Top Marketing Challenges & Trends for 2019

2018 is in the books and 2019 is here. Striving to remain competitive is certainly more challenging than ever before. With so many tools out there and so many options for utilizing a platform or agency, planning out your approach is more important than ever.

Each passing year brings new technology and continues to move the ball on how your next customer may find you. When making this plan for the year, we have found it important to begin by identifying the challenges you are facing. This causes you to be honest with yourself about competition, about your own and your staff’s skills, as well as outside factors which may be unique to your business.

Here are some of the common challenges that our clients face here at OMG:

Increasing cost of digital ads – Per a recent study conducted by Adobe, digital ad costs are on the rise. In fact, they are rising at a rate which is five times faster than the rate of inflation. This means that getting your ad to the right set of eyeballs is likely going to cost you more than last year.

Social Media Influence has some companies cashing in – “Influencers” is one of those irritating new marketing terms which larger brands are cashing in on. The small business marketer who understands it and figures out how to leverage that for their company will be ahead of the curve in 2019. Start small, make sure that you are asking serious “Yelpers” or Google “Local Guides” to provide feedback after doing business. Get in the habit of asking all happy customers, (whether manually/verbally, or ideally, via a system you institute) for their feedback. This habit will breed new, valuable reviews, impacting your relevancy online and ultimately leading to impactful social media “influencer” shout-outs.

Online Storefronts Take a Bite – Let’s face it, the barrier to entry for many businesses has been lowered as tech has risen. Competing with the “gig economy” and even crafty, online directories who appear to be, say a local plumber or home remodeler, but are actually just a lead generation service, are taking a bigger chunk off the table than ever before. Standing apart and showcasing your capabilities succinctly and effectively, requires an ever-evolving set of skills which are difficult to hire for, at entry, or even mid-level.

Please send me a Digital Marketing Analysis for my business!

3 Main Trends to Help You Get There in 2019.

So, you’ve identified your company’s own unique challenges and sketched out some goals for the new year… these powerful trends can help you ring the register.

Video Marketing: With social media on the march, new platforms and the techniques required to leverage them, are becoming more important. One cross-platform, universal kind of media is video. Your video can tell your story, in HD, when you’re not there to do it for yourself. Personalized messages and 360-degree videos can give some real flavor and color to your company and services.

Mobile Search: Smartphone users now make up the majority of service related, medical, and increasingly, product specific searches. If your website and directory network presence is still not catering to a mobile user, you are missing out. This includes digital assistants like Amazon Alexa, Siri from iPhone, Cortana from Microsoft, Google Home and others. Though today it may sound like the future, mark my words, your company’s stored data within these directories which is “read back” to a user from one of these devices…is the next big thing, so get on it!

Customer Feedback: Having a system in place for addressing and managing online reviews is just imperative for a growing company. Positive reviews when legit, are making a HUGE impact for business owners who understand how to handle them. On the flip side, businesses who have ignored their reviews and left them up to the wolf pack on the web, are in trouble. Starting to correct this at once should be a priority for any company looking to grow and thrive in the new year and beyond!

Look, there’s no one-size fits all approach, no magic bullet. It’s many little things and having the right processes in place. Many companies find that collaborating with a fairly-priced, small-business experienced, and results-driven marketing agency is the answer for them. Hey, what a coincidence! For more on how we might help you with your own personal business checklist for 2019 marketing, just reply to our blog post email, or call us at 800.789.4619. For OMG National, this is Jesse Lubar, tipping my cap to each of you for a healthy new year!