Is Digital Marketing passing the ball to Robots?

Digital marketing has emerged as a pervasive phenomenon that is guiding, selling, and marketing activities on the Internet. This line of commercial activity is premised on digital technologies such as the World Wide Web and connected consumer devices such as smartphones, smart televisions, and consumer tablet devices. Consequently, marketers are adopting new mechanisms that hinge on artificial technology-powered chat robots, story-driven marketing spiels on online video platforms, virtual reality technologies, social marketing strategies, instant messaging platforms, etc.

Let’s examine some of these digital marketing trends:

• Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence will represent one of the premier trends in digital marketing. Recent advances in AI technology enables these software robots to increasingly engage with online customers. As things stand, an estimated 61% of customer service queries and questions are serviced by chatbots. Market research suggests that by the year 2020, roughly 85% of customer interactions will involve some form of chatbots. Millennials are driving this change because they form a large segment of customers in the present age.
• The traditional art of storytelling is emerging with renewed vigor in the digital age. Increasingly, marketers are relying on storytelling techniques to hook online audiences and sell their products and services. Popular online platforms such as Instagram and YouTube have tried this technique to boost their marketing efforts. According to One Spot, “92% of consumers want brands to make advertisements feel like a story.” New-age services such as Airbnb have developed customer-centric storytelling campaigns. These tales are “highly-engaging with a mix of amazing stories published regularly.”
• Virtual reality is emerging as a big concept in digital marketing. 65 million users in the US downloaded Pokémon Go, the augmented reality app, in 2017. Experts estimate that consumers will buy roughly around 200 million virtual reality headsets by 2020. Following this, the brands must leverage this technology to reach a larger number of new-age consumers. Certain brands like IBM are already investing in immersive storytelling techniques powered by virtual reality technologies.
• Dark social will emerge as a significant platform in digital marketing. This variation refers to social sharing practices that cannot be tracked accurately through digital dashboards. Market research indicates that roughly 70% of online referrals may originate in dark social media. Google Hangouts, Snapchat, messaging platforms such as WhatsApp are examples of dark social. Hence, digital marketers must deploy these channels to fashion an engaging narrative and connect with individual consumers.
• Influencer marketing is already a mainstream marketing tactic. It should gain high velocity in the years to come. Celebrities, YouTube stars, bloggers, and journalists help to drive a brand’s message to large numbers of online audiences. Social channels represent the primary medium for this form of marketing. Market research suggests that an estimated 70% of millennial consumers in the US believe in the recommendations of their peers. Surveys also indicate that 30% of consumers are inclined to buy products recommended by non-celebrity bloggers. Further, YouTube appears as an influential social media platform that drives the purchases of an estimated 18% of consumers.
• Social messaging apps provides a bumper opportunity to modern-day digital marketers. Facebook enjoys an estimated 1.3 billion monthly users through the Facebook Messenger app; similarly, Facebook-owned WhatsApp boasts roughly 1.3 billion monthly active users that send 55 billion messages via WhatsApp every day. Google’s YouTube has an estimated 1.5 billion users that regularly spend time on that platform each month. These platforms are, therefore, gold mines for the modern digital marketer. Advertisements and banners placed on these platforms will likely reach billions of consumers through their mobile devices. This is one monster trend in modern digital marketing.
• Voice search is powering new patterns of digital engagement with modern consumers. This platform is powered by artificial technology and is enabled by Smart home and mobile services such as Alexa and Siri. In line with this, brands are working to incorporate voice search technologies in their digital marketing strategies. Market research indicates that an estimated 50% of all searches will be powered by the human voice by 2020. Search Engine platforms such as Google and Bing are reporting a rising number of mobile queries from global users. This indicates that serious efforts must be taken to re-shape the digital marketing strategies in the years to come.

These lines of analysis talks about the true potential that marketers can unleash through digital marketing technologies. Modern marketers need to study and deploy these techniques as part of their marketing playbooks. They can apply various combinations of these strategies in a bid to expand their market share and to boost the metrics that measure customer engagement.