Marketing Trends For Your Business Growth

Figuring out which marketing methods will actually land with an audience gets harder every year, mostly because the audience itself keeps changing along with the technology. It’s worth looking back at last year’s patterns before betting on new ones. Here are eight marketing trends worth watching, since what worked last year may not carry the same weight this time around.

1) Voice Search-Marketing Trends

Growing use of voice search has forced companies to rethink their digital marketing strategies, since it plays a real role in how people find information through audio instead of text. AI has also cut down on the errors voice assistants like Google, Alexa, and Siri used to make regularly. As one digital marketing company puts it, adopting a voice search strategy isn’t just about staying relevant, it’s about building an optimized, pleasant customer experience that reinforces brand loyalty. A few brands already lean on voice search for exactly that kind of value:

1. PayPal users can ask Siri to send money to businesses and friends.
2. Patrón Tequila helps customers pull up personalized cocktail recipes.
3. Tide gives stain-removal advice for more than 180 different materials.
4. Domino’s lets pizza lovers order from the couch without touching their phone.
5. Campbell’s has a skill that helps hungry customers pick and cook recipes.
6. Nestlé built a skill that walks you through cooking instructions step by step. For any voice-search content, write in an informal tone, aim for featured snippets on Google, and target the keywords people would actually say out loud rather than type.

2) Chatbots-Marketing Trends

Customer service matters, but not everyone wants to call or wait on an email reply. That’s where chatbots come in: AI-driven tools built into a website that can answer questions and handle requests immediately, often without losing the brand’s personality. Grand View Research shows:

1. The top advantages of chatbots are 24-hour service (63%), immediate response to inquiries (54%), and answering simple questions.
2. 62% of respondents prefer messaging a chatbot over talking to a person directly.
3. By 2021, chatbots are projected to save businesses more than $7 billion a year.
4. Chatbots are expected to handle 84% of customer service interactions by 2020.
5. 75% of businesses plan to adopt chatbots by 2020. Customers tend to like them because they’re available 24/7, remember purchase history accurately, respond quickly, and never lose patience.

These assistants meet customer expectations, deliver consistent service, and automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time for higher-value work. Companies like Ola and Uber already run chatbots that let customers book rides through their mobile app, Google Maps, or a messaging platform, selecting ride type, tracking the car, and paying, all through chat. Zomato, Pizza Hut, Whole Foods Market, Sephora, Swiggy, Fandango, and Staples use chatbots too.

3) Artificial Intelligence-Marketing Trends

AI is reshaping how a lot of work gets done, at least the more routine jobs. A few years back, Gartner predicted that by 2020, AI would show up in nearly every new software product and service, a forecast Harvard Business Review backed up more recently. Analysts estimate AI could add up to 13% to world GDP between now and 2029, making it one of the biggest commercial opportunities for companies and countries alike over the next decade. Businesses slow to adopt it risk a real competitive disadvantage within a few years.

AI can identify search patterns and consumer behavior, pulling data from blog posts and social platforms to help businesses understand how people actually find their products. Chatbots are one visible example: Mastercard built a Facebook Messenger bot using natural language processing to understand what a customer needs and respond much like a person would, automating payment handling in the process. AI is already showing up in several practical areas:

1. Content creation.
2. eCommerce operations.
3. Basic communication.
4. Email personalization.
5. Product recommendations.

4) Video Marketing-Marketing Trends

Video marketing remains one of the most important trends right now, and that’s likely to hold for the next several years. Beyond YouTube, higher engagement often comes from posting a video directly to LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, or going live on those platforms. One challenge marketers have faced recently is the shift to mobile: long sales pages and emails that worked on desktop are harder to read on a small screen. Video sidesteps that problem, presenting the same information in a format that works regardless of platform. One of the bigger advantages of a video campaign is how easily the content reformats into other things. Say you record a video for your YouTube channel, instead of publishing only there, you could also:

1. Upload the raw video with captions directly to Facebook (native Facebook video tends to get more reach and engagement than a shared YouTube link).
2. Use a video thumbnail and the word “video” in an email subject line to boost open rates.
3. Get it transcribed so you have a text version to work from.
4. Turn that transcription into a standalone blog post with a light rewrite and a few relevant images or stats added.
5. Strip the audio and release it as a podcast episode.

5) Influencer Marketing-Marketing Trends

Influencer marketing is also shifting, and who counts as an influencer is starting to change. Companies used to lean on celebrity endorsements to convince people a product was worth buying, but customers increasingly trust their peers more. Iceland, the frozen food retailer, switched from celebrity marketing to real customers for exactly this reason, their audience trusted other customers over the brand or so-called industry experts. Going forward, tailoring an influencer strategy to who your audience actually listens to matters more than picking the biggest name available.

Marketing is only getting more complex, so it’s worth keeping an eye on newer channels too. Push notifications are a good example: with email facing tighter restrictions from GDPR and stronger spam filters, and audiences favoring different ways of getting messages, push notifications have moved up the list. Research shows 34% of 18 to 34 year olds opt into website push notifications. Expect more brands to adopt push notifications through 2019, with messaging getting more personalized and sophisticated. Segmented push campaigns already outperform broadcast messages:

1. A 6% open rate for segmented push messages, compared to 2% for generic broadcast messages.
2. 55% of users convert from segmented push notifications, compared to just 14% for broadcast messages. Behavior-triggered notifications, targeting users who showed interest but didn’t convert, are also proving effective at recovering revenue from abandoned shopping carts.

6) A/B Testing-Marketing Trends

A/B testing takes an app screen or webpage and creates a modified second version, sometimes a small change like a headline or button, sometimes a full redesign. Half your traffic sees the original, half sees the variant, and results get measured through an analytics dashboard and a statistical engine to determine whether the change had a positive or negative effect. This lets companies and teams make changes to the user experience while gathering real data on the outcome, testing hypotheses about which elements actually influence behavior rather than guessing. Run consistently, A/B testing improves a single metric, like conversion rate, over time.

7) Quality Content-Marketing Trends

Content is still the foundation everything else builds on. You already know it needs to speak to your audience: their ideas, their emotions, what motivates them. The goal isn’t just to put content in front of people and hope they respond, it’s to give them something worth sharing and engaging with. A shared article or video opens a two-way conversation, which builds trust and shows customers you value their attention. High-quality content answers a question completely rather than skimming past it, adding a genuinely fresh angle to a current issue instead of just repeating what’s already out there. Anyone with basic writing skills can run a quick Google search and rehash what’s already ranking, but that’s a long way from actually original work, and it rarely earns the top spot in search results the way a genuinely useful answer does.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

None of this means scrapping your current campaigns overnight. Apply these changes gradually, keep everything compliant with regulations like GDPR, and stay open to adjusting as new trends emerge. A business that keeps a thumb on what’s shifting, voice search, chatbots, video, influencer strategy, won’t fall behind. These eight trends are a solid starting point if you’re deciding what to test next.