As we move through another year, there are some digital marketing trends that stand out more than others. Here are five trending topics in digital marketing we’ve seen.

1. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, can be a useful tool for digital marketing strategy. It can help you optimize and speed up your marketing in a few different ways. It can enable you to identify what your best performing content is with ease, plan more effective content for the future, repurpose your already existing content, and distribute it.

AI can process your data quickly and make predictions on the patterns in that data to help reform your digital marketing strategy. Since it is processing your data so quickly, you can begin improving your customer’s experiences much faster than if you had to collect and process all of that data yourself.

It is also useful for predicting your customer’s behavior and help you identify and focus on your most promising leads. This is seen in the recommendations sections of online retailers, where you see suggestions for things for you to buy based on your previous purchasing patterns.

2. CHATBOTS

We see chatbots all over the internet these days. When you go to a website you may have a little chat box pop up that asks if you need help with anything. This is a chatbot, which is another type of AI. They allow companies to provide instantaneous customer support, so customers do not need to wait until business hours to get the help they need with a product; they also reduce the amount of wait time you have when you contact customer service for something. There is no need to wait for a person to physically be there, at least for more basic questions, like asking about a return policy. However, they are usually pretty limited in the amount of intelligence they have, and they are often programmed with a basic “if this then” so they can only answer questions a single way, so for something more complex, a human agent is still necessary.

3. PERSONALIZATION

Personalizing your advertising uses insights into your customers to increase the relevancy of your ads to each individual customer. A basic form of this is when you look at something online and then later that night you are scrolling through Facebook and there is an ad for the exact thing you were just looking at, along with other similar items. This is a personalized ad tailored specifically to what you have shown you are interested in, and you are probably more likely to look at it than you would a generic ad, because it is relevant to your personal tastes.

This can help you build a more loyal customer base too. If a customer feels that the company cares about them and their needs, they are more likely to return for future purchases. Using personalization can help you reach customers in that way.

4. VIDEO

While people dislike commercials on TV, the popularity of video marketing has been growing over the years. Brand storytelling is a popular form of video marketing that helps you humanize your company and connect to your customer base on a more meaningful level. Using video to answer customer questions, showcase or demonstrate some of your products, show video testimonials, and offer behind the scenes looks at your company are some of the more popular ways to enter the video marketing field, and they can be done fairly inexpensively. People often prefer to watch a video explaining something over reading the user manual or finding the answers in an FAQ, so offering these things in the form of videos can help bring your page more traffic.

5. VOICE SEARCH

As smart speakers and other voice-activated devices become more popular, voice search has grown in importance. Optimizing your website for voice search can be difficult, because the search queries are worded differently than if the customer typed out their question on their phone or computer. With voice searches, there is more conversational language, which can addle things a little, and there are more long-winded questions. Determining how to work that into your digital marketing strategy is difficult at first, because it is so much different than any other type of web optimization. A few things you can do to help optimize your site for voice searches are: focus on longer keywords, use more natural language, focus on action questions, and think about your users’ intent.