Digital Marketing Channels
A vital channel emerging for marketers! As per a recent study by CISCO consumer videos are said to be accounting 80 percent of all of internet traffic by 2019. And a lot of new technology will further drive momentum in that medium.
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6. Augmented reality is the other name in the types of digital marketing channels for 2017:
AR and VR technologies lately have gathered a lot of market traction. The techies have been rolling out new technologies every year, and the brands have been trying at using these techs for better advertising purposes. This will definitely see some more movement in the upcoming year.
http://www.marketingdive.com/user_media/diveimage/Gartner-hc2015vrar-figure1.jpg
7. Zoning in content marketing
With all the attention going to the customer experience a lot of brands today are looking to promote better with content marketing strategies. This they believe will help them build better relationships with their potential clients.
8. Data will be essential to marketing
Marketers still need to learn to connect the dots with data for better strategies and this will be an important channel to work on next year.
9. Boost personalization for the better
With focus on customer experience, greater focus must be given to personalized communications.
10. Digital experience will be the sole important channel next year
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Apart from the above mentioned lot, new breakthroughs in digital marketing tech are unlikely to evolve at the top tier. And mobile adoption and management will still gather the most attention as per industry insider predictions.