How the Latest Innovations in Digital Media, Technology, and Data will Impact Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

Changes in digital marketing strategies occur primarily as a result of a change in consumer behaviour; from the way consumers shop and research products to how they spend their time and money. This directly influences how marketers need to communicate with consumers in order to drive action.

Technology is one of the main factors that affects consumer habits and behaviour, and technology companies are innovating faster than ever before. It’s vital for today’s marketers to be on top of the latest technologies that are affecting the way people receive and respond to communications.

The following are some of the ways that technology is shaping the world of digital marketing, and how you can evolve your marketing tactics to keep your business ahead of the curve.

Increasing Use of Voice Search

Currently, almost a third of Google searches are done by voice; by 2020 this number is expected to increase to 50%.  Programs are becoming better at distinguishing human speech, and more people are turning to Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and the Google Assistant to answer their queries.

This will have a significant impact on how marketers handle search engine campaigns.  With a typical keyword search on a mobile or desktop, users are given hundreds of thousands of results.  While marketers would like to be in position one, being on the first page will typically be enough to see significant results.

With voice, this is slightly more difficult. Siri, for example, will answer a query with just a few results, often only one.  On the up side, if you are one of the results that come up, you can expect a very high click-through rate, and potentially conversion rate.  Ensuring your SEO strategy is optimised for voice search will be crucial in the coming years. Another interesting consideration for voice search is that there is no screen to show your website, so traditional digital marketing techniques to improve user experience like Conversion Rate Optimisation are obsolete.  It will be interesting to see how businesses adapt and evolve with this development.

Artificial Intelligence Becoming Available to the Masses

Everyone speaks about Artificial Intelligence and how it will disrupt the future of business.  But for now, no one really knows just how and when it will come into effect. The technology is taking shape, with chatbots being the most widely implemented form of AI currently.

Chatbots help brands with customer service by giving quick, programmed answers to user queries 24/7. Chatbots can be integrated with a website, an app, or on social media and can be used to gather insightful customer information that can be analysed and applied to inform future marketing campaigns.

AI is also being put to use in advertising, where it can help marketers to buy ads more efficiently and target audiences more specifically. It uses data to define what message to send to what person and at what time, in order to reduce conversion costs.

Micro-Moments the New Consumer Journey

The term ‘micro-moment’ refers to a new type of consumer behaviour. Defined by Google, it describes the moment when someone immediately picks up a device to act on an immediate need for information.  This information can be something they want to learn, do, or buy.

Micro-moments are particularly important for marketers because people want to make a quick decision about what they are going to buy, where they are going to visit or what they are going to eat. Your business needs to be there in that micro-moment in order to fill their need. This will typically involve a search marketing campaign as this is where most users start looking for information.  From local SEO to search engine optimisation and paid search ads, make sure your business is easy to find, quick.

Social Media is Bigger than Ever

Currently, the Internet has 4.2 billion users, 3.397 billion of them are active social media users; and on average, people have 5.54 social media accounts.

The stats speak for themselves. Social media has become embedded in the daily lives of today’s consumers, from young to old.  As such, understanding and adapting to the changes made by these platforms is necessary for your digital marketing campaigns. Facebook users want different content when they’re on YouTube, and these users are not necessarily the ones that are reading the content on your website or receiving your emails. The way marketers should respond is to be active on multiple channels, with content that is repurposed so that it is relevant to each of them.

As the digital marketing scene continuously grows and evolves, so to must your marketing strategy.  For more information on the digital trends that may affect your business in the next 12 months, get in touch with Digital Squad, your digital marketing agency Auckland for more information. The experts at Digital Squad can help you with SEO Auckland, Facebook Marketing NZ, and AdWords advertising Auckland.