6 Great Articles About Digital Marketing in 2019

You have made your way through 2018.

Maybe it was a successful year and your marketing team saw significant improvement in customer engagement and campaign ROI.

Maybe it was more of a struggle with your team still trying to find their footing in the new world of digital marketing.

Either way, it is time to prepare your strategy for 2019. A thorough plan will allow you to either continue seeing strong results or help you right the ship and refocus your time and energy.

The following takes a look at what digital marketing experts are predicting for next year. These insights should help you to shape your budget, your strategy, and your goals.

1. Forbes: 5 Marketing Trends To Pay Attention To In 2019 — John Hall

John Hall has been a contributor for Forbes.com and Inc. Magazine since 2012. He is regularly hired as a keynote speaker for marketing seminars and conferences. He founded his own firm to help companies create content and reach their target audience. In other words, he knows every side of digital marketing, which shows through in his recent Forbes article on what companies should be expecting across the industry in 2019.

Hall covers five trends he predicts will come to life over the next year.

The first is that consumers will start putting their trust in the circle of people they know, followed by editorial sites and customer reviews. Advertisements, on the other end of the spectrum, will become one of the least trusted sources of information.

The second trend is that being different is the move to make. Companies that make creative digital marketing choices will be the ones that stand out.

A third trend is teamwork between the marketing team and other departments.

Fourth is the fact that companies will need to start better serving their customers’ communication preferences.

And finally, the fifth trend will be instilling a personal touch in all of the tech and automation involved in digital marketing.

2. Digital Marketing Depot: The Secret Formula For A Marketing Budget — Lou Covey

Budgeting plays one of the biggest roles in planning for the upcoming business year, and digital marketing can be one of the most challenging areas to budget for.

Lou Covey has created a comprehensive budgeting process for marketing that will allow leadership to accurately plan for their digital marketing financial needs.

In the article, Covey first dives into the budget dilemma — the struggles that every brand faces in determining the value and cost of various marketing methods.

And this budget is about more than just the dollar amount, but also time and other company resources.

Covey then introduces helpful equations and how to use them, the importance of including more than just the expenditures, and smart budgets for businesses of different sizes.

3. Social Media Explorer: Top 12 Social Media Marketing Tools For 2019 — Adam Torkildson

The changes in digital marketing not only include the wavering popularity of various social platforms, but also the advent of new social media marketing tools.

Adam Torkildson recently covered some of the most promising tools that digital marketers need to add to their arsenal. These tools include:

• SEMrush: This SEO tool allows marketing teams to understand their current SEO situation and to identify how they can improve their SERP position.
• Canva: An easy-to-use design tool with free templates and images that have been pre-sized. It allows companies to quickly edit content to perfectly fit the various social platforms’ size and quality requirements.
• BuzzSumo: This tool allows businesses to search for various topics. The results page then provides information on how much social media attention the topic is receiving and identifies keywords, ideas, and events that have been attracting buzz. Companies can then use this to create content about ideas that are trending.
• MeetEdgar: A post scheduling tool that allows users to schedule re-shares so that a larger portion of a brand’s audience sees the content.
• Buffer: This tool is a dashboard that can manage multiple accounts in one place, as well as offering useful collaboration tools for digital marketing teams.
• Typito: This tool allows marketers to create video content that fits into every social platform. The editing tools are intuitive and allow users to drag and drop video, images, captions, music, and more.
• Quuu: While Quuu does allow marketing teams to schedule posts, it is also a source for sharing and discovering content that can be repurposed and re-shared.
• Post Planner: This tool does much more than just schedule posts. It also analyzes a brand’s audience to identify the topics that will create the most interest, as well as helping companies source the content that they are looking for.
• SocialDrift: This Instagram tool combines AI and machine learning to help brands identify who their target audience is and then automate interactions with those individuals to help build an organic following.
• Planable: This is a tool that was built for large teams and works especially well for teams that have marketers who are working remotely. It has every collaboration feature imaginable and it provides a space for creating post-mock-ups.
• Unsplash: This is a resource of free, high-quality stock images.
• Sendible: This is ideal for teams that are working on multiple platforms and possibly even have multiple accounts on each platform. It creates a unique inbox for each account for comprehensive organization and oversight. It offers intuitive collaboration tools and a content engine that provides suggestions based on each platform account and its followers.

4. Jeff Bullas: 3 Ways Blockchain Is Disrupting The Digital Marketing Space

Jeff Bullas is one of the most influential thought leaders in the digital marketing space. In a recent article on his website, Bullas discusses the biggest buzzword of 2018 — blockchain.

More specifically, he addresses how blockchain will disrupt digital marketing in an effort to help marketing teams prepare for 2019 and beyond.

The article concentrates mainly on advertising fraud — ad space on fraud sites where ad-bots are then sent to create fake traffic. Companies around the world are wasting millions of dollars on this each day. The best digital marketing teams will begin to prevent this waste by using the blockchain solutions that are being created, such as Adchain.

5. Smart Insights: How Voice Search Is Rocking The Foundations Of Digital Marketing — Kag Katumba

Voice recognition technology has been in development for decades, and it is finally being perfected so that it can understand different tones, accents, pitches, and sentiment. In this article, Kag Katumba explores how this advancement will change the landscape of digital marketing in the next year.

This trend began with the rise in smart voice concierges, like Cortana, Siri, and Alexa. It is going to extend far beyond this, though. And this will transform SEO strategy in every digital marketing team. The reason for this transformation stems from the fact that consumers have grown comfortable with Siri and Alexa. They can speak to them in full sentences, just as they would a human concierge.

This is not what digital marketers and SEO professionals are used to. Search queries have traditionally been a string of keywords.

In 2019, as search queries become more commonly initiated by voice technology, they will more often be full sentences. But the change that voice brings to digital marketing does not end with SEO.

There is also the aspect of a screen. Previously, search results appeared on a screen. With voice, there is no screen.

Digital marketers will need to find creative ways to continue marketing efforts without the visual assistance that screens offer. Additionally, search results will likely transform. Instead of offering a page of potential results to queries, there could just be a single result. This turns SERP rankings on its head.

6. Digiday: Marketers Cool On VR, Shift Focus To AR — Seb Joseph

Seb Joseph’s recent article about VR and AR’s places in digital marketing is one of the first pieces of content that truly separates the two technologies in terms of their place in the industry.

Joseph boldly states that virtual reality doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in terms of digital marketing. AR, on the hand, is going to be a digital marketing staple in 2019.

The reason for this is that for VR to work, it requires expensive equipment. AR can fully function on any device and it is as close as any consumer can get to the real product or experience without actually being there or holding it in their hands.

Over the next year, many brands will begin to develop augmented reality apps that can transform their surroundings.

Lego is working on one that allows consumers to scan their creation and turn it into a game. Facebook is considering adding features that will be more like Snapchat filters. Fashion companies are developing software that allows consumers to try on clothing, accessories, and beauty products from behind their screen.

In 2019, digital marketing is going to undergo dramatic changes. Marketers will begin using new tools. They will renew their concentration on certain aspects of marketing and move away from others. In order to fully equip yourself and your marketing team, please read the articles linked above.

This article first appeared on Jefflizik.com