The Future of Digital Marketing
20 Future Digital Marketing Trends
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
- List five key digital marketing trends
- Describe ways new technologies and tools might impact digital marketing in the future
Digital Marketing Trends & Developments
The global pandemic accelerated the growth of digital marketing. With the sudden collapse of face-to-face interactions, both organizations and consumers quickly shifted their attention and activities online. Marketers heavily invested in social media, email marketing, mobile apps, websites, landing pages, blogs, webinars, and a variety of other digital channels to build closer and stronger relationships with more digitally savvy customers. As a result, the world of digital marketing looks quite different post-pandemic, and many digital marketing strategies and tactics are here to stay.
Given this acceleration in digital activity, what does the future hold for digital marketing? While always challenging to predict the future, there are a few trends and emerging behaviours that may signal what is yet to come. Here are five areas that will likely have a significant impact on marketers in the near future:
Marketing Automation / Personalization
Due to the computational power that is now available, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) are playing a pivotal role in how marketers perform their jobs. To clarify the differences, artificial intelligence enables computers to mimic human intelligence. Machine learning uses algorithms to parse data, learn from that data, and make informed decisions based on what it has learned. And deep learning structures algorithms in layers to create an “artificial neural network” that can learn and make intelligent decisions on its own.
- From a marketer’s perspective, many tools and systems are now using ML to identify meaningful patterns and derive insights based on user data and/or behaviours. As a result, many marketing tasks and activities that used to be done manually are being automated.
- While some early marketing automation is already happening, there is still a great deal of growth that will happen in the coming years. Below are a few examples where machine learning is already helping marketers optimize their marketing activities. That said, many of these technologies are still in their infancy and are only being used by early adopters:
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is the use of automated technology to buy advertising space. Instead of a marketer manually bidding, placing content / copy, and choosing the timing for a specific ad, programmatic advertising uses data insights and algorithms to serve ads to the right user at the right time, and at the right price. With these systems, marketers simply provide content, campaign goals, e.g., most impressions (brand awareness), conversions, etc., budget limits, and other campaign constraints, e.g., location,