Cha cha cha changes: Digital Marketing in 2019
Dorsey In, Zuckerberg Out
Social media presents inherent risks. Considering that it is a large portion of marketing budgets, these channels must work to provide value, protect out assets as their own, and constantly be leveling up. 2019 could arguably be considered a year of and for change. Not only in marketing as a whole but in the social media realm there have been many changes that all good marketers should be aware of how and why they impact their respective marketing efforts. Below are just a few major transformations that have occurred in the past 10 months. They are social, political, and ethical.
Facebook (sigh) is not a legitimate resource for marketing. Feel free disagree or agree to disagree or just agree! One thing is aggressively apparent is that Facebook does not have our back. This month, they chose to allow political ads that are not true and spread lies. Okay, you lost me. Why would anyone advertise on Facebook when there is ZERO integrity by the publisher. Yesterday, their response is to create their own news bureau. Quite the paradox, they won’t stop vicious political ads so they create their own news agency.
Twitter stands up to the plate just this week. They will no longer accept political ads. I applaud Mr. Dorsey for standing up and understanding how important the truth in advertising means, especially considering the current state of affairs. If your role is in media, public relations, and communications, you understand just how vital Twitter is to creating relationships with journalists, pitching the media, and using it as a prime research resource.
Linked In is very powerful in the B2B space. LI is a professional resource for growing your network, publishing thought leadership articles, and strengthening yourself as a subject matter expert. Recently, LI announced they are taking risk seriously and tackling the issue of fake accounts. In the first six months of 2019, they stopped over 21 million fake accounts from being registered. Friends of Zuckerberg perhaps?
Other Trends to Consider:
Reach - A deep decline of organic reach. The death of organic reach is probably the most impactful across the board. To be clear though, organic demise started a few years ago as a flood of marketers really started to overwhelm the space and the business matured. It’s just continuing to solidify.
Content - The rise of the story. Storytelling = Storytelling.
Influencers - The success or demand of the nano-influencer. Influencers with less than 10,000 followers and hyper local have achieved a significant more impact to businesses that want to grow their brands and promote new products. In a nutshell, less is more.
Search - Google's new BERT algorithm adopted to make Google search more efficient. Since this is a new update using neural network based techniques to understand the consumers search in a better and more efficient way. This will be a major learning curve for the SEO department of many organizations.
In closing, understanding these changes and modifying strategies is required to transform. Business goals usually stay the consistent throughout a year, marketing moves faster these days. The key is to have a plan to change the plan.