In the marketing ecosystem, old-fashioned marketing is considered especially heinous. In Australia, the dedicated marketers who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad, who contributed to this article.
Dun Dun.
We're always keen to hear from local marketers about what they're working on, so we put a call out for contributions on what will be BIG in marketing in 2019, or simply the things you're focusing on this year for your clients or your personal brand.
Here are your answers:
Adam Stewart
Digital Marketer
Digital Marketing Specialist Located in South East Melbourne
2019 will be a crazy year in the world of digital marketing. The biggest change I believe will be in voice search.
I work with a lot of small to medium sized businesses and this is something we are looking very closely at. When someone searches "find me the closest dentist" via voice, we want to be at the top of that list!
Cal Willcox
Managing Director
Cal Willcox is Managing Director of Clout Marketing, a ‘digital first’ marketing consultancy for Australian brands. Cal has over 16 years marketing experience in client side and agency roles in Perth and London.
Cut…Cut…Cut….will be what 2019 is all about. Cutting through the increasing clutter and noise.
More brands are increasing the volume (not necessarily quality) of their content, which means it’s never been more important to create engaging messages that are delivered to the right audience.
Without frequency and relevancy of communications, brands will lack impact and compromise on brand image.
Video content will continue its attention-grabbing dream run, and more brands will produce video content to feed this demand. Video is ideal to appeal to the always-on, ‘snacking’ nature of people’s browsing habits, who find video content engaging and easy to process.
My 2019 predictions in mass media will see newspaper circulations continue their decline, with a chance the Sunday Times will close its doors in 2019, after a solid 122-year lifespan. Free-to-air TV will continue to feel the pinch in 2019 with a raft of new streaming services coming online, including entertainment giants Disney and WarnerMedia, which will also put pressure on Netflix to keep delivering.
Alana Christidis
Elta Group
In 2018 I dabbled in creating video for the brands I work with, although these videos were never created for digital first. I’m part of a team of highly creative designers who all had a hand in creating videos and together we’ve created some really beautiful pieces of content but one of our biggest pitfalls was the pursuit of perfection.
We could spend months working on a video that could very easily blow out to a five to ten minutes. We found that with that production time frame it was really easy to lose sight of what we were doing it for.
It wasn’t until the end of the year when we took a couple of quick videos on our phones, posted them and saw some really great results that we realised we didn’t have to spend hundreds of hours slaving away in Adobe Premiere.
So this year I’m so excited to take ramp up our level of video content by creating consistent, short form videos optimised for social media. Rather than leading by production value, I’m going back to basics and focusing on content and engagement - I’m really excited to see the results!
James Norquay
SEO & Content Marketing Director
James has over 11 years experience in internet marketing. Having grown his own network of sites to 24 million unique visitors from SEO. Worked with large corporates such as Virgin Mobile, Woolworths, CitiBank & HomeAway to drive growth from SEO & Content channels. In 2012 he founded Prosperity Media, the team has worked with high growth startups such as Campaign Monitor, OpenAgent, Open Colleges Stayz and many more to grow leads & traffic from organic traffic channels.
Growth in use of structured markup use by website owners will increase in 2019. It will be important to ensure you make use of schema.org to ensure you keep up with the game.
Voice search will grow in adoption due to more users buying voice devices. Ensure you have a strategy set up for voice search.
Scale evergreen content assets for business owners, it’s important to ensure you are building out high quality content pieces.
Video will grow, if your company doesn’t have a YouTube strategy in 2019 you should develop one. YouTube is the second largest search engine so it’s important to be making high quality video content.
Brooke Vulinovich
Instagram Speaker + Educator
Brooke is an Instagram specialist, founder of Villa Management and creator of the Social Club Membership. She is an expert at helping local businesses, e-commerce stores, service providers, entrepreneurs and influencers increase their exposure, leads and sales using Social Media. Working with brands like Dermalogica, Mazda and Channel 9 Perth, Brooke will teach you how to crush it on the ‘Gram, reach more potential customers and keep them coming back!
DM’S - Gone are the days when you can slap “NO DM’S” in your Insta bio and get away with it…THE PEOPLE WANT TO BE HEARD! To grow your community (and to become BFF’S with the algorithm) you NEED to be interacting over DM. Stop hatin', start communicatin'!
LIVE VIDEO - Instagram lurrrves live video. Your customers lurrrve live video. Instagram live video is literally your magic potion to speed up the know > like > trust > buy factor. Want customers from the Gram? Start live-ing!
STORIES - See above. Encourage reactions and engagement through stickers, questions, polls!
ANALYTICS - The vanity metric of worrying about how many Instagram followers you have is soooooo 3 years ago. In order to deliver valuable content that will help to grow your account in 2019, you need to first check the posts that gave you the most user engagement last year.
How to find out this info?
Step 1: Tap Insights Step 2: Tap Content Step 3: Tap See All Step 4: Tap on the sentence that says “Showing all posted in the past 1 year sorted by Engagement” Step 5: Filter the middle option to ENGAGEMENT Step 6: Tap apply
....then share more of that content!
Jacqueline Pauline Baril
Communications Consultant and Marketing Lecturer
Jacqueline is a committed communicator, who believes that at the heart of all quality Marketing is trust and data. She works in Tourism, Hospitality, Corporate Communications and lectures in Digital Communications and Integrated Marketing Strategy at North Metro TAFE.
2018 was a rough year for digital media and marketing, the public perception of social media has been tarnished by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the subsequent PR fumbles that followed.
Facebook, in particular, has made its user feel, well, used.
Quitting social media is now a trend, and this mistrust in social will fuel what I believe will be the biggest trend for 2019, real-world experiences.
I expect to see a resurgence in popularity of installations, events and pop ups. Marketers will go back to their pre-social media roots to create unique and memorable live impressions with their perspective clients. The irony though of course is that these real-world experiences will still predominantly be promoted and viewed through social media channels. Everyone still uses Facebook, they just hate that they do now.
Recognising the negative connotations that people hold to their own social media use is why it is important for marketers to have a relationship with their customers and perspective clients both online and in the real world.
It is easy to see the world through a marketer's eyes, but we need to make sure that as professionals we view the world through the lens of a customer. If people are closing off from connections online then we need to give them something to talk about offline too.
Clayton Smith
Social Media & Digital Marketing Specialist & Co-Founder of The Marketer
I freaking love podcasts. There is something so engrossing about fantastic audio-only storytelling.
According to a report by the ABC, every statistic seems to be pointing up and to the right when it comes to podcasting, and I think this is just the beginning.
As with any medium, the quality of the content will play a big role in the growth of the platform ie if another super smash hit like Serial drops, those numbers will climb higher even quicker.
I’ll bet that any statistic we use to measure podcast growth will go up by the same or more this year.
From a marketing perspective, I am going to hang my hat on these two predictions;
Podcast Prediction No 1: Podcast Ad Spend Will Double.
As podcast audience numbers continue to skyrocket, the ad dollars will too.
Podcast Prediction No 2: Five Branded Podcasts from Big Australian Companies.
I recently came across the podcast Seek Alt Route, a branded podcast from job search behemoth Seek, and I really enjoyed it. I’m putting my money where my mouth is and predicting at least 5 more branded podcasts by big Australian companies this year.
Non-Podcast Related Prediction - LinkedIn Might Get Its Shit Together.
Maybe this is more of a plea than a prediction, but I feel like LinkedIn is ready to take the next step from tween social media platform to young adult.
I think/hope we will see major improvements in;
1. Ad Targeting Capabilities - Go have a peek in your big brother Facebook’s bedroom, it’s all right there for you.
2. Newsfeed Algorithm Improvements - Show me more relevant articles for the sake of all that is holy.
3. Increase Video Length Limit - It’s only ten mins. Yep, it’s 2019 and you can only upload a max length vid of ten minutes. NOT ENOUGH.
Ok now it's my turn!
Carma Levene
Social Media Marketer, Trainer & Strategy Consultant | Co Founder of The Marketer
In 2019 I have no plans to drop the tried and true to put any emerging tech into play – but we’ll just have to see what happens!
It’s not that I’m not interested, I’m just not about taking something on for novelty sake. In fact as marketers it's sometimes our job to "slow the roll" of clients who want the newest shiny thing if it doesn't align with their strategic direction.
There’s so many businesses who haven’t nailed the basics that don't need to be looking at using emerging tech just yet
For me 2019 will be about educating business owners about getting strategic with their content, offering more workshops to help businesses navigate Social Media in general, and focusing on getting back to being SOCIAL.
Not to mention, backing their new-found organic success with killer ad campaigns!
The rise of Stories’ popularity is of great interest to me though...I’ve been saying for a while I think people are getting tired of the fairy-tale posts on Instagram and have been looking to make more authentic connections to people, business and content in general. Stories allow this because they are more candid.
And although you can make beautiful graphic or text-based Stories, the ones with the silly gifs and “day in the life of” not-so-perfect selfies really give me hope that we’ll start creating more authentic content to fuel this - and hopefully fall in love with the realness of it.
What do you think marketers?
Do you agree with our contributors? Or have you got something completely different in your 2019 strategy? We'd love to know.
Watch our LIVE discussion and join in with your thoughts on Feb 1st at 3pm on Facebook & Instagram.