Digital marketing

megatrends 2019
10 digital marketing and martech megatrends

Digital marketing megatrends 2019

 About the author

 1. Audience and value proposition
 2. UX, content, and communications
 3. Optimize platform best-practices
 4. Manage brand, people, and process
 5. Marketing Technology
 About premium membership

In this briefing, we’ll take an in-depth look at what Smart Insights see as the ten
most significant trends, or ‘megatrends’, in digital marketing.

We’ve structured the trends around the five pillars of marketing today that we
recommend businesses of all types need to review and improve to stay
competitive as part of digital transformation.
The aim of this briefing is to help you review the main trends in marketing which
are likely to impact your business in 2019 and beyond, that can be incorporated
into your digital marketing strategy and overall marketing strategy, where
relevant.

About the author

Dr Dave Chaffey
Dave is co-founder and content director of Smart Insights. Alongside colleagues
in the Smart Insights publishing team, he is an editor of the templates, ebooks,
and courses in the digital marketing resource library created by our team of 25+
digital marketing expert commentators.

Smart Insights resources are used to transform knowledge and results by

Individual and Business members in more than 120 countries to plan, manage
and optimize their integrated digital marketing.

To see my full profile, ask questions or receive my latest updates on innovation

and best practices in digital marketing, media and technology please connect
with me LinkedIn.

1. Audience and value proposition

Devising marketing plans and campaigns should always start with
understanding customers’ changing needs, wants, and characteristics, so that’s
where we start our review of the trends.
Digital channels give a fantastic opportunity for brands to engage their audience
through new content formats and channels, yet this has resulted in more
competition for attention meaning that engaging audiences online is one of the
biggest challenges we face.

So, it’s essential that we better understand our audiences and the content
forming the digital value proposition that will engage them through the
lifecycle. As the visual shows, it’s about working out which content will best
meet your goals while engaging the customer to help them, what Jay Baer
called ‘YouTility‘.

While you may hear tacticians say ‘we need an SEO strategy’ or ‘we need a social
media strategy’ or an ’email marketing strategy’, what’s most important is to
have an overarching audience engagement strategy which defines the content
and communications used to engage our audiences.

Best Practice: Define personas

We’re big fans of using personas to create a more customer-centric engagement strategy.

Adoption of personas has increased, but many are too superficial, they need more depth to
operationalize them through content mapping as the examples in our Persona toolkit like this
one below.
Persona overview

What is it? Megatrend 1: Increasing smartphone adoption

The growing importance of mobile marketing and apps is shown by these stats:

 More than 50% of searches are on mobile

 91% of Facebook usage (daily active users) is on mobile

 80% of Facebook advertising revenue is on mobile

 90% of mobile media time is spent in apps

Source: Smart Insights Mobile marketing trends statistics compilation.

The importance of mobile platforms is shown in this interesting visual from comScore.
This panel data shows that in countries like the UK, US, France, and Germany, the majority of
consumers are multi-platform and will often be multi-screening, accessing sites on mobile or
desktop, so consistent experiences across device need to be deployed.

It suggests that, rather than following Google’s ‘Mobile First’ mantra, most businesses need to
develop a multichannel strategy to engage consumers across mobile and desktop with
consistent experiences. However, in some European countries, South American countries, and
especially in some Asian countries, the percentage of mobile-only users is much larger.

What is it? Megatrend 2: Increased use of Conversational User Interfaces

Coupled to the growth in mobile interactions are new applications of Conversational User
Interfaces (CUI) which include:

1. Chatbots: Businesses need to decide between proprietary applications or

integrating with standard platforms for customer service or pre-sales support,
for example Facebook’s Bot Engine for Messenger, which went live in April 2016
when Google also announced its Google Assistant service.

2. Software and human-assisted support: Human-assisted live chat is well

established. What is new is the addition of segmentation and automation rules
to trigger messages on site, in-app or through email via technologies like
Intercom, Helpcrunch, and Drift. These offer not only service, but can also
support sales and audience engagement and are a great fit for smartphone use.

3. Voice controlled search assistants: Voice-controlled searches are rising and

likely you’ll know about Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and
Google’s Assistants which can be used on smartphone.
 4. Voice controlled connected devices: Adoption has been boosted by
advertising from Amazon for its Echo devices, Google’s Home devices, and
Apple’s Home Pods.

For most businesses, numbers 1 and 2 are going to be of most practical value. It will be
interesting to see how popular chatbots prove to be with end users. This example from Nike
shows how sophisticated chatbots built on Facebook Messenger have become with different
navigational elements beyond chat to make the interface easier to use.

Similar services existing within business-to-business. We’re certainly excited by the potential
of Intercom, here is an example showing rules we have set up to trigger messages in real time
suggesting content to members. These give far higher response rates than email since they
don’t suffer from inbox competition and are in the context of a website visit.
2. UX, content, and
communications
Improvements to your user experience (UX), content, and communications
forming your digital value proposition need to be prioritized on a roadmap. As
the lifecycle communications visual below shows, there are so many options for
more contextual communications touchpoints across paid, owned, and earned
media.

Our Digital channel essentials toolkits used to structure resources within our
member show how we can simplify these many channels down to just eight key
digital marketing techniques which are essential for businesses to manage
today AND for individual marketers to develop skills.
We recommend you develop your learning and audit your capabilities in each of
these areas. Remember that all members of Smart Insights can use our
interactive assessments in each toolkit in the members’ area or review these
free visual benchmarking templates.

What is it? Megatrend 3: Always-on lifecycle marketing optimization

We believe that lifecycle marketing optimization is essential to create a customer-centred,

integrated approach to improve the effectiveness of interactions with customers on different
devices using different communications channels.

This marks a departure from optimizing individual touchpoints such as paid search or media,
landing pages, emails, and conversion pages in isolation, but instead views them as a multi-
step, multichannel process.
This visual summarizes all the potential ways to influence an audience through the lifecycle.

While some channels such as social media and SEO are well known, we find that some
techniques such as retargeting and influencer outreach are used less widely or are not fully
optimized.

We recommend you perform a gap analysis of all always-on lifecycle activities you could be
using against those you are currently on using our digital marketing healthcheck
template which is an Excel document that enables a comprehensive, but quick review across
25 always-on digital marketing activities structured across the Smart Insights RACE digital
marketing planning framework.

Here is one example of the power of integration showing how combining Facebook ads with
email achieves uplift:
In this case, the advertiser’s most valuable customers were those who both opened the email
and saw the News Feed ads as they were being reached by multiple channels. Coordinating
messaging across channels resulted in reaching customers who were 22% more likely to
purchase than those only reached by email. Facebook ads extended email campaign reach by
22%.

This is an example of lifecycle marketing for an online retailer. The marketing techniques
shown all apply to other sectors too.

Audit and optimize your always-on customer touchpoints

Smart Insights resources are designed to support the trend to always-on marketing activities
using the RACE planning system audit and workbook which defines 25 key activities that every
business needs.

We recommend you map current and future online AND define ‘always-on’ marketing
activities across the lifecycle using RACE. This will help identify activities and define best
practices you may miss out on if you haven’t planned projects to set them up or
optimize them, e.g. re-marketing or marketing automation.

Always-on communications is where a continuous investment in paid, owned, and earned

digital media/content is made to engage prospects and customers and meet purchase intent
as they continuously research products through search, social media, and publisher sites.
These activities are shown in the lifecycle visual above.

‘Always-on’ is a helpful label since it highlights the need to ring-fence investment in activities
and technology to automate and optimise these continuous touchpoints as distinct
from campaign communications. Our research shows that many businesses aren’t investing
sufficient in the automating, testing and optimisation activities that are made possible
through the technology. We believe that often this is because, in some companies, processes,
roles, structures and remuneration are still focused on the campaign activities to launch new
products and promotions.

What is it? Megatrend 4: Omnichannel marketing strategies

The lifecycle visual shows the complexity of channel interactions that businesses need to tap
into. Retailers were the first to realize this when they developed omnichannel marketing
strategies such as ‘Click and Collect’ and the use of mobile apps. Omni is from the Latin
‘omnis‘ meaning ‘all’ and shows the importance of being present in all channels that your
audience is using, prioritizing the most popular.

Now this approach is being used in other industries like publishing, travel, and financial
services as there is a similar need to communicate with audience in all relevant channels. The
lifecycle visual above is shown for a B2B organization showing that integration is required
here also.

This quote from John Bowden, Senior VP of Customer Care at Time Warner Cable, shows how
it is useful to position digital transformation as part of broader integrated omnichannel
communications:

“Multichannel is an operational view – how you allow the customer to complete transactions in
each channel.

Omnichannel, however, is viewing the experience through the eyes of your customer,
orchestrating the customer experience across all channels so that it is seamless, integrated,
and consistent.

Omnichannel anticipates that customers may start in one channel and move to another as they
progress to a resolution. Making these complex ‘hand-offs’ between channels must be fluid for
the customer.”

What is it? Megatrend 5: Mobile optimization

The core of mobile marketing is a mobile-optimized website or a mobile app. To date, the
most popular approach is a mobile-responsive design (RWD). Most businesses now get the
basics of mobile marketing right. They provide a responsive website design, meaning that
their site is ‘mobile-friendly’ with the consumers and all-seeing Google’s eyes.

Yet many mobile experiences are sub-optimal since they are not designed for the ‘thumbs and
fingers’ interactions we have with our phones as shown by this mobile interaction
research shows:
In our innovation and technology guides for premium members we make recommendations
on adopting new mobile approaches like accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) and progressive
web apps (PWAs). Here is a visual representation of the improvements to experience that can
result from implementing a PWA.

What is it? Megatrend 6: Content and inbound marketing

Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, defines content marketing as:

“How a brand creates, delivers, and governs original or curated content to attract and
retain customers, positioning the brand as a credible expert and, ultimately, motivating a
change in behaviour.”
Content marketing is the fuel for all your core digital marketing activities to engage and
persuade your audience. An effective content marketing strategy supports buyers at every
stage of their buying cycle, leaving no gaps for prospects to fall through. As such, content
marketing is the marketing strategy that helps target audiences move through to purchase,
one step at a time.

Use our content marketing toolkit to audit your use of different content marketing assets and
formats through the customer lifecycle:

Recommended resource: Customer persona templates

Plus use our Persona guide and template to quickly review content mapping for your key
audiences. Detailed examples of these key customer persona analysis and experience
development techniques are available in this download:

 Technique 1. Customer journey mapping

 Technique 2. XY characteristic mapping

 Technique 3. Assessing buying behaviours and motivations

  Technique 4. Quantified persona values assessment

 Technique 5. Content mapping against lifecycle and content needs

Access resource

Increase in adoption of interactive content

At a practical level, Martech guru Scott Brinker has talked about the 4th Wave of
Content Marketing and I’m seeing more and more examples of interactive
marketing apps – like our capability graders and also personalization tools
recommending content. Read his article introducing it.

3. Optimize platform best-practices

As I mentioned at the top of the article, many communications today between
consumers and brands are mediated using services and operating systems
created by the major platform providers.

For example, consumers search through Google or Bing, use Facebook for
catching up socially and messaging, business communications through
Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and use digital devices via Android or iOS. Since these top-
tier platforms are looking to grow their audience share and monetize their
audiences, many of the most frequent changes in digital marketing today are on
these top-tier platforms and other key platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp,
Pinterest, Snapchat, and Twitter.

Let’s look at what analysts Gartner have identified as emerging technologies.

The latest Gartner technology hypecycle (their 2018 version is not published yet)
highlights many innovations which the mega platforms like Google and
Facebook, with their mega budgets and research teams are working on
integrating into their services. For example, augmented reality, cognitive expert
advisors (described above as AI chatbots), smart data discovery (of which
predictive analytics is one approach) and IoT integration including the
connected home.

It’s interesting to note that augmented reality and virtual reality are in the
Trough of Disillusionment. However, they may be relevant in some niches, for
example, we described how Virgin Holidays are rolling out Augmented Reality in
store.
Many of these advanced technology approaches may not be relevant for
customer-communications from your ‘average business’, so in this article I have
looked to highlight more practical communications innovations businesses can
apply in 2018. In their separate marketing hypecycle, it’s interesting to see the
technologies they have identified which are in line with what we describe in this
post.

‘On the rise’ marketing trends include:

 General-purpose machine intelligence

 Ad blocking

 Customer data platforms

 Real-time marketing [that’s personalization, not real-time PR]

 Personification

 Programmatic TV advertising

 Cross-device identification

 Virtual personal assistants

 Programmatic direct advertising

Recommended resource: Digital marketing benchmarking templates

These free templates enable you to quickly review your capabilities in the key
digital marketing techniques across different platforms including content
marketing, SEO, social media and overall digital marketing strategy.
They’re designed to give you a shared understanding of where you are now in
managing digital marketing against where you need to get to in the future.

Access resource

4. Manage brand, people, and

process
This category of trends for marketers and business leaders to be aware of, relate
to how marketing is managed. The main ongoing trend here is digital
transformation, which is the integration of digital marketing activities and
technologies into wider marketing and business activities to create a ‘digital
business’.
Our Managing Digital Marketing Research shows that many businesses still don’t
have a defined digital marketing strategy.

Strategy Recommendation: Complete an audit to create an integrated digital

marketing strategy

If you’re looking to create or refine your digital strategy, then we recommend you start by
auditing your current use of digital marketing across the customer lifecycle. Our digital
marketing healthcheck template is an Excel document that enables a comprehensive, but
quick review across 25 core digital marketing activities structured across the Smart Insights
RACE digital marketing planning framework.

What is it? Megatrend 7: Digital transformation

A staged change management programme of business and revenue model improvements to

people, process, and tools used for integrated digital marketing to maximize the potential
business contribution of digital technology and media to a business.

Digital transformation has been around as a concept now for several years since
a focus was put on it by MIT and consultants such as Cap Gemini, PwC, and
Accenture. While these consultants mainly work with larger organizations, the
Smart Insights – UBM research report on managing digital marketing covering
organizations of all sizes shows that many business are actively working on
digital transformation.
You will see a significant proportion (one-third) of businesses for whom digital
marketing isn’t relevant. These are typically smaller businesses or startups for
whom integration is less of a challenge.

The growth in digital transformation is fuelled by many of the changes in

adoption of mobile and digital devices covered before. Namely, by the need to
integrate better way ways of communicating with consumers via digital devices
and in particular, mobile and social channels.

Digital transformation is helpful in encouraging focus on both longer-term and

shorter-term planning horizons. As part of a transformation programme,
businesses should introduce long-term roadmaps for introducing digital
technologies, analytics, and processes techniques. To encourage optimization
and agility in planning, in the shorter term, 90-day optimization plans should be
created which seek to make changes to marketing across the customer lifecycle
to improve results. These focus on ‘always-on’ marketing activities rather than
too much focus on campaigns which won’t typically address major
improvements to inbound marketing, marketing automation or improving the
customer experience.

5. Marketing Technology
We’re close followers of changes in martech since there are so many great
services available for gaining market insight and for creating more relevant
online communications. We review changes in martech across our Essential
martech wheel and free report (updated in 2018) and more detailed members
guide which shows the main options across the customer lifecycle.
You will see that across the lifecycle, many of these technologies are
established. For example, search marketing insights tools (Reach), marketing
automation tools (Act), web personalization tools (Convert), and marketing
automation or Cloud services (Engage). Others such as programmatic (Reach)
are less well established across all sizes of business. Across all of these the main
megatrend is the growing popularity of marketing cloud solutions targeting
different types of business from the likes of Adobe, HubSpot, Infusionsoft,
Marketo, and Salesforce.

Use our Martech selection guide (for Business members) to review your Martech
stack across the customer lifecycle – ask team members and agencies
responsible for different parts of the lifecycle whether the services that you use
give you the insight and capabilities to compete.

A gap analysis will help compare current services against future. For each
category only one service should be needed – the guide gives our
recommendations.

What is it? Megatrend 8: The rise of the marketing clouds including automation
and programmatic

The aim of a marketing cloud or a digital marketing hub service is to help brands manage all
points of contact between themselves and the customer through the customer life cycle –
from lead to customer communications to develop loyalty and repeat purchase.

One of the key promises of a CRM tool is the ability to provide a single ‘360 degree’ customer
view. This requires integration of all brand’s platforms which hold some sort of customer data.
This single view, allows an accurate understanding of the customer and tight controls over
how the brand manages its relationship and communication with that customer.

What is it? Megatrend 9: Applying machine learning and artificial intelligence to

engage, persuade, and service customers

Artificial intelligence is now starting to deliver on its promise and has now developed to the
stage where brands are developing bots that give consumer assistance, but there are many
other options to consider.

AI technology is a hot topic in marketing at the moment, but AI is such a broad term covering a
wide range of different technologies.

We define AI as any technology that seeks to mimic human intelligence, which covers a huge
range of capabilities such as voice and image recognition, machine learning techniques, and
semantic search.
To help marketers understand the opportunities from AI, we have identified 15 artificial
intelligence techniques that businesses of all sizes can implement, rather than techniques
which only major tech giants can devote resources to. We’ve also plotted the techniques
across the customer lifecycle so you can see how each AI tactic can help take your customers
down the marketing funnel.

All the techniques are ‘AI’ in the sense that they involve computer intelligence, but we’ve
broken them down into three different types of technology – machine learning techniques,
applied propensity models, and AI applications.

Machine learning techniques involve using algorithms to ‘learn’ from historical data sets,
which can then create propensity models. Applied propensity models are when these
propensity models are put to work predicting given events – such as scoring leads based on
their likelihood to convert. AI applications are other forms of AI, which carry out tasks one
would usually associate with a human operator such as answering customer questions or
writing new content.

Since we believe that most practical marketing applications of AI are in machine learning, our
detailed briefing explains how businesses can get started and gives examples from early
adopters of machine learning.

Recommended resource: Download Business Member resource – AI and

machine learning guide

The guide aims to help businesses of all sizes embrace machine learning and AI to benefit
marketing efforts. It shows how businesses can effectively manage machine learning projects
in place, and how to use the insights generated to improve marketing results

Access resource
What is it? Megatrend 10: Growth in customer data platforms and predictive
analytics

Predictive analytics is well-established and has specialist applications such as assessing credit
risk and fraud in financial services, but we predict that its general use in marketing will
increase as marketing automation services move to more use of automated lead scoring and
grading based on algorithms rather than human-defined rules.

An example of an application of predictive analytics is scoring propensity to

buy/subscribe based on historical data.