Digital trends for 2019

It’s crucial that our team keep up with the latest digital industry trends to ensure we deliver the most effective solutions and user experiences. We believe the following five areas are the ones to watch in 2019:

1. Voice Search

Our prediction to make the biggest impact during 2019 is voice search. Many brands are already leveraging the technology to great effect, read about how Esteé Lauder, Domino’s, Diageo and Burger King are making the most of voice search technology.

Voice search is a step beyond chatbots, imagine speaking to an ecommerce site in your mother tongue and searching for products. This bridges the digital divide and opens up online shopping and other services to a far greater audience. Find out what 35 voice industry leaders have to say about voice.

The most common voice searches are simple commands like “call mom” or “navigate home,” but over the last year, there has been a rise in the number and diversity of voice searches. Advances in voice-supporting AI and differences between the algorithms of various tech-giant providers are sure to lead to more distinction between brand offerings over 2019. Read why Gabriel Shaoolian (Forbes) thinks that voice search will dominate SEO in 2019.

2. Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making a huge difference in the marketing world already, helping to achieve better user experiences, help to predict customer behaviour, and to provide real-time customer support.

Salesforce indicates that 51% of marketers are already using AI to great effect, which is likely to increase to nearly 80% by the end of the year. A recent Gartner Study suggests 30% of ecommerce growth will be credited to AI technologies by 2020.

Listen to IBM’s Jeremy Waite, Chief Strategy Officer discuss What’s the Future of AI in Marketing?

3. Personalisation

This isn’t the first time that personalisation has been a trend, it’s been talked about for years for many different purposes, even going back to pre-digital days when personalised junk mail became a thing.

Netflix and Amazon already leverage the power of personalization. Netflix, for example, shows you a nice ‘welcome back Christian’ message upon login, ‘would you like to continue watching your last show?’

Personalized content works for products, services, emails, and more, and is made possible using data, for example your purchase history, consumer behaviour or links clicked, custom content has never been easier.

96% of marketers believe that personalization advances customer relationships and Kevin George from EmailMonks, says, “The future of email is real-time behaviour-based personalization. A study by Marketo shows that personalized, triggered e-mails based on behaviour are 3x better than batch-and-blast emails.”

Read more about the powerful potentional of personlisation in digital markteing 

4. Technical SEO

The main search trends of 2019 we believe will be related to slightly more technical areas than usual.

Site speed is a good example of technical SEO. Your site can be optimised in a variety of ways including using content delivery networks, caching solutions, minifying code, asynchronous loading or using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) HTML, which does all of these things and more.

Structured / schema data is code you can add to your web pages that is visible to search engine crawlers and helps them understand the context of your content, and can help to enhance the presentation of your SERP listings through featured snippets or knowledge graph entries for example. It’s a way to describe your data to search engines in a language they can understand and is gaining more and more importance because it is heavily used by Google in the Search Results.

5. Bold design styles

As we mentioned in our presentation last year, there are a number of aesthetic design trends that are helping to enrich the visual appearance of websites. Some of the latest techniques include:

• More adventurous and vintage type
• Bigger type and funky fonts, often large screen-dominating text
• Glitch and overlap styles
• Bold colour and gradients
• 3-dimensional illustration
• Abstract and surreal design styles
• Animation
• Playful cursor design.

Other things to look out for during 2019:

• The term Inclusive design being used instead of accessibility
• Visual search
• Connected cloud services
• More about AR and VR
• Internet of Things (IoT).

Get in touch to find out how your organisation could embrace the latest digital trends