by samAs the cold winds signal the swansong of the last year of the decade, it gives all of us an opportunity to reflect not only on our personal lives, our year in review – but also the choices we’ve made to tell our stories to our audiences, be it about a fabulous product, a terrific promotion, or a compelling campaign. Digital Marketing as an industry and as a practice exists because of decisions made by people in decades past that now has made the entire world as small as a phone screen and a computer monitor. As always – technology moves forward and so to stay ahead of the curve – here are our top predictions for the year ahead!
AR in digital marketing
Ever wondered where you could buy a dress similar to the one worn at your famous celebrity wedding? What about the envy you feel when entering your friend’s home and seeing her fabulous furniture, table-wear or even the dress she’s wearing?
Enter Google Lens, described by some as ‘the coolest app you never knew existed’ has automatically been integrated into the chrome browser (the most popular in the UK) and allows you to tap into it’s vast image library and meta tags to directly connect people searching ‘most beautiful wedding dresses UK’ in Google image results, and, through the lens – connect to either a sales funnel or product page for an item similar, or identical, for the dress you’re looking at! Same goes for furnishings, home décor paraphernalia, and as the rollout of Google lens continues – much, much more.
Dawn of the planet of the Chatbots
For the majority of the decade, one of the major focusses of big tech has been machine learning, and AI. Now, many companies are choosing to augment (or even partially replace) their lead-generation and customer support staff with chatbots – partially programmed and partially the result of thousands of iterations of machine learning algorithms – these bots, either on a company’s Facebook page or, most likely embedded into their own website, can take the customer through their planned experiential journey start to finish – and may even process orders, create customer accounts, and facilitate remarketing automatically. As AI improves – the capability of these bots, who can have different simultaneous conversations (the number of which only being limited by server processing power and bandwidth), is sure to dramatically increase in the year ahead.
A hugely renewed focus on Personalised Content, and Hyper-Targeted Advertising
Digital Advertising, and particularly our own PPC services in Cambridge, are driven by relevance to your target audience. As you can see from the image, a result of a HubSpot survey – almost 3 in 4 were annoyed enough to openly report they get frustrated to content that is totally irrelevant to them. On the other side of the office door, you can see that half of marketers are struggling to have insight into the needs and lifestyles of their audiences. This creates a bit of a scatter-gun approach that can make PPC campaigns utterly ineffective with vast audience selections undertaken by some companies – with the idea that one lead out of a thousand impressions is totally worth it. In fact, the opposite is true. Those 700 people who were frustrated with your ads irrelevance to them that they will actively avoid it in the future.
We offer innovative solutions through SEO services in Cambridge, as well as Conversion Optimisation guidance – and for all things Digital Marketing – all you need are clicks!