Digital marketing is one of the most interesting and challenging domains. It is made up of simultaneously shifting parts amidst digitally savvy consumers. With their rapidly changing customer expectations, tend to dwindle their attention spans, while in keeping with the stiff competition, containing several touch points.
Conventional marketing dictums have replaced the new era of placing high demands upon marketers. This calls for marketing automation to help both your enterprise and your customers save time, with increased visibility, increased social media presence, and organized management of traffic through SEO.
The key digital marketing trends that will shape the future, undergoing a tectonic shift and are set to prevail in 2024:
The trends and predictions on the latest online searches
1. Google-verified listing for SEO will be provided
Local-level operative businesses, such as veterinary clinics, electrical shops, or plumbing companies within their geographically-defined service area with Google My Business listing, are provided with valuable information that helps establish the company’s geographical location showing up for “near me” searches. This also helps customers to learn more about the company’s current business information, Search results provided by Google My Business listing.
2. Rise of virtual reality to spread a huge impact
More technologically engaging tools which provide interactive and personal experiences of virtual reality are emerging to marketers as a clear winner. Virtual reality allows for engaging in storytelling which further, enables its users to connect with a brand maintaining emotional intensity which is pretty unimaginable when we talk about traditional media.
This strategy helps the brand to reach closer to the customer thus reinforcing loyalty to the brand. It is expected that very soon virtual reality will become the standard part of marketing campaigns, with it continues to boom. From $7.9 billion in 2018 to $53.6 billion in 2025 as per Markets and Markets research. For example, many leading automobile makers and smartphone manufacturers have already experienced this leap by delivering 360-degree interactive experiences using virtual reality.
3. Voice searches
As days pass by some tech-savvy households talk to Alexa, Siri, or Cortana more than they speak to family members, and therefore in keeping with this trend we find the rise of demand for voice-activated digital assistants, which continue to be huge sellers. The most significant shifts in using keywords both at home and on our phones led to the popularity and high usage of voice search. This can be easily figured out if you remember when you type a search into Google it is phrased differently than when you use Alexa for various information.
Let’s consider an example, suppose a person is in search of the nearest Italian restaurant and typed into Google “Italian restaurants Venice”, but this same person will ask Cortana, “Which is the closest Italian restaurant?” Hence to increase the visibility and digital marketing trend, with no signs of slowing down, it is assumed that while writing content, people will choose keywords based on the questions they ask while using Siri or Alexa, or Cortana.
4. AI-first approach
AI and machine learning have been at the top of every marketing trend list for a long time now although with its ‘trough of disillusionment’ tag. According to Forbes’ 2018 findings, 75% of enterprises were able to enhance customer satisfaction by 10% using AI and machine learning. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning for marketing help to enable more accurate, real-time analytics and measurement which in turn improves the customer experience and supports minimizing customer churn to the least.
The next big thing that is being looked at is customer relationship management improvisation with the help of AI-powered Chatbot which are capable of understanding complex requests and personalized responses. Research and Market analysis says that AI-based Chatbot helps to manage over 50% of customer queries via the global AI-enabled market. This too is estimated to reach $2.2bn by 2024, if the technology continues to mature and interesting use cases come to light, thus making AI-first strategy marketing very soon to be the new normal.
5. Automated and smart bidding
Ad specialists analyze carefully every piece of data by continuously tweaking and adjusting keywords, bids, and ad phrasings, in order to acquire the best possible results from a Google Ads campaign. To acquire the best results this obsessive attention is exhausting for some business owners, who multi-task trying to run a campaign and become completely overwhelmed, at times resulting in failure.
Therefore in order to avoid failure the Ads specialists can embrace automated bidding strategies to adjust your bids in real-time. These bids are still in complete control and will allow Google to use machine learning in order to analyze the tremendous amount of data it has on its users.
Although Smart Bidding made its debut in 2016, there are still plenty of human strategies involved in optimizing PPC performance, which is why most business owners aren’t aware of what it is or what it does. Automated bidding requires, including testing automated bid strategies against each other be to continuously monitored.
6. Blockchain potential will be explored
Blockchain is one of the latest technology that can bring dramatic transformation to a wide range of industries and is the latest buzzword being touted around. Marketing can address some of its biggest concerns and challenges with blockchain increasing transparency in terms of identifying bots and building consumer trust, which helps resolve privacy concerns.
There will be some challenges, with any nascent technology, where blockchain’s potential is being evaluated currently as it might have some technical glitches. However innovative use cases of blockchain are expected soon.
7. Conclusion
Therefore in the tech-savvy 21st century, technology will emerge as the core fabric of marketing to understand customer’s demands of customers, listen to their grievances and meet their expectations and we can confidently conclude that future marketing trends will evolve with the mantra of ‘Everything for everyone, customized’.
About the author
The author of this enlightening article is Tuhin Banik, the founder, CEO, and search scientist at ThatWare. He has over a decade of experience in advanced SEO, semantic search engineering, Natural Language Processing (NLP) in SEO, machine learning in search, penalty recovery specialist, understanding search algorithms, cracking Google Patents, and a technical SEO consultant.
