Digital Advertising: What’s hot, what’s not?

We are surrounded by digitally smart devices today and thus get exposed to a lot of digital advertising inevitably. Digital advertising has changed the electronic advertising approach in leaps and bounds. This advertising is interactive, data-driven and result oriented. If a company or a brand wishes to penetrate a competitive market it will have to use a mix of advertising and marketing tolls, where digital advertising will be the most important one. From television screens, mobile phones, watches to home devices everything is turning ‘smart’ today, providing ample advertising opportunities to reach the target audience.

What does digital advertising include?

As ‘digital’ means making use of data to get faster and accurate results, any device that creates, stores and process data is termed as digital device. Digital communication includes everything that uses digital technology for processing and disseminating communication messages. Digital advertising thereby uses digital platforms such as emails, social media, mobile phones, websites, search engine and digital screens to reach the target audience. As digital advertising is data-driven, it gives brands an insight on whether or not their digital campaign is moving in the right direction. If they feel that digital advertising is not reaping the desired results, the can fix the on-going campaign which is not possible in traditional formats of advertising. The acceptance, rejection, feedback and result of digital communication can be monitored instantly.

What are the hottest trends in digital advertising?

With the advent of latest software and hardware that are technologically advanced, digital advertising is getting more accurate and precise in collecting information in form of data. This data helps the advertiser to recognise the needs and wants of the targeted audience. The data also let the brands understand the internet surfing habits, TV viewing habits, social media activity frequency, etc of the audience. Through this data the brands can design their ad campaign for achieving high ROI (return on investment).

Digital advertising is adapting new technology rapidly to access more and more information about the audience. Latest digital trends include:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence works on computer algorithms. The machines drive intelligence through these computer algorithms and generate automated decisions. In marketing and advertising field, the artificial intelligence is used for data collection, analysis and observation of the target audience. AI helps advertisers to minutely observe the patterns and behaviour of prospective audience. The clear understanding of target audience facilitates effective communication and ensures high rate of investment. Implementing AI also reduces the marketing team’s work load by far.

• Augmented Reality (AR)

Augmented reality is gaining popularity all over the world for it being an interactive and vivid form of communication. AR offers interactive reality, where the audience can visualize how a product would look in the existing environment. For instance if a customer is surfing a furniture website, he can visualize, how a furniture item like a center table or an easy chair would look in their own room by clicking the picture of the room or by scrolling the camera to the corner where the furniture item would be placed, if bought.  Augmented reality involves digital elements such as sound, visuals and other sensory stimuli to enhance the real-life experience by adding them to existing environment. All leading sectors like healthcare, advertising, defense, automobile industry, e-commerce industry and more can do miraculous progress through AR.

• Voice search optimization

With devices like ‘Google homes’ and ‘ Alexa’ and services like  ‘ Google assistant’ and ‘Siri’, voice search optimization has become another powerful tool for reaching the target audience. People are now using devices and services that support voice searches and give them accurate results. The voice search is quick, precise and saves typing time. Voice searches are more informal as people tend to ask queries to the device like they would talk to a friend or family member.

• Personalization

The key to be a step ahead of your competitors and win the audience’s attention instantly is through custom-designed advertising content. The more personalized content you offer the audience, the more chances are that they become the buyers. Be it emails, promotional messages or social media content, the better your research is about the target audience’s need and wants the better would be your communication message. Audience is overloaded with digital marketing on every platform, so much so, that it irritates the audience and they block the ads completely. So, to avoid this situation, it’s better to offer something that resonates with their interest, choices and needs. For example if a customer is searching for ‘refurbished items’, the advertiser can show results of ‘refurbished item available near their location first instead of showing all the possible refurbished item list.

• Shopable posts

A Shopable post instantly directs you to the shopping portal of the particular product. Be it in any form like video, picture or blog, if the advertiser inserts a link along with the post, the visitors can click and make the purchase instantly. The users want to skip as many as steps possible, to buy the product and through theses shopable posts buying the product becomes quick and easy.

• Gameification

We all want our audience to make happy and cheerful purchase and what better if it is through games! ‘Spin and win’, ‘ Answer and win’ etc. are  formats that  make the audience feel excited, victorious and happy while they make purchase online. The emotion of winning something extra always excites the audience and they take full chance to do that through these promotional games and quizzes. This trend is already being followed ecommerce giants like Amazon, Flipkart and many more but the audience is not bored with it as it involves winning more discount, offers and coupons and other free products.

• Chatbots

They have been here for a while and have been our secret saviours for our queries. Chatbots are a product of artificial intelligence that generates automated results for audience’s queries. Through instant messaging, chatbots try to solve queries of the customers by digging deep into the already stored data. Their ability to handle numerous customers at a time, make chatbots a wonderful solution to heavy website traffic and delayed response to online queries. Unlike physical customer service which is operational for a limited time period; chatbots service is ready to deal with the consumer’s queries 24×7.

What are the digital trends that are dying now?

Digital trends are changing rapidly as it is new and advertisers are still exploring the opportunities it has to offer. Therefore, any trend that is not reaping the desired results is being discarded and new trends are being adopted simultaneously. The ads which are repetitive, forceful and interrupting are often rejected by the target audience. The trends that fall short of audience attention and fail to propel the marketing objectives as desired include:

• Bulk emails and SMS
• Unskipable ads
• Full screen pop-ups
• Long-form advertising copy