Top Three Digital Trends of 2019

Digital opportunities continue to boom and explode. It was forecasted in 2019 digital ad spending will rise by 17.6% to $333.25 billion. That means for the first time, digital will account for roughly half of the ad market.

Some of the top digital trends on the rise are video marketing, artificial intelligence and chat boxes.

Video Marketing is anticipated to climb and climb. Video has always been an important marketing tactic, but it is changing. By 2020, 85% of all consumer internet traffic will be made up of video. And gone are the days of fancy overproduced videos. Consumers want genuine and good content that is entertaining and informative and put a lower a priority on dazzling special effects and fancy edits of high-end footage. They want it to be real.

There are many video options when reaching your target audience. OTT is the HOT new way to reach the cord cutters of the world. Who is watching TV live anymore? In the world of streaming and binge watching of movies and shows, OTT is where it is at. 71% of internet users also use OTT services and 47% of US wi-fi households own a streaming device.

OTT can be targeted to certain demos and behaviors like Moms and Sports nuts or even isolated to certain areas or neighborhoods with a geo-fence. AdWeek notes, “While watching a program, two out of every three people use a second screen to look up information about a product they saw during that program.” Talk about the power of advertising!

OTT is not the only place video can be consumed. Pre-roll video on YouTube and other publisher websites that allow video is another great way to capture people on their phones, laptops and other devices.

A pre-roll ad is a video advertisement that automatically plays directly before a featured video, on both mobile and desktop. These ads are commonly :15 or :30 seconds in length. It has proven to be a great format for brand awareness, brand engagement, brand favorability, and purchase intent.

Video ads also can be included on Facebook. Facebook touts video posts have increased by 94% with 8 billion views a day and 100 million hours of Facebook videos watched daily.

Mobile Conquesting ™ is one of our most popular products. As consumers spend more of their online time on smartphones and tablets, it’s important to include a mobile strategy in your digital marketing. Mobile Conquesting™ allows advertisers to use both location-based targeting combined with demographic and behavioral targeting to reach desired consumers on their mobile devices with video ads.

Video is changing and so is digital targeting, by leaps and bounds now with machine learning, AKA Artificial Intelligence (AI). Machine learning gets to the heart of your target consumers based on who is engaging with the ad, and showing your ad to more people like those. Utilizing this tool really helps advertisers get their campaigns in front of the most receptive audience. As digital consumers, we want a more personalized experience and are more likely to purchase if ads are customized to us.

All of this activity will yield in more traction on your website whether it be from OTT, mobile ads or AI targeting to capture that potential lead. This is where Live Chat can play a huge role. When advertisers have placed Live Chat on their website, they have seen a 30% increase in leads. 42% of end users prefer a live chat as a major means of communication.

These live chat conversations are not with Chatbots, but with real humans, trained live agents to be precise. These chats can play a critical role in improving the customer experience and allow marketers to better engage with their website visitors, without really doing a whole lot. They offer real-time assistance to the user, and proactive interaction where they ask questions to understand the real problem and provide lead data to advertisers.

Video, mobile, machine learning and chat agents are a small taste of some of the top digital trends this year. Stay on top of these new trends and work to incorporate them in your next marketing plan before the next wave of trends is upon us. Be relevant.