It seems like just yesterday that we were making our predictions for digital advertising in 2019. Yet, a whole year has passed and here we are again, trying to figure out what areas we should focus on for the new year.
Many of the trends that we spoke about last year are still hot and continuing to grow. And we hear about them a lot. These include voice search, video, AI, influencers and privacy concerns. However, here is a look at 3 new up-and-coming trends that experts expect to see more of in the coming months.
Interactivity: 360-degree videos, AR/VR, quizzes, shoppable posts and polls. People love to interact. Not only does it break up the monotony, but sometimes it’s just plain fun. It takes someone from being a passive viewer of you page/app to an active engaged participant who is likely to stay on the page longer. Also, 93% of marketers agreed that interactive content is effective in educating its buyers versus just 70% for static content. In addition, interactive content has the potential to be highly shareable. This trend is going to be big moving forward.
Visual Search: Visual search using tools like Google Lens or Pinterest Lens is the newest development in online search. Using visual search, users can now search for products online by clicking a picture of the item with the visual search tool. Obviously, this is a great thing for ecommerce, especially in the fashion industry. Imagine you’re scrolling through Instagram and you come across a celebrity wearing a pair of boots you’ve been searching for all season. You can upload that image and use it to find similar boots to purchase or perhaps, even the same ones. It’s also useful for users to identify landmarks, plants, animals, etc. by uploading pictures they themselves have taken. And this is only scratching the surface for the potential of this trend. There could be a myriad of ways to utilize visual search so digital marketers will have to learn how to best optimize their content.
Smart Bidding in Google Ads: Also known as auction-time bidding, smart bidding refers to the use of machine learning by Google Ads to optimize bids for conversion. Some game-changing announcements were made at Google Marketing Live 2019, which allow the maximum returns out of every conversion. The updates will optimize bids better than ever and give marketers the ability to choose conversion actions at the campaign level and according to different time periods. Many marketers are looking forward to this trend.
It is still very early in the year, so I’m sure we will see current trends continue to grow and even more new trends start to emerge. What are your predictions for this year? Feel free to share your thoughts!