6th March 2025
The digital marketing landscape is currently experiencing a significant and irrevocable shift. Our new, high-tech age is influencing everything from SEO and social media to content marketing and PPC, and businesses must begin to adopt these new approaches and integrate these new strategies to secure success both now and for the future.
So, here are 4 important digital marketing trends that you can’t afford to ignore.
AI
Although this might initially sound akin to something that has come straight out of a Hollywood movie, artificial intelligence (AI) is already playing a significant role within the marketing landscape. As well as efficiently analysing consumer behaviour, this technology can also monitor search patterns and utilise data from blog posts and social media platforms to help businesses better understand how their users are finding their products or services.
AI can also deep dive into conversations and predictions indicate that 85% of all customer interactions will be achieved without the need for human contact by 2020 [1]. With the ability to accelerate growth, reduce costs and outperform your competition at stake, it’s clear that AI is the future for many businesses.
Programmatic Advertising
This approach to advertising uses AI to automate the ad buying process and helps businesses to more accurately target specific audiences. As this method increases campaign success rates and significantly reduces costs, it is predicted that by 2019 more than 80% of all US digital display ads will be programmatic [2].
Chatbots
Chatbots use AI technology to chat, at any time of the day or night, with your customers in real-time via instant messages. Many businesses have already chosen to integrate this feature into their websites and customers demonstrably enjoy interacting with them because they provide instantaneous answers. Chatbots also have the capacity to retain information, ensuring that customers don’t need to repeat conversations they have already had when starting a new interaction.
The demands of consumers are consistently increasing and it is forecast that chatbots will help businesses to save $8 billion each year by 2022 [3].
Social Messaging
If you think that social messaging apps are essentially just for conversing through emojis with your friends, think again. WhatsApp [4] and Facebook Messenger both attract 1.3 billion users each month [5] and on Facebook Messenger alone, every month more than 2 billion messages are sent between businesses and individuals [6].
The increasing popularity of social messaging apps is providing new opportunities for businesses to both communicate with their current customer base and expand their reach by connecting with new audiences. If your audience is already spending time using messaging apps, it only makes sense to direct your marketing efforts towards those channels. In fact, more than 45% of people actually prefer to communicate with businesses through a messaging app than via email or phone calls [7].
The pace at which digital and technological innovations are occurring within the marketing landscape means that management teams now need an enhanced skill set to drive meaningful growth and secure future-proofed success. Contact our expert recruitment team today to learn more about how we can help you to attract talented digital professionals that will help your business to thrive and flourish.
[1] https://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/summits/docs/na/customer-360/C360_2011_brochure_FINAL.pdf
[2] https://www.emarketer.com/Article/eMarketer-Releases-New-Programmatic-Advertising-Estimates/1015682
[3] https://www.juniperresearch.com/press/press-releases/chatbots-a-game-changer-for-banking-healthcare?utm_campaign=chatbots2017pr1&utm_source=prnewswirepr&utm_medium=email
[4] https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000631/Connecting-One-Billion-Users-Every-Day
[5] https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/14/facebook-messenger-passes-1-3-billion-monthly-active-users/
[6] https://www.facebook.com/business/news/introducing-the-messages-objective-for-facebook-ads
[7] https://medium.com/hijiffy/10-graphs-that-show-the-immense-power-of-messaging-apps-4a41385b24d6