How Your Marketing Plan Will Change for Good in 2019

As we reach the end of 2018, it’s time to start thinking about how our marketing plans will change in the new year and beyond. In the world of digital marketing, things don’t stay the same for long. Every day new technologies emerge and we learn more about our users.

With that in mind, let’s look at how the different areas of your marketing strategy are going to change in 2019 and beyond.

Content Marketing

We’re already beginning to see the rise of long-form content online. Indeed, you’ve probably already noticed early adopters publishing white-papers and eBooks online. You don’t have to go to this extreme though. Generally, long-form content is understood as anything over about 2000 words.

This is only going to increase in 2019 and beyond. How do I know? Well, for one thing the search engines love long-form content. First page results on Google rarely have below 2000 words. We also know that the longer a piece of content is, the more likely it is to be shared.

We can also look at what our audience wants. People are generally fed up with disposable content. That’s why we’re seeing more emphasis being put on high quality, authoritative and ever-green content. A well-researched, thoughtful article is going to be far more use to your readers than a stub or a listicle. Every time.

Segmentation

Traditionally, segmentation has meant grouping our audience based on certain characteristics, normally at a single point in time. The rise of AI means, we are increasingly able to segment audiences based on behaviors instead.

As AI algorithms analyze trends in our customer’s behaviors, they are able to make more and more accurate predictions. This means that you can create hyper-personalized marketing messages based on where individual customers are in the buying journey.

This basically comes down to finding the right customers at the right time with the right message. As we move into 2019, you’ll want to take a look at which of your marketing tools have native AI functions. If your email automator, CRM, or social ad platform lacks this, it may be worth shopping around a little bit.

Social Media

In 2019 and beyond, we’ll also need to keep an eye on the way people are using social media. Especially if you’re targeting specific demographics. For example, Facebook use has plateaued and is even decreasing among young people.

As such, it’s time to start thinking about how to replace the marketing value Facebook no longer offers. Younger generations tend to use messaging apps far more than full-scale social networks. In fact, Messenger, WhatsApp and WeChat have a higher combined user-base than Facebook and YouTube.

So, it’s worth thinking about moving away from traditional social media advertising and moving towards social messaging. This is basically the same idea as email marketing, but directly into messaging apps rather than into your customer’s inbox.

Source: B2C