Marketing

Get Ready: These Digital Marketing Trends Will Impact Your Marketing in 2019

Digital Marketing is making a huge impact on marketing efforts around the globe.

When we talk about digital marketing, we are referring to marketing that happens in online spaces. There are endless opportunities to connect with consumers through websites, social networks, mobile applications, streaming video services, and more. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin, but we have the scoop on which trends are here to stay.

In our last post, we unpacked the top trends we see coming for website development in the new year. Today we hone in on digital marketing and take a look at the digital marketing trends that will drive marketing decisions and dollars in 2019 and beyond.

Americans Spend 11 Hours a Day Interacting With Media

Our world is more connected than ever, and as a result, Americans are spending almost half of their days engaging with some form of media. While we laugh at (and maybe feel slightly annoyed by) the way people are always buried in their devices, the truth is this…

digital platforms and services have fundamentally transformed the way consumers receive and interact with marketing content

If you want to grow your business or organization you have to prioritize the digital marketplace. From live TV and radio to mobile internet and app, the opportunities for digital marketing are huge and savvy marketers stand ready to engage with consumers at every level. It can be overwhelming to know the best place to jump into the digital marketing universe especially for small businesses and nonprofits who may be unsure how the trends apply in their niches.

Social Media is Thriving

Social media began long before Facebook, but to the average consumer, 2006 is the year people began to take social media seriously. This is when Facebook opened to anyone over the age of 13 (rather than just for college students with a .edu email address) and experienced wildly unprecedented growth. Just a little more than a decade later and we see that social media has grown beyond what anyone could’ve predicted ten years ago. Social Media continues to dominate the time, money, and attention of billions of people worldwide.

As of 2018, 196 billion people around the globe are using social media. That’s more than half of all the people in the world. And this is not just people using platforms like Facebook to post pictures and connect with friends. There are hundreds of major social networking sites and endless opportunities to connect and engage over products and services.

The bottom line is that social media isn’t a trend, it’s a mainstay that every brand should prioritize.

Facebook May Be Peaking

People tend to think of Facebook as “THE” social network but that reality may be changing. It’s hard to say for sure but Facebook seems to be reaching a plateau if not a peak in 2019. In the fall, Pew Research released a report revealing that Facebook users in all demographics are changing how they interact with this social media. For example, 42% of Facebook users have taken an intentional “break” from using the platform in the last year. This is a significant fact to consider as you plan your social media engagement and ad spend in 2019. A myriad of reasons from online security to politics play into this shift but what’s more staggering is that in the younger demographic, Facebook users ages 18-29, have deleted the Facebook app from their phone. Given the current trends in mobile internet usage, this could be a strong marker of a permanent shift away from the platform for Millennials.  

Branded and Live Video Are Dominating

We have written frequently about the value brand films and videos add to your digital marketing strategy and for good reason. Trends in internet video usage indicate that consumer internet video use is set to grow four-fold by the year 2022 and live video will grow 15-fold.

Ultimately, 82% of all IP traffic will be video.

This also means that technology will continue to adapt to meet the growing demand for video. We are seeing digital marketing platforms adjust their products to showcase video and make it easy for users to create and share video driven content. Additionally, these trends may indicate a higher ad spend value in the video-on-demand platforms. The bottom line is this: if you’re not devoting a significant portion of your marketing efforts to video, this is an area you will want to shore up in the new year.

If you need help sorting through the trends in digital marketing and website development, we are here to help. We specialize in digital marketing strategies for small businesses and non-profit organizations. We can help you make sense of the statistics and understand how they apply in your corner of the vast online world. From video and film to branding and design, our team can come alongside you and walk you through a strategy that will get traction and produce results.

We are running two end-of-year specials that can help you jump-start your marketing efforts

Get in touch with us now and let’s start the new year working together to help you amplify your message in new ways.