These are the four most important digital trends for online marketing

Marketing decision-makers can't afford to miss these developments in 2019:

1. augmented reality advertising

Snapchat filters, Pokemon Go or digital city guides: Augmented reality (AR) has long since found its way into customers' daily lives. The technology is also becoming increasingly important in professional brand communication - especially in social media marketing. Industry giant Facebook, for example, makes it easy for advertisers to implement augmented reality concepts with its AR Studio.

Large corporations such as Audi and IKEA now regularly place their products and services directly in the lives of potential customers via augmented reality applications. This enhances the user experience with a personalized brand and product experience. A virtual racing track or a corresponding showroom, combined with appropriate user interaction, can lead to viral effects. The greater the utility or entertainment value for the user, the greater the likelihood that he or she will share the content with others - and thus spread the corporate message.

2. measurability in content marketing

Companies often spend large sums of money on the production of YouTube videos. But the desired conversion, for example to visit the website or sign up for the newsletter, fails to materialize. Hence the second digital marketing trend for 2019: content must become measurable. After all, if elaborately created content does not contribute to the company's goals, it only eats up resources.

The prerequisites for measuring success in content marketing are a detailed content marketing strategy and a zero measurement, i.e., an inventory before the actual measures are taken. The following questions must be clarified as part of the content strategy:

• What business objectives does the respective content serve?
• How is the target group defined?
• What is the core message of the content?
• Which channels are suitable for placement?
• What kind of format is suitable?

The so-called content audit is very helpful for this. This important step documents, for example, whether an article is suitable for the target group, the editorial quality is right and, above all, whether the content contributes to the business goals.

3. SEO for Voice Search

Siri, Alexa and Cortana are becoming increasingly popular with customers worldwide. The market research institute Comscore even suspects that every second search query worldwide will be made by voice command in 2020. No wonder that digital assistants are also playing an increasingly important role for SEO. This is particularly evident in the digital trend SEO for Voice Search. Time for marketing departments to proactively address this trend. To optimize content for voice search, companies must pay attention to the following:

• Integration of structured data, i.e. special codes that allow crawlers to interpret data correctly
• Inclusion of relevant questions that begin with the common question words "how," "what," "why," or "which"
• Use of long-tail keywords from spoken language (also referred to as "natural language" in technical jargon)
• Integration of local keywords for mobile users
• High page loading speed for 3G and 4G users

Users now use voice assistants to search not only for information about brands and everyday issues, but also for specific products and good deals for direct purchase on site. This also explains the rise of the ROPO trend - Research Online, Purchase Offline. In the future, even the mood of users is expected to influence search results: Several companies at once are working on software that evaluates the speaker's pitch and expression to determine his or her emotional state. If the user sounds calm and in a good mood, he or she is more likely to be referred to inspirational content than to pure collections of facts.

4. even more customized content

Personalized content remains a trend in marketing. Here, the peak is far from being reached; on the contrary, although technological development is already well advanced, many companies are only now beginning to exploit the full potential of segmentation. Individual content will become even more important in 2019, not least because of increasing customer demands. Users want to be met according to their needs. Not only socio-demographic characteristics such as age, relationship status or gender play a role, but also user behavior on the website, purchasing behavior, the end device used or external factors such as the weather situation are important segmentation factors.

With flexible content management systems (CMS) and the use of artificial intelligence (AI), content can be optimally personalized and adapted to the user, the respective channel and the corresponding device. Automated A/B testing or tweeting or posting are just a few examples of the application area of AI. Especially when dealing with large amounts of data, the advantages of artificial intelligence are obvious.