11. 4. 2024 | advertia digital

The world is moving fast, summer is coming, and soon half of the year will be behind us. You know how it works, after summer, the year will be over soon and all the plans you made will be behind you, either achieving your goals or failing at them.

Most likely you need the leverage of digital channels in order to achieve your business goals… at least some extent. Therefore, we chose “Top Digital Trends for 2019” as the topic for May’s Community Meet-up.

Omnichannel Marketing

One of the highest trends of 2019 is the shift from multichannel to omnichannel marketing. It refers to a sales and marketing approach that provides the customer with an integrated shopping experience. The customer can be shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, via phone, or in a brick-and-mortar store, and the experience will be seamless.

This approach puts the customer journey in the center of the channel strategy, providing engagement where and when needed and making the whole journey effortless in order to complete the purchase and to interact with the brand.

Some of the best examples of a comprehensive omnichannel strategy can be seen in brands, such as Disney, Sephora and Starbucks. On the other hand, some of the biggest challenges that marketers face towards implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy, besides lack of budget, are the lack of know-how, the access to data cross channels, failing to recognize the same customer on different channels and the silos within the company.

Social Media Trends

Facebook

Facebook is coming in with big changes that seem to be making a zoom-pivot of their strategy. Focusing more on groups interactions, launching a desktop messenger app, relaunching the events tab and lessening the importance of the timeline. This year Facebook will roll-out a new design that claims to be fresher, simpler and faster. It also will start testing other features in specific markets, such as “secret-crush” and shipping on the marketplace. When it comes to ads, brands can’t ignore it anymore, while Machine Learning seems to be taking over the optimization process.

However, Facebook seems to be “declining”, showing a huge shift in demographics where the younger generations seem to be staying way from it.

Instagram

This is one of the highest growing social networks; attracting younger generations, showing one of the biggest performances in interactions, and serving as a channel for consumer creators and influencers. One of the biggest changes in Instagram this year will be the shop feature of creators. Whit this feature, users will be able to make purchases directly from the app. This will be a gamechanger for e-commerce and we’re excited to see what happens when it goes global.

Other SM Trends

· LinkedIn keeps growing.
· In-the-moment content will win out over highly-produced content
· WhatsApp Business API
· Brands can no longer afford to ignore social media ads
· Creative social ads that are both personalized and entertaining
· Rise of social media TV and vertical videos
· Long-Form Content Marketing

For deeper quantitative data regarding social media, we strongly recommend you visit the Smart Insights report prepared along with Hootsuite.

Global social media research summary 2021

Artificial Intelligence.

A.I. and Machine Learning are on the way to be democratized and productionized, leading it to specific problem-solving software solutions. Some of the biggest applications are seen taking place in ad optimizations used by Facebook and Google that are helping advertisers run intent-driven ads; however, ai is also being used in content curation, lead scoring and customer engagement. That last one being specific to the rise on chatbots. On other fronts, brands are using AI internally in warehouse and production-lines, reducing times for training. It will also disrupt the automotive industry with autonomous vehicle’s speed rising.

The way we see it, there is no need to worry. It looks like for now, at least, advertising and marketing jobs are safe from robot replacement as much of marketing needs the ability of emphasizing and dealing with emotions that make the highest fluctuating.

VR / AR

When it comes to VR there has been a low adoption due to the content-sync and immersion problem. This is probably why VR headset sales have dropped nearly 35% since 2017. This might change with recent developments in VR exploring brainwave user interaction and the talks of neural links. However, this technology seems a bit far away from taking the mainstream for now.

On the other hand, augmented reality is on a rise. This is enabled by the mobile disruption, putting phones in the center of AR devices. It clearly increases both user engagement and brand recognition, while lowering the adoption barriers of VR by using a device more than half of the world already has in its pockets and uses daily. This is a cool trend and we’re looking forward of what brands can do with it. One of the best examples of VR usage by a brand is coming from Ikea.