Top Trends That Will Drive Marketing and Sales

As a business owner, you might want to assess and rethink your marketing and sales strategy for the following year. The digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving as technological advancements, and new players affect the market strongly. Companies worldwide are pursuing plans to disrupt the digital world as we know it. Here are some of the trends that are projected to drive marketing and sales in 2019.

Voice search continues to rise.

More than a third of the 3.5 billion searches on Google daily are voice searches. An increasing number of people rely on personal assistant devices such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant. Owing to the improvements in mobile trends, the capacity of these devices to recognize human speech is also improving considerably, optimizing the process of searching for information online and performing tasks around the house.

Voice search differs from the usual mobile or desktop search because it can only show you a few results at a time instead of the hundreds of pages you usually see on search results. This means that the click-through rate for that website shown in these limited results is potentially a lot higher. Tailoring your SEO strategy to rank higher for voice search is thus crucial. For marketers, this means planning campaigns that cater to this significant trend.

Artificial intelligence offers new solutions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly finding its place in marketing and sales. Many already deployed tools use machine learning, predictive analysis, and natural language processing. By next year, it is predicted that AI-powered solutions will take over many government enterprises and consumer markets worldwide. AI is also expected to improve personalization, allowing marketers to tailor products and services according to user feedback.

The most widely implemented kind of AI is chatbots, which allow brands to enhance customer experience while still keeping costs at bay. These chatbots are often imbued with humor and personalities to better relate to customers needing assistance. Some stores, such as Lazada, the best online shopping site in the Philippines, are using chatbots to provide data-related answers and address customer requests.

Content is still king.

This year, marketers realized that consumers tend to put more trust in brands that they know and reputable content instead of flashy ads. A study showed that the top four advertising sources were people you know, branded sites, editorial sites, and reviews. Traditional ads are somewhere near the bottom, and this is something that will continue into the following year. With more and more users using ad blockers, standard ads probably won’t even reach 30 percent of their target audience.

Because of this, more and more brands are expected to turn to market strategies that offer relevant value to the consumer. This includes referral partnerships, content marketing, influencer marketing, and other systems designed to deliver real value to the consumer. For website owners, consistent blogging and content creation are the keys to increasing traffic, as most internet users still prefer great-quality and original content over canned ones.

Micro-moments take over the consumer journey.

A micro-moment refers to a new kind of consumer behavior, where they will reflexively turn to a device such as a smartphone to act on their need to do, learn, get to know, or buy something. According to researchers from Google, the average smartphone user experiences micro-moments 150 times every day. Micro-moments are essential for marketers because they dictate how consumers decide what to buy, where to go, and where to eat. Essentially, brands only have a few seconds to capture consumer attention.

With micro-moment marketing, brands must realize that they are not the center of the consumer’s world. Most of the content that brands produce is probably perceived as an interruption to a consumer’s routine. Because brands only have nano-seconds to obtain a consumer’s attention, their message must be clear, concise, attractive, and relevant.