Almost every business has an online presence these days. Irrespective of the industry, businesses are reaching out to customers with marketing expertise to realise their visions for growth. And digital is central to their expanding plans.

What is digital marketing?

It involves marketing products and services through a wide range of digital media like website, email, social media, display ads and mobile apps through interactive or engaging content. Digital marketing activities include search engine marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce marketing and messaging apps based marketing.

The shift from marketing products and services to customer engagement:

More brands are realising that just aggressively promoting their products and services is not going to cut it. In fact, it may alienate consumers. Also, just competing with competitors to make offers, give coupons and rebates is only going to bleed them financially. The trend that is fast catching up is actively engaging consumers in a dance that is up close and personal. Brands are moving towards storytelling and other immersive experiences to connect closer with consumers and also to create product experiences as close to reality as possible.

And digital is quick to embrace that change!

It’s difficult to say if technology has created the paradigm shift from marketing to engagement or if it has just embraced the change. Irrespective of where the change originated, technology has proved to be a great enabler of this paradigm shift. Moreover, the digital landscape itself is evolving to meet the demands of new age marketing.

So, what are the emerging trends in digital marketing?

Rise of video content: With the growing penetration of smartphones and wireless networks, there has been a rise in the amount of video content consumed on mobile. Brands are making use of this medium to create engaging content that educates, entertains and inspires to try or buy their products and services. And consumers are just loving it here!

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make smart recommendations:

Recommendation engines and chatbots have sprung up across the digital ecosystem of commerce. Powered by data about consumer demographics and preferences, they intelligently suggest products that consumer might need, or is yet to figure out that he needs. These are soon going to be the norm as conversational commerce comes to the forefront of marketing. With the likes of Facebook opening their messaging apps to business bots, messaging apps are currently in the spotlight of conversational commerce.

Advanced marketing analytics:

There is more data about a potential consumer on the web than ever before. Every like, comment, tweet and share is tracked. Analytics also plays a meaty role in connecting the dots in a way a marketer would have not imagined to produce big picture insights. These in turn are used to redefine marketing strategies in a way that the brand reaches the right customer at the right time.

Social media beyond Facebook:

Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat have expanded the social media footprint of a consumer beyond Facebook and Twitter. The advertising here is done via stories, videos, pictures and ads. While earlier these spaces were limited to interpersonal conversations, brands have made their presence felt through great bite sized content.

The slow but steady arrival of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR):

To create immersive product and service experiences, businesses are adopting VR and AR technologies in their marketing. Not only are these fun and engaging but also create great brand recall. This is particularly so for the millennial demographic which is likely to appreciate the ‘cool quotient’ of a brand.

What’s the way ahead for digital marketing?

The next big thing in marketing is to build up on the Internet of Things (IoT) network making use of smart sensors and talking devices sense the mood of the consumer and make recommendations or personalized suggestions. Clearly, technology has changed the marketing game for good.

YouTube’s community of gamers, especially those who make videos that fall under the “Let’s Play” genre, can be a huge marketing asset for up-and-coming developers. Some video games, such as Day-Z, have received millions of sales thanks to their popularity on the internet.

How much impact does just one Let’s Play video have? When that video comes from YouTube’s most-subscribed channel, game makers sometimes see six figures as a result. The New York Times recently published a piece about video game developers and designers who use “YouTube as an accelerant. Among other anecdotes, the Grey Lady cited Ryan Clark, who estimated that YouTube star Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg’s playthrough of his game Crypt of the Necrodancer ultimately catalyzed more than $100,000 in sales.

In a 2015 video, Kjellberg booted up Crypt of the Necrodancer and navigated the game’s dungeons, which require the player to stay in beat with the soundtrack. The affable (if controversial) Swede seemed to enjoy his time with the game, and when he was done with it, he posted a video to his channel (which currently has more than 57 million subscribers) with the title “AMAZING RHYTHM GAME!”

His fans responded by picking up copies of Crypt of the Necrodancer for themselves. Clark told the New York Times that he believes the PewDiePie video generated about $60,000 in sales on its own. In addition, several other YouTubers decided to check out the game after seeing Kjellberg play it, and Clark estimated that this “halo effect” pushed his PewDiePie sales up above $100,000.

If you were curious why game companies are so eager to get their titles in front of YouTubers, the example of Crypt of the Necrodancer provides a compelling case study. For additional anecdotes about games that have prospered thanks to their popularity on the internet, check out the New York Times‘ report.

Intel unveiled its 8th generation Core processors earlier today, which will launch on laptops first. As part of the launch, Intel has produced a promotional video of what to expect from the next processors, which will bring quad-core chips more broadly to laptops. MSPoweruser has spotted that the video includes what appears to be a black Surface Book.

Microsoft currently manufactures a gray Surface Book, and the company hasn’t used black on its Surface line since the Surface Pro 2 nearly four years ago. The mysterious device in Intel’s video could be a marketing render, but it does include the exact same eject key found on the keyboard of the Surface Book and the unique fulcrum hinge that Microsoft uses on its laptop.

Microsoft is planning to launch an LTE version of the Surface Pro in October, and it’s possible the company might also refresh its Surface Book at the same time. Microsoft was one of the first PC makers to opt for Intel’s Skylake processor for its original Surface Book, but the company struggled with the architecture and a new Connected Standby (Instant On) feature of Windows 10.

While Microsoft eventually updated Surface Book firmware to fix some early issues, Consumer Reports recently found reliability problems with previous Surface devices. If Microsoft is planning to refresh the Surface Book, it would be surprising to see the company once again take Intel’s latest processors right away after the previous problems. Intel’s video tagline is “designed for what’s coming next,” so it could just be hinting that the next Surface Book will use the new quad-core Kaby Lake refresh processors.

Lindsey DiGiorgio, VP of Marketing for NinthDecimal explains, the way we consume content has evolved quickly, forcing marketers to rethink the way they engage with their target market. Whether it’s trying to reach the millennials who want to escape a world of ad pollution or speak to the cord-cutting viewers who ditch cable or satellite subscriptions – advertisers are having to work harder than ever to find their audience

The way people watch TV is changing right before our eyes. Think back to the last time you watched an entire television series, week after week, at its regularly scheduled time; or when you waited for the evening news to hear about the day’s big stories. TV has become more about the type of content (e.g. long- versus short-form video) than the flat screen mounted in your living room. The proliferation of new TV formats and on-the-go viewing are creating an exciting new world of engagement opportunities for advertisers, as well as more sophisticated measurement solutions to calculate ROI.

Understanding how the effectiveness of new digital TV advertising is driving specific consumer action requires brands to rethink the metrics they use . Take, for example, the traditional metric for measuring how effectively a TV ad is delivering a brand’s message, gross ratings point (GRP). While the GRP certainly has a place in TV measurement, it does not address all the demands of this new media ecosystem. For one thing, it’s only modeled to measure ad exposure, not consumers’ behavior in response to an ad. GRP also does not take advantage of new, more sophisticated measurement techniques to understand how effective an ad was at driving people to a website or – even more important for brands with a retail presence – a store.