Time flies, this new and promising year already started a few months ago. At the beginning of this month, we created an online trend report showing the most important trends of 2019. The online world doesn’t stand still and online users continuously change their preferences. In this blog, we show you the most important trends. Do you already use trends like marketing automation, voice search, and visual search?
Do you want to see the newest trends and their stats? View the infographic
1. Marketing automation
Personalization becomes more and more important to online users. 9 In 10 marketers, even say their customers expect personalization1. This is what makes hyper-personalization the trend you need to implement and asks for an extensive contact database. Marketing automation gives you more insights into your (potential) customers so that you can help them better with their customer journey. You can use these insights to create personalized content, which can be emails, but automated call to actions, bots, or landing pages too.
The rise of chatbots, virtual assistants, and AI let people expect faster and improved service. Using marketing automation, you can automate specific actions, so you have more time to offer qualitative services. This way leads become customers, and your customers stay engaged with your brand, product, or service.
2. Voice search
With the rise of Google Assistant, Alexa, and Google Home, voice search becomes more and more popular too. Because of the improvement of functionalities of the voice assistants, and the fact that speaking is a lot faster than typing, voice search is used more and more. By answering the questions, your target group can have, by using long-tail keywords, and by adding your location, you make your website more ready for the growing popularity of voice search.
Here you can read more about >>
3. Social media
Social media is quickly becoming an online advertising tool. As an organization, you can now use live video, social ads in stories, and augmented reality. This last one can be used to let your customers see if an item like sunglasses ‘fits’ them before actually buying it. Think of all the possibilities this offers for webshops.
Influencers are becoming more and more important too. Influencers are the people who advertise your company so they can influence the emotions, opinions, and (buying) behavior of your target group. Consumers nowadays trust influencers (49%) almost as much as their friends (56%) when it comes down to recommendations2.
4. Mobile
Already 52,5% of all the online traffic comes from mobile3. To be visible to search engines like Google and to create a perfect user experience, it is now more important than ever to create a fast and functional mobile website.
When it comes to mobile websites, consumers think speed is the most important. Over half of them leaves a website when loading takes more than three seconds4, and consumers only stay on a site for 2 to 3 minutes5. So make sure your mobile website is fast and contains all the functionalities needed.
Here you can read more about mobile trends >>
5. Visual
The last of our five most important trends is one you may not think of as a trend. Over 90% of all the online marketers already use video in their online marketing strategy6. Still, the rise of new visual tools like 360-degree photo/video, visual search, and holograms let us show you the importance of visuals.
One of these visual online tools becomes just like voice search more critical. This is why your company must show beautiful and personal images with a clear description (alt-text).
