Have you watched the movie Hunger Games? There are a bunch of kids who are constantly fighting for their lives, in order to thrive in the challenging environment. You either adapt to the environment or you die.

The current trends in Advertising and marketing are nothing lesser than Hunger Games. The fact is the industry is evolving like crazy, companies providing innovations are at a faster pace than ever.

For example, the popularity of smart phones and digital assistants like Siri has made voice search SEO most crucial of digital strategies. Visual search which also is in the similar lines, but not quite famous, is still a worthy contender especially for fashion brands which needs to be highly visual.

There is still few more months till the end of 2018. Use this time to examine, rethink and plan your digital strategies for the next year ahead. Let’s check some of the top digital marketing trends of 2018 and compare the trends with the Digital Marketing trends that are making its way to 2019.

DESIGN TRENDS
Year 2018 favoured geometric pattern that lends technological and futuristic blend of simple shapes and elegant designs. Many minimalistic and monochromatic colour schemes were dropped in 2018 and vibrant palettes that were bolder and bigger taken up.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING TRENDS
With the growing social media world, visuals marked an astounding growth by jumping to bigger platforms as Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. Almost 80% of feeds are shared to videos.

2017 marked the growth of videos, 2018 saw it to completely dominate other forms of content. 10 million videos are being watched on Snapchat daily. Facebook is, maximum of all videos. Instagram stories garner 250 million views on their videos daily.

BRANDING TRENDS
With the social media’s soaring popularity in 2018, social media marketing saw an immense growth. Brands realised social media and the tailored content has the power of reaching the bigger audience which were previously unknown.

With the ongoing trends of 2018, let’s have a look at all the fresh upcoming trends for 2019.

Rise of Smart Speakers
Smart speakers are the newest trend in the market. Well, what actually are smart speakers? Smart speakers are invading homes one after another. Whether you choose small brands like Sonos and HEOS or bigger brands like Google and Amazon, smart speakers are smartly everywhere.

Smart speakers are becoming a staple of modern homes. With the ability to not only play what you want through commands, to smartly control various other smart appliances in your house. They even dig the internet to find answers to your queries.

Amazons Echo Show and Google’s upcoming smart displays have models with screens for improved visual features and other technical features.

Voice – Ultimate Search Tool
Smart speakers like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant allows us to talk to Digital assistants. Smart phones with Siri and Bigsby are doing the exact same things. As more and more devices are bundled with these assistants, you are able to do more and more with your voice commands.

Along with the comfort of sitting at home and asking these devices about the weather and play music, voice search is actually very helpful when you are on the go. Searching for a nearby restaurant while driving or a motel for a night stay, all it takes is simple a voice command. For example, ‘’Hey Siri Where is the nearest Seafood Restaurant?’’ and you get your answer through your phone without unlocking it or opening the app.

Chatbots
AI powered Chatbots residing inside a website or an app at all hours of the day is the conversational commerce that is always ready to help customers and seekers. Perhaps, acting as a customer representative, who is working 24/7 is becoming the new norm in the market.

Artificial Intelligence was reserved by bigger brands who could actually afford its programming. But now, AI is practically making its way to all the businesses be it bigger or smaller.