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1. Instagram is king! Ignore the power of Instagram at your peril. Creating valuable Instagram content should be a non-negotiable element of any brand marketing plan in 2019, if you want to create an emotional connection with your end user. The numbers speak for themselves as Merkle report that visits to brand sites driven by Instagram grew 111% in Q3 of 2018. There are also opportunities to commercialise in multiple new and exciting ways, including in-feed, influencers, Instagram TV and Stories.
2. Voice Search The rise of voice search will be monumental. As digital assistants become part of everyday life, touchscreens and keyboards are taking a back seat, so brands will have to understand user intent more than ever before. Content will now have to respond to both traditional and voice search, and if you ignore this development, you could find yourself and your content lost online.
3. Dark social cannot be ignored As more content is shared via private networks, dark social will be causing marketers headaches as they struggle to accurately track content shares. In 2019, brands and their agencies will need to work together to establish a new way of measuring content success that goes beyond public shares. If you don’t do this, proving any ROI on content investment will become increasingly difficult, as you report on only half the story.
Social media got serious Facebook was hit by a series of data, privacy and hate-speech scandals. Cambridge Analytica harvested 50 million Facebook profiles without user consent, which led to Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress. This also put Google and Twitter in the hot seat with political lawmakers.
Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ad sparked a boycott and earned Nike $6 billion The Kaepernick ‘gamble’ turned into a big win. 58% of UK consumers say it’s important that brands take a stand on social and political issues (YouGov) so this type of storytelling became a new brand currency in 2018.
2018 was the year of GDPR On 25th May GDPR rules gave users more control of their personal data online. It has been described as the most important data privacy change in 20 years. Post-GDPR, Econsultancy reported that there had been 24,319 complaints to the ICO, which equates to an increase of 113%.
It was another tough year for retail At the end of 2018, The Guardian reported 85,000 jobs had been lost from the British high street. The unprecedented level of discounting in the sector also hit online retail, with ASOS shares dropping by 40% in November, sending shockwaves through the City. M&S, boohoo, H&M and Sports Direct also saw their shares drop after the news.
KFC showed us how PR and crisis management should be done KFC struggled at the start of 2018 when their supply chain failed, leading to a chicken shortage and 80% of their UK restaurants closing temporarily. The negative sentiment and media coverage spread like wildfire and the brand was in crisis. However, the fast-food chain pulled themselves out of a hole with their ‘FCK’ campaign. Appearing only once in two national print publications, the apology made an incredible amount of noise below the line. The campaign was shared 219,138,216 times through social and reached an estimated 796 million people with editorial coverage.
The robots really are coming The Guardian reported that more than 6 million workers fear being replaced by machines, and they might be right! Chinese state media has TV news anchors that can broadcast 24/7 with computer-generated faces and there has been a rise of CGI influencers within fashion. Instagram superstar Lil Miquela has 1.5m followers. She has collaborated with Chanel and Prada. In August, the computer-generated Instagram influencer released a song called ‘Hate Me’ and made the pages of American Vogue wearing Alexander McQueen.
Sci-fi has now become sci-fact China’s social rating system has passed the trial phase and every Beijing citizen will be tracked and assigned points based on their actions by the end of 2022. People will be rewarded or punished according to their scores, and it has already stopped millions of people from boarding planes and has banned people from staying at the best hotels. Your pet will even be taken away if it causes a public disturbance. This is something straight out of the ‘Black Mirror’ episode ‘Nosedive’. Some UK firms have also started to microchip employees. Legal and financial companies are attracted by security and performance benefits. The miniature technology bypasses the need for cash, tickets, access cards and even social media. In Sweden, the technology has really taken off and young people are even throwing ‘implant parties’.
The use of social media continues to be part of everyday life in the UK. At the beginning of 2017, the total number of social media users in the UK had reached over 39 million, that’s 59% of the UK population! According to Battenhall, Facebook is still the largest social media platform, with 2.27 billion monthly active users, followed by YouTube with 1.9bn and WhatsApp with 1.5bn. However, a report from Buffer uncovered a 50% decline in engagement on Facebook business page posts, which illustrates a change in how people are consuming content on social channels. Despite this, there is still an opportunity for marketing on social as 56% of social media users state that they are happy to be exposed to branded content on their newsfeeds.
Instagram’s popularity continues We’ll see the increased dominance of Instagram, especially amongst older demographics. There are more 45 – 54 year-olds using Instagram than there are 13 – 17 year olds. As Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes predicts, ‘Instagram will quickly evolve over the next few years and become the new home for brands.’ It’s also the year of Instagram Stories. Instagram drives the most engagement per post compared to any social network: 84 times more than Twitter; 54 times more than Pinterest; and 10 times more than Facebook. As an indicator of increased importance, Facebook is shifting to Stories over the newsfeed.
The rise of dark social Dark social will prompt marketers to look beyond social share counts. Dark social refers to private sharing of content via messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Snapchat or SMS, rather than on public social platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, and therefore can’t be accurately tracked. From our own data, we have seen up to 80% of all YouTube content being shared via dark social.
Chatbots will become the norm Social Report expect the use of chatbots to continue growing in 2019. According to a study from LivePerson, only 19% of the 5,000 people surveyed had a negative perception of chatbots and 48% were indifferent so long as their problems were resolved.
Brand authenticity is key – especially for millennials Gaining consumer trust will be of the utmost importance for brands in 2019 and 86% of consumers state that authenticity is an important factor when deciding which brands to support (Stackla report). This number is even higher amongst millennials.
AR and MR become crucial to a brand’s marketing activity At Facebook’s developer conference, they announced augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) will soon be available to brands to show off products within the Messenger app and newsfeed. For example, viewers will be able to ‘try on’ products advertised. Personalising the user experience allows users to experience a brand product in realtime and will encourage sharing and user-generated content. This is nothing new for Gen Z, where 22% of them are using AR geo-filters each month already.
Voice-enabled devices will continue to go mainstream According to The Verge, more than 100 million devices with Alexa on board have been sold and Google Assistant could be on billions of devices if Google install it as the default on their phones. Voice is becoming part of the essential channel mix within content marketing. By 2020, 30% of all website sessions will be conducted without a screen and up to 50% of all search activity will be conducted by voice.
Visual search is on the rise Google, Amazon, Bing, eBay and Pinterest have all launched visual search engines. With the introduction of Google Lens, users can now take a photo or upload an existing one and have Google scope the entire web for additional information. As machine learning and artificial intelligence push the boundaries of image recognition technology, algorithms will help with providing more relevant content.
Influencer marketing focusses on ROI Businesses spent more than $2bn on influencer marketing campaigns in 2018. Brands will continue to use influencers as their ‘salespeople’ but will pay greater attention to ROI as less than a fifth of companies say that they are able to integrate influencer marketing into their broader ROI calculations despite the fact that the vast majority believe it will be critical to their success going forward.
Live video is back Video content is set to be responsible for 80% of all internet traffic by 2021 and a report from BuzzSumo says that Facebook video posts get at least 59% more engagement than other post types. Consumers are craving authentic content and this is what you get with live video. For brands, the cost of using live video can be low as there are no post-production costs and live video activates FOMO!
Note, this article was originally published on The River Group blog.