Connected Consumer Drives Digital Marketing Trends in 2019

Digital marketing is rapidly changing, and consumers’ digital habits are evolving just as quickly. Jon Robinson, President at Lunar discusses the trends and opportunities shaping the digital marketing landscape in 2019

PERSONALIZING COMMUNICATION
One of the most significant of these trends is personalization.  Consumers want marketers to personalize communication with them throughout their buying journey.  More educated, connected and knowledgeable than ever, consumers expect a level of personalization that fosters real relationships.  A recent Salesforce study, State of the Connected Customer, found that 76 percent of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, while 84 percent of consumers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. The bottom line is that mass messaging no longer fits the bill; hyper-focused communication is the way to effectively connect with consumers.

CONNECTING ACROSS ALL TOUCH POINTS
Successfully connecting with the consumer also mean that marketers need to be where their customers are. This involves providing relevant and responsive engagement for the individual consumer across all touch points. Marketers can achieve a very high level of granularity, targeting consumers across touch points like Facebook and Instagram based on interactions outside of these platforms. In fact, marketers can use customer responses to email marketing campaigns to effectively tailor their interactions with consumers on these other platforms.

INTEGRATING MARTECH TECHNOLOGIES 
Consumers do not exist in silos, and neither should a company’s marketing technologies. Integrating technologies like marketing automation and CRM can help provide the personalization, efficiencies and customer-centric focus that companies need to successfully engage with their customers.  While integrating the martech stack can help companies achieve these marketing mandates, in order for these integrations to succeed, companies must ensure that they have two critical components – a skilled technology integration group and a drive to innovate.

DEVELOPING TOOLS FOR PERSONALIZED ANYTIME, ANYWHERE COMMUNICATION
Uplink, a communication tool, allows sales and marketing teams to reach customers directly from their phone’s text messaging app and visualize these conversations in their company’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The development of communication tools like this helps companies leverage text messaging as a channel for quick and convenient conversations with consumers that offer a more personalized customer experience. Texting also allows companies to connect with consumers anytime, anywhere and has an immediacy that other channels do not.  According to Mobile Marketing Watch, text messages have a 98 percent open rate and Connect Mogul found that 90 percent of all text messages are read in under three minutes. Communicating with customers via text is a powerful marketing and service tool that can help companies build a direct bond with them and aligns with consumer desire for more personalized interactions with brands.

This means finding ways to personalize communication with consumers, developing a presence where customers can be found across all relevant platforms, integrating technologies to achieve a customer-centric focus and taking advantage of tools and technologies that provide a high level of personalization and engagement with customers will be critical for marketers in 2019 and beyond.