Vine Blog: Tekoäly
This text is only available in Finnish.
Soon you’ll be buying a new calendar for the year 2019. Okay let’s enjoy the summer first but here are 6 marketing trends that you should take under consideration already.
#1 AR
AR (augmented reality) got people’s attention at the latest when Pokémon Go hooked a lot of children and adults too. In marketing AR offers an opportunity to amaze, awaken feelings and create an experience that actually sticks in your mind. For example Pepsi made standing on a bus stop a level more exciting and now you can even find what you are looking for in a grocery store with the help of technology. With AR the world is our oyster.
AR is an ability to integrate digital data to a realtime experience and with the help of it you can take customer service one step higher. During year 2019 we will most likely see more use of AR in marketing. How can you amaze your customers with AR?
#2 VOICE SEARCH
Voice search will change the search engine optimization (SEO), because nearly half of all the searches will be voice searches by the end of year 2020. The new way of searching information have to be taken into account in the website’s contents. The way we form sentences speaking is different from writing them.
Machine learning AI-assistants like Siri and Alexa sort out all the relevant information online based on the voice search. There is a day coming when your office table and home is full of machines like Alexa and Siri that make life easier. Marketeers need to be ready to answer the question: How do I market to machines instead of people?
#3 CHATBOTS
AI is here and it will change marketing – This is what we have heard dozens of times. We have also heard that you should already be aboard with AI – this I don’t really buy yet but of course you need to know about the topic. The fact that AI is a part of marketing daily even in smaller companies, is not going to happen in year 2019. For example only 7% of year 2017 Cannes Lion's winner’s use AI in daily marketing.
Chatbots will become a norm in few years. Chatbots are conversational marketing and they are a positive step forward. Of course it is annoying to chat with a chatbot that doesn’t understand you but they will develop in the near future.
What about in Finland where most of the companies are small and middle-sized? Developing the chatbot takes up a lot of time, resources and investments – Where does a small company get these?
#4 PERSONALIZATION
Along GDPR the opportunities of targeted advertising got smaller. Ad blocking is more popular than ever - #adlergic is a trend. Sponsored content is not as trusted as non-sponsored. And the list goes on – People don’t like adverts. This is why advertising needs to be targeted, personalized and real. Personalized advertising offers the experience to the customer based on his previous behaviour. It can be completely unique to different people.
The future of email marketing is in real time, behaviour based and personalized communication. Marketing automation makes this possible. Automation technology takes care that the customer receives the right kind of content at the right moment. Automation technology works with triggers: It initiates after different actions (triggers) that the website visitor does.
When getting started with email marketing it’s easily forgotten that the actual goal of email marketing is to create conversation. And in modern conversational marketing the selling needs to be left on the background.
#5 PURPOSE
When the news of chaotic world dominate the news and social media, responsibilty , justice and purpose become a more important part of companies every day communication. When you do good, share the story! Today’s consumers assume that companies do a lot more than just offer their own services and products. Ethical, ecological and responsible operations are trending right now. Purpose will become one of the basis in marketing and something that customers expect.
#6 VIDEOS
According to one prediction more than 70% of webstreaming will be videos by the year 2020. Another prediction shows that more than 80% of webstreaming will be videos already by 2019. The importance of videos in marketing can not be highlighted more. Videos will eat the web. In Youtube, Facebook and Instagram videos are being watched more than million hours daily.
Because the popularity and production of videos has already been huge, you need to be creative to get people’s attention. For example adding a video to an email can lift up the click percentage more than 300%!
With videos we don’t only mean Youtube and fancy brand videos. In addition to these the realtime video services are getting very popular. People actually watch live videos 3 times more than edited ones. Along with algorithm change the organic visibility in different social media channels have come crashing down. Instagram Stories and Facebook Live help to tackle this problem and this way you can reach more people in social media.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) will change marketing – this is something that us marketeers have heard plenty of times. In B2B marketing of small and middle-sized company the question is how will AI affect the every day work of marketing in the near future?
I’ve tried to learn as much as possible about this, but to be honest I still don’t feel like today’s AI- solutions work in my every day marketing tasks. “AI will change marketing”- hype has caused a lot of frustration in me, because the more I have studied this, more certain I am that it’s going to take a while before AI truly is a part of marketing. The frustration started with chatbots..
1. CHATBOTS
To understand more about AI, I have been listening to different experts in different events. Every time I hear the same story: ”Chatbots will take care of website chats.” And then what? To us, like many other small and middle-sized companies, the daily messages to the chat can be counted with one hand. It would take decades, before AI would have enough data from the chats, to answer all the questions instead of a human. And would this kind of investment pay itself back? No, I don’t think so.
In B2B markets the website volumes are notably smaller than in B2C markets and the extra value of chatbots comes with the quantity. So, for now the value of the chatbot in B2B world can most likely be forgotten.
2. IDENTIFICATION OF PICTURES AND VIDEOS
Identification of pictures and videos will certainly be a part of a small and middle sized companies b2b marketing. Picture identification is already done daily, by for example opening an Iphone with facial identification, adding a filter to your face in Instagram or when tagging yourself in a photo and Facebook asks: “Is this you in the photo?” In the near future consumers can search similar products and services from the web by using photos. Marketeers need to get ready for the change of search behaviour.
It has been said, that more than 70% of webstreaming will come from videos by the end of 2020. In the future AI can make conclusions and analyses based on videos. For example, we can choose the best brand videos of the year based on the AI’s suggestions. Picture and video identification will decrease the manual work of marketeer.
3. CONTENT PRODUCTION
The fact that AI will help in content production, is great news. Content producers might be scared that their jobs will disappear – I don’t believe that this is as black and white: Content producers will be needed in the future too. AI most likely will not write a Pulitzer winning novel. Or who knows maybe this will be possible in the future also.
Forbes uses AI for news producing and AI does that very successfully. The content produced by AI is still in children’s shoes that it can’t be fully trusted. Microsof's racist tweets are a proof of this. I still can’t wait for the time when AI can help with the content production of a small and middle-sized company.
4. SMART TARGETING OF ADVERTISING AND CONTENT
Day by day marketing is more personalized and targeted and it’s a great idea that no one has to see irrelevant adverts in the future. This is the way where we are going but we are still in the beginning of the journey. We all see adverts that we don’t want to see. Quantity replaces the quality in this case. AI is taking us towards a world where we see less but better adverts.
AI has bee used to target advertising for a long time now. Showing adverts to a certain person is like recommending shows on Netflix: It’s based on th behaviour of the user.
When advertising happens, like recommendations in the services you use, everybody benefits. I always love all the songs that Spotify recommends to me based on my song history. You can use the power of recommendation already on your website, in email marketing and Display advertising by serving certain content to different customer segments.
