Is it a secret that failing to keep up with latest marketing trends can lead to failure as a marketer? Certainly not. Most marketers understand the importance of staying up-to-date with the latest tools and tactics of the trade. It’s finding the time to keep up with those trends and knowing what to focus on that’s the problem. To help make it a little easier to narrow down the things you should be focusing on to improve your marketing in 2019, I’ve compiled the following list of 5 marketing trends to pay attention to in the new year.

Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing and greater personalization will continue to gain momentum in 2019. Identifying key prospects and then crafting messaging and marketing campaigns aimed at their specific needs and pain points will allow marketers to offer the right solutions to the right audience. Relationship building is critical to companies’ success and focusing your efforts on building relationships with the prospects who have the greatest need for your services (not to mention the funding to pay for them) can have a significant, positive impact on the bottom line.

Personalization

Personalization will be another effective tactic, which falls in line with the concept of account-based marketing. The blanket approach to marketing is still an important piece of the puzzle and is great for brand recognition, product awareness and other important KPIs, but to really drive home the sale, it’s important to show each decision maker that you really understand their needs and that your products or services offer genuine solutions to the particular issues they face.

Omnichannel View from the Customer’s Perspective

Creating a seamless experience across all channels truly enhances your ability to engage and build relationships with your target audience. Your branding, tone and voice, level of customer service and other aspects of your marketing and business efforts should be consistent across channels. This is the omnichannel experience. While it’s important to have multiple channels for your customers and potential customers to experience your brand, it’s even more important that when they traverse from one of those channels to another, they feel right at home. This can truly help enhance your relationship with your customers in the hopes of strengthening brand loyalty and advocacy.

Breaking Down Silos

Marketing departments that operate in silos can run into issues with communication, consistency in branding and messaging, organization and general effectiveness. To reduce the occurrence of these issues, companies can break down the silos and build teams of individuals with a variety of skill sets who can crossover into different disciplines and are fluent in multiple marketing languages. If your SEO team doesn’t talk to your content marketing team, and your advertising team never crosses paths with your graphic design team, that can be problematic. The solution is to hire multi-talented team members who transcend departments and are able to work seamlessly together.

Chatbot Popularity Increases

Whatever your opinion on chatbots, it seems they are here to stay. These tools can actually be highly effective for both marketing and customer service. Not every company has the funding to develop a hundred-person team of customer service reps who are ready to roll around the clock. A chatbot is great for efficiently getting answers to frequently asked questions in front of those seeking the info in question. Chatbots create a scalable tool to allow one-on-one interactions with your target audience. And, although they are not seamless by any measure, many have come fairly close to mimicking actual human interaction.

Whether chatting with robots or tearing down the silos keeping you from being the best marketing organization you can be, these marketing trends are something marketers should continue to follow as we move into 2019.