Let’s take our brand viral! We need to be different! We must be visible across social media. We must improve the engagement with our audience. We need to measure the impact of our digital marketing efforts – Marketing teams come across these objectives to make a better brand impact.
Today, most of the organisations end up reaching the same set of audience with the similar messaging or offers. But to be ahead, we all need to be different in our interactions with our target audience. Marketing is heavy shifting away from old school techniques, thanks to the latest digital technologies. And adopting the right technologies and strategies will be pertinent in winning this never-ending race of staying ahead and staying visible.
In this article, I have put down some key marketing trends and technologies which are changing the entire communication landscape:
1. Blockchain is more than Bitcoin

Blockchain today is not just associated with bitcoins, but another important aspect of it is advertising. It is extensively used to track and verify online advertising. With blockchain, you can verify each time your ad is delivered and seen by a real user (taking away bot generated views) and the duration as well. It can even prevent ads from being over-served for optimal frequency and thus reducing the overall spillage. It can even identify if an influencer is actually an influencer with real followers instead of just bots. I expect blockchain to take on more roles as the technology is fully adopted. It will go a step forward and used in purchasing licensing/copyrights from content creators (music, video, photos) for usage of their work. Believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg, marketing will not remain the same anymore.
2. Visual Content to build engagement
Verbal Intelligence has now gotten off and Visual Intelligence is taking over. With a tremendous growth in platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and their ever-growing offerings like Insta TV, Facebook watch, Stories, etc., Users are glued to their platforms. These platforms have come into dominance since the overall attention span is reducing. An average person gets distracted in 8 secs and that is exactly the time you have, to keep them engaged with your communication. Today, 81% of the educated audience would prefer to skim instead of read an entire article online. Interestingly, people follow visual instructions 323% better than written instructions. According to a report by eMarketer, brands adding images in their posts earn 87% higher engagement. Marketer Jeffbulls predicts that 80% of the internet content would be videos by 2019. So, if you want to be visible, visual content is your answer.
3. AR & VR are on the rise again
I use the word ‘again’ since these technologies once existed which were introduced well ahead in time. They on the rise now because we have their respective supporting applications, devices, and the know-how among its users. It was not long ago when people were slamming on doors, walking into somebody else’s house or falling in ditches just to catch hold of a Pokemon. According to a whitepaper released by CISCO, VR and AR would see a compounded growth rate of 82% by 2021. IKEA has been experimenting on a VR based game since 2016. Today, VR lets you experience the look and feel of your customized kitchen, for instance, helps choose a paint for your house and replaces with a site visit by creating a virtual environment anytime and anywhere. That is the power of AR & VR.
4. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning come to life
Companies have been experimenting with these technologies for quite some time now. 2019 would be the year when this would come to life. From chatbots to robotic process automation, the value of improved efficiency, increased productivity and higher customer satisfaction is becoming a reality. This would enable marketers to create customer-centric personalized strategies through better and accurate trend analysis and enhanced customer profiling. It would also enable automate A/B testing and algorithms that update themselves in real time on the fly to increase the marketing ROI. Remember when Facebook used to prompt you to tag your friends? Nowadays, their algorithms recognise a familiar face from your contact list (read as within milliseconds), using some seriously impressive technology termed, DeepFace. Another use case for this is, the online payment platform PayPal. It uses machine learning algorithms to combat fraud. By implementing deep learning techniques, PayPal draws up financial, machine, and network information to provide a deeper understanding of a customer’s activity and motives and evaluates the risk accordingly. Enterprises are now digging the data collected across the past years and deploying smart AI-powered applications to help understand and reach their targeted audiences with precision and thus paving the way for extraordinary customer experiences.
5. Voice Search
Now, we are seeing advanced versions of Siri like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomePod. ComScore estimates by 2020 approximate 50% of the search queries would be voice-based. With the rise in the adoption of these technologies, brands would have to find a way around how they design and place content on their websites. The search rankings and visibility is also about to be drastically affected. In fact, as of January 2018, there were an estimated 1 billion voice searches per month. Another staggering stat says that voice commerce sales which reached $1.8 billion would cross $40 billion by 2022.
Technology is advancing and so is the user’s adoption rate. And though it sounds very logical and easy but putting it all into practice has proven far from evident for most of the companies. Hope this will help you in finding answers to most of the questions raised at the start of this article. Now to put this into action, ask yourself the following question: “How does my own marketing department rate on the new age technology adoption?” “How many companies do I know today that do well on each/most of these technologies?”
Believe me, this race will take quite some time to finish but just ensure you have kick-started your own journey. Now is the time to act upon these new-age technologies and to put your brand on the digital radar!