EXPERT TALK: Most Prominent Digital Marketing Fields in 2019 by Industry Experts

Which field of digital marketing is going to be the most relevant in 2019? We’ve asked digital marketing experts from all around the world this question. Curious about their opinion? Read on to learn about their insights.

“Which field of digital marketing is going to take a prominent role in 2019 and why?”

 

Selo Axapli – CEO at DigiFist

I personally think that reassuring customers with different trust elements – such as – reviews or validation of the business or the service provider’s identity. Reviews and social proof elements will become more important than ever.

As marketers, we will also have more micro-moment opportunities to respond and benefit from, this will help us maximise the interaction with potential customers.

Another thing to look out for is the new AMP-emails where users can interact with dynamic email-messages without leaving their email client. For example, you can perform a reservation within your email without having to go to the website. This will give marketeers a whole new opportuntities to experiment with.

Mina Cruz – CEO of i55 Talent House

Influence marketing combined with seamless storytelling (aka content) – i think is this year’s power combo for digital campaigns. Brands and companies have started to tap influencers, bloggers/vloggers and other digital celebs before. But using these icons’ personal experiences and stories, maximizing their belief system and raw personalities to relay brand messages hasn’t really been the main strategy. Gone are the days when storyboards and scripts can dictate what type of content sells. Businesses are now forced to listen to conversations and ride with it, in order to engage. The public is now demanding for something authentic and true. So content plus people and their experiences should be part of every brand’s strategy this 2019.

Marijn ten Bulte – Head of SEO at Adwise – Your Digital Brain

I think there is already a great demand for the more tech savy digital marketer and this demand will continue to grow in 2019. With websites and -apps getting more and more complex and the continuing rise of different JavaScript frameworks, it will get increasingly important to at least understand how these work and how they can (positively or negatively) impact your site performance.

In addition, the more traditional digital marketing channels like SEO, CRO/UX, Analytics already require a certain level of technical knowledge. So developing your technical skills will also benefit your knowledge in these areas.

Sean-Si – Owner at SEO Hacker

Since I specialize in SEO, one of the emerging ways to search online is voice search. It has been around for a while now and its fame isn’t just for show since it’s expected to be integral for most devices and it’s relatively important for marketing since it affects how we move around the digital landscape. It has become more accessible and useful as the years went by and it’s not at all surprising that the number of people that rely on voice search has increased as well. This means that voice search will have a much more important role with regards to digital marketing than it has had before its sudden fame.

As the number of users increases, voice search also becomes more refined, accurate, and improved. The obvious digital marketing strategy for voice search is to attain the featured snippet/rank zero in the search engine results pages (SERPs) since this is what the voice search algorithm uses to answer user queries. Another strategy is to adjust the way digital marketers make content – if they want to be successful in gaining more traffic/visitors/leads, they have to optimize their content to better accommodate the conversational requests by users. This means that the content they put out should be answers to specific questions that users ask. Knowing which questions to answer won’t be difficult since I believe that as voice search gains more traction, digital marketers, SEO specialists, etc. will begin to use AI to gather and collect voice data that they can use to understand the user’s intent

Sjors van Esen – Senior Marketer at Emotion

Er will be a more prominent role for CRO! Not only CRO as a discipine, but more as a mindset. Learning, testing, experimenting & growing. These will be considered a dominating role of the ‘core skills’, who are required of digital marketers. Not only content-wise, but also the technical aspects is uttermost important to get the right ‘growth mindset’.

 

 

Heiko Hartsuijker – Co-founder at Bgreat.nl

A prominent role is finally there for video it’s becoming more and more main stream to deploy video ads in Holland, Youtube is still growing and growing every day also the audiences. And I think affiliate marketing is still alive and well only shifting to more video and bigger platforms.

 

 

Sietse-Arne Schelpe – Founder at Wetime

For 2019 content and certainly also video content will play a more prominent role. Especially because the costs of advertisment and ROI are always coming under more pressure. People’s attention is declining even faster, so short content and good short video messages will be crucial.  

 

 

Gary Viray – Founder of Propelrr

In the Philippines, brands have been executing social media-centric marketing campaigns for quite a bit of time. It even came to the point that digital marketing was like synonymous to social media marketing to many. However;  that “period of cluelessness” is already a thing of the past (I hope).

We can still see growth on social media marketing, but wiser marketing executives are now beginning to realize that non-vanity ROI and revenue-driven metrics are the way to go to further justify their marketing budget to business owners. Don’t get me wrong here; social media marketing is still an essential piece to a holistic digital marketing strategy.

What we now observe though is that more companies in the Philippines are now trying to invest more on PPC, SEO, and Content Marketing.

There’s also a growing demand on marketing data analytics which makes sense because you can’t do proper digital marketing without the right data turning it into actionable information. Infusion of AI in digital marketing is alsosomething that we are rooting for but it won’t get that traction yet in PH for 2019. So yes, anything related to performance marketing and more revenue-driven digital marketing fields will have more action this 2019.

Dave Francis Cancio – Product Management Specialist at Marketing Media Cloud

My idea is that digital marketing will be leaning much on voice search and video marketing. Businesses using these marketing platforms will help their end-users easily understand their products and/or services and capture their interest which will eventually lead to their purchasing decision.

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Sicilia Cirrus – Re : Fine

Chatbots on Social Media for enterprises
This will improve the crm time efficiencies and analytics of the consumer behavior that generates through the rapid inquiries that are coming to social media messages for enteprises, Chatbots are undeniably revolutionary.

Video content to SEO
Videos are highly engaging and have the chance to reach a larger number of users and develop strong emotional connections with viewers. Optimize video content so that it is timely, relevant and engaging. When done right, this can help increase social media engagement, generate solid leads, create a more effective call to action and increase sales.

Geo-Marketing
Serving digital ads to mobile users within a predefined geographic area is another way to capitalize on geo-marketing. For example, businesses can create and launch a geo-mapping ad a quarter-mile radius from a competitor’s store. Every time a customer walks into that targeted location, they will be served with an ad for your business, potentially sparking interest in your store and brand. These targeted notifications are a great way to produce high engagement and brand awareness for your business. more accessible to mobile devices.

Glen Dimaandal – Founder of Glen Demands

Branding may not sound new, but it’s more important than ever in the digital marketing world. Good branding positively affects practically every facet of your online presence. It’s central to your SEO efforts, it;s part of the factors that go into email blast deliverability, and it’s correlated with good conversion rates. Having a brand that tells a compelling story in a ubiquitous way is the foundation to a strong digital presence in 2019.

 

Vi Nguyen – Digital Marketing Consultant at Storm Digital by Accenture Interactive 

I think connecting all the different fields within digital marketing will be a big one in 2019, or it should be at least. Where different agencies and companies are specialized in a specific field (wether it’s on the technology side, creativity or advertising), there is a shift in working together and be able to connect the dots in order to fully increase the company’s or clients growth on all aspects. Being able to create creative concepts based on data, use technology to personalize advertising and use automation to shift focus from operational work to strategic plans.

 

 

Zack Briones – Owner of Box Digital

Content Creation & Paid Campaign would take a prominent role in 2019, if you are going to look at it; Paid digital media spend is still under-priced globally, and with the power of creating an excellent content that will drive consumers to move forward with the business along with the proper targeting and placement of the content by paid media, it will give a great result for every business that has their own well-built content and paid campaign strategy.

Digital Real Estate for ads is still not saturated as of now, but in a few years it will be; and the ad spend would be a lot more expensive compared to what we have right now.

Better to take advantage of it this 2019.

Taco Valk – Team Lead SEA & Marketing Automation at BVA Auctions

In my opinion, both marketing automation and (online) personalization. Nowadays, digital marketers are aiming to deliver the right message in the right phase of the customer journey. In the past, this would require lots and lots of (manual) advertisement campaigns. By automating the creation of (dynamic) campaigns and optimizations, we are able to fully focus on strategy in stead of repetitive time consuming labor.

To maximize the chance of conversion, it’s essential to align the website content to every unique visitor. The ultimate goal is to personalize the website content real-time. This means that every unique visitor sees the content based on their specific needs and preferences. Using machine learning technology, (website) history, interactions and insight in their interests, we as marketers will be able to predict (with high probability) whether a visitor is going to convert to a buyer or not.

Rien van der Bosch – Managing Partner at KOOACH

Seth Godin once said that content marketing is the only marketing that’s left. Although it was 15 years ago, it’s still the case. Without content there is no use of putting effort into your marketing. The only difference between now and 15 years ago is that the channels always change. And with that the use of those channels. Because whatever happens on those channels, it’s always comes with a certain built in hierarchy of influencers, but also of (brand) ambassadors.

Last year, we saw a professionalization of ambassadorship and ambassador marketing. This year, we will have companies and organizations really investing in a full blown ambassador marketing strategy built on gaining trust, creating awareness and offering valuable content.

 

 

PJ Aquino – PPC Specialist at EOI Digital

I think SEO is still very vital for 2019. This includes, keyword research, competitor analysis, and link building. With the proper SEO techniques, people can easily find businesses online, which can boost profit and ROI. Content optimization is also still very advisable.  include other media and not only the written content.

 

 

 

Roy Selbach – Co-founder at EOI Digital

Since the digital marketing environment has been split into a variety of specialized channels, I believe its power lies in utilizing each individual channel for their own strength and combining these to create one big power front. To illustrate… a few years ago you could run perfect social advertisement campaigns which converted no matter what. However, consumers are getting more smarter every day and getting more aware of the marketing techniques that’s being promoted towards them. Digital marketers need to find more clever ways to achieve their end goal for consumers this year.

I believe firmly in the power of sequenced content being delivered in segmented funnels. It should be the power of the individual channels combined, which will deliver the best possible outcomes. Which channels are taking a dominant role this year? This will differ per industry, product or service a lot. But one thing is for sure, it should be the combination that will deliver the best results.

For example, social media content & advertisement is a perfect way to raise some brand awareness and to excite people about your brand. By using rich content (video & engaging images) people will have a better understanding of your product. After this you will have the possibility to create a true brand experience. After the engaged prospect clicks on your social ads, he will be directed to another channel. In most cases, the visitor will end on a landing page. This page needs to be carefully designed with enough value proposition and statements to convince the person to take an action (purchase or lead information). After receiving their personal details, you can either directly upsell them or convince warm leads step by step to take action, this can be done with well-executed and planned automated email funnels. To come across convincing you can use retargeting to give the final push towards your conversion, in assistance of the email funnel.

To summarize, the consumers behaviour and awareness of the different marketing tactics has evolved. So, I believe that we are more moving towards an omnichannel approach, where each channel will contribute in the different phase of the customer journey cycle.

And that’s it! We are confident that you have picked up a lot of ideas and learned a lot. We hope this will helps you, in creating your own digital marketing strategy for this year. From SEA, SEO to video content, you’ve got a lot your can add to your to do list. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks and get make sure you download your FREE Digital Marketing Strategy.

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