Marketing trends for 2019

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As marketing communications experts we are always looking ahead and speculating on new marketing trends to get ahead of the curve. Here’s our top three growth areas to focus on for the forthcoming year.

Marketing Trend #1 – Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a form of marketing which focuses on selling via influential people, rather than targeting the market as a whole. For example, “rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you instead pay influencers to get the word out for you” (www.singlegrain.com). It’s digital word of mouth – and strictly speaking a form of advertising. Organisations identify individuals with a relevant online following, who may have influence over potential customers, and then create marketing activities with these ‘influencers’.
Influencer marketing took off in 2018, but it’s still emerging as key to brands that want to define their positioning, utilising certain online individuals’ authority, knowledge or relationship with their audience. As always, ‘people buy people’ and tend to trust what other people say, over businesses’ communications as whole.
This form of marketing – or advertising – can work nicely alongside a PR campaign when promoting a product, service or idea. While mostly used in B2C marketing, there are always opportunities for B2B to take advantage of influencers, providing added value to content and making your business feel more approachable.
Oxygen is new to this area, but has successfully sourced and engaged with influencers on a number of campaigns.

Marketing Trend #2 – Video

Video advertising has transformed how brands can reach customers and influence conversions with highly engaging content. It allows complicated services or technical products to be easily visually explained. Studies have predicted that video will account for approximately 81 percent of all internet traffic by 2021.
Moving into 2019 it’s thought that we will see more video ads from brands as it provides great flexibility to marketers. However, it’s still imperative to stimulate interest without the need for sound. According to a recent study from www.locowise.com, viewers on Facebook watch videos for approximately “18.2 seconds, despite the average video length being 55.3 seconds” (https://marketingland.com). Therefore, business needs to be sure to use captivating content within the first three seconds of videos, to increase viewing retention rates.
We’ve produced around 50 videos so far in 2018, and many have captions for the silent mobile phone user. See some examples below that we have created for digital navigation client Nautisk and Somerset Choices.
Somerset Choices video marketing trends 2019 Marketing trends 2019 subtitles Nautisk

Marketing Trend #3 – Format types

The Instagram ‘Stories’ feature has gone from strength to strength since its launch in 2016. Instagram Stories now has more than 300 million daily users and provides marketers with a great opportunity to reach people by taking advantage of one of the fastest growing social networks.
It’s also predicted that brands will continue to use even more format types as “‘it’s all about digital storytelling” (www.adweek.com).
This summer Instagram introduced IGTV (short for ‘Instagram TV’), which is the new long-form video sharing service. Stories are limited to a maximum of 30-seconds video content, while IGTV allows users to upload videos of up to an hour in length. Instagram stated “we’re evolving with the times; these days, people are watching less TV and more digital video. By 2021, mobile video will account for 78% of total mobile data traffic. We’ve also learned that younger audiences are spending more time with amateur content creators and less time with professionals” (www.business.instagram.com).
It’s anticipated that next year we’ll see more brands using engagement-based content channels. At Oxygen we are experts in online advertising and marketing, and can help boost your brand and help you get ‘on top’ of Google, so contact us today to find out how.