Simply having a website for your company is no longer enough. of course, it hasn’t been for quite some time.
For years now, making the most of your site meant making the most of every opportunity to market it. Many companies have grown from obscurity to inspiring successes just by investing in their online marketing needs.
Part of that means keeping up with online marketing trends, which can change every single year. By understanding which ones still matter, which ones don’t, and which new ones deserve attention, your company can rise to prominence, keep its position, or even achieve greater heights than ever before.
The 4 Most Important Online Marketing Trends for Big Profits in 2019
There are probably many ways you could work to ensure 2019 is a banner year for your company, but few will matter as much as investing in marketing that’s keeping up with the times.
Do this, and you’ll see greater profits.
Fail to do so, and it will be your competition’s gain.
Here are the four most important online marketing trends your company needs to embrace in 2019 to achieve the former.
1. Programmatic Advertising Will Supercharge Your PPC Campaigns
Don’t worry. We’re not arguing that PPC campaigns are one of the new online marketing trends for 2019. Clearly, it’s been a mainstay for more than a decade now.
However, you may have kept your budget far away from it because PPC is also notoriously confusing. Between choosing keywords, deciding how much to bid on them, optimizing your ads, and reviewing your results, these campaigns demand a lot of commitment.
That’s why programmatic advertising for PPC may be one of the most important ecommerce developments in years – perhaps the past decade.
In short, programmatic advertising puts software in charge of buying your ads – automating the process and improving these efforts at the same time.
Programmatic platforms are similar to Facebook Insights or AdWords’ audience profile analysis in that the act of advertising can actually provide new insights about your audience – insights you can use to create more successful ads.
That, alone, is enough reason to put it on our list of online marketing trends, but programmatic PPC ads can also be used to target current customers for reengagement, dramatically increasing their lifetime value.
Unlike Facebook Insights and Audience Profiles, though, programmatic vendors can put your ads across more than 80 ad networks, ensuring your company enjoys a much longer reach, as well.
2. It’s Not Too Late to Take Advantage of Video
Video marketing is nothing new, but we’re adding it to our list of online marketing trends for 2019 because you’re most likely running out of time to take full advantage of it. Assuming your competitors haven’t already swarmed to this powerful medium, investing in it this year will give you an easy way to stand out from the crowd.
You need to do it soon, though. According to Cisco, video may make up as much as 82% of all worldwide Internet traffic by 2021.
Also, keep in mind that effective video marketing is about more than just uploading some videos to your site.
Instead, you need to create videos that educate your prospects about topics they’ve proven they care about. Then, you need to promote these videos. You can’t just rely on YouTube anymore. Get on social media and get busy.
Then, like any piece of content, review your analytics regularly to see what worked and what didn’t, so you can continue creating better ads as time goes on.
3. Personalized Websites Will Become the Standard
Creating original, helpful content for your audience is no longer enough. Everyone is doing that, and most companies have been for years.
In 2019, this kind of content will be the bare minimum for attracting traffic and having even the smallest chance of converting it. In fact, your entire site needs to cater to what a visitor wants from it.
The way to do this is with personalization, an approach that adjusts different features of your site depending on what a customer wants from it. Personalization platforms can do this by drawing on:
- Aggregated Data
- Customized Variables
- Demographic Data
- Past Interactions
The desired outcome is what you might come to expect from your favorite restaurant. When you walk in, you’re warmly greeted by name, ushered to your preferred table, and immediately provided with your drink of choice before being asked if you want “the usual.”
What visitor wouldn’t visit a website that provides them with this kind of experience? What shopper wouldn’t return to it often?
4. Long-Form Content Continues to Win Out
Despite what you may have read about our collectively dwindling attention spans, there’s very little reason to think that shorter content will improve your chances of engaging with your audience.
For SEO purposes, it’s always been argued that long-form content is better because it gives you more opportunities to place keywords, especially among sub-headers.
However, it turns out that social media loves long-form content, too. When BuzzSumo analyzed 100 million articles, it found that longer content earns more shares.
We’re talking about really long content, too: 3,000 to 10,000 words received the most attention, earning an average of 8,859 shares.
What’s interesting is that, despite this, more short-form content is created. This represents a major opportunity for companies that are willing to go the distance. Better still, doing so could actually help your social media profile, too.
Prioritize These Online Marketing Trends in 2019
For reasons we’ve already covered, these four online marketing trends are the most important ones to embrace in 2019.
To be clear, though, this isn’t an option.
If you don’t leverage all four, any competitor that does is going to have an easy time passing by your business. All of those years of hard work would immediately amount to nothing.
On the other hand, if you prioritize these online marketing trends and give them the attention they require, you could end the year with greater profits than ever before and enter 2020 prepared to achieve the same all over again.