1. Real-time marketing.
Today consumers do not have the patience for marketers to respond after a day. They want answers there and then. So what comes to the rescue? Chatbot. In chatbot, you are automating and writing a program so that all the consumer queries are answered immediately and consumers can be taken to the next stage in the marketing funnel. A Very good example is HDFC’s Eva chatbot.
2. CRM automation
Customer Relationship Management is becoming sophisticated and advanced. If you have only limited information about your customers like e-mail id and phone number, you can enter the data in the software and guess, what the software does for you? The software will pull out information that is publicly available on social media. It will also look at what is the purchase history and then help you do a better segmentation and targeting of your customers.
3. Predictive analysis using big data
One can see what is the purchase behavior of customers and make predictions about the possibility and the probability of taking the desired action. You want to show your ads only to people who have high probability of installing your app or you want to show your ad only to those who have higher chances of converting and purchasing. So marketing is going to become more and more predictive in 2019.
4. Omni-channel marketing
You can integrate across different channels in digital marketing. You can integrate across online and offline channels. Imagine a user walking into a store which is brick and mortar and the user behavior inside the store also gets captured into his online profile and now the user can complete his journey by either online or offline methods. For example, Myntra has a very popular brand Roadster. One can buy Roadster online at the same time one can go to offline stores of Roadster and experience the products and can purchase from there. That’s omnichannel marketing for you.
5. Artificial Intelligence
It can be used for multiple purposes. Foremost is the recommendation engine. As a user, it can identify the similar products or interests that you have and can recommend making the entire user experience richer and better. This will also help in cross-selling and upselling. Another powerful use of AI will be remarketing. A user came to the website and put the items in the cart but did not buy, as a marketer you want to convert the user. So you show the ad to the user on other social media or website platforms that the user visits, and try to convert and close the loop.
6. Accelerated mobile pages
We will see a shift from a responsive website to AMP. All the search engines are giving greater priority and significance to accelerated mobile pages because users are becoming impatient. They do not wait for 3 seconds for a page to load. With AMP your page can load in less than 0.5 seconds.
7. Virtual reality and augmented reality
Earlier what marketers used to do? They used to tell people how great the product or service is all about. Now telling is not enough. People want to see. As a marketer, they started to demonstrate what functions or what uses the product can be put to. Now showing is not enough. People want to experience the product before they can buy. Before buying an apparel user want to see how the apparel will look on them. Before buying a piece of furniture, users want to see how a particular table or a bed will look in their living room or a bedroom. Ikea has a very good augmented reality app and has been using it for selling their products.
8. Video marketing
More and more platforms are becoming video friendly. Videos are definitely a more powerful tool than text or only an image because since its audiovisual, you can show a lot of emotions. You can have a narrative. Your product can have a story. It can have a plot. It can have a character. It can have a climax. So a video is very good and as a marketer, one should look at creating more and more content on video and not just text or images.
The original article on ProfSeema.com
