Speaker and Digital Marketer Bob Tripathi brought his words of marketing wisdom to the Digital Summit Dallas at the Irving Convention Center on Dec. 5, 2018. One of 45 top industry leaders chosen to speak, Tripathi discussed the future of AI, ABM, CX, voice, apps and podcasts in his presentation, Digital Marketing Trends for 2019.

For the past seventeen years, Tripathi helped hundreds companies with their digital marketing efforts. Founder of Instant E-training and owner of the marketing services company, BobTripathi.com, Bob and his team offer training and digital marketing expertise to companies who need a digital marketing arm.

Here are a few pearls of wisdom and highlights from his speech:

Future Trends

Artificial Intelligence, personalization of content marketing and voice search will increasingly help companies scale their marketing programs. “Businesses will be influenced by how we are automating our homes, our lives and our cars,” he said. “For example, voice search is going to be huge. By 2020, 50% off all searches will be voice.”

A growing trend for B2B marketing is Account Based Marketing (ABM) which is going more mainstream and increasingly used by small businesses. Personalized 1 to 1 targeting will be more popular in 2019 with big companies no longer using the spray method, but instead targeting 5 to 10 big accounts. “Marketers are increasingly looking at who the influencers, approvers and decision makers are and marketing to them on a personal level. Combination personalizing and also broader funnel targeting are becoming popular, too,” he said.

Customer Experience

Personalization is huge and technology will have a bigger play when it comes to personalization. “It’s interesting when you talk about the customer experience because there are so many touch points — Marketers will be focused a lot more on the CX, UR, UX, and how you will touch them on every step of the customer journey, and see where you can optimize along the way,” explained Tripathi.

B2B marketers need to make sure the experience is unified. The medium dictates the message, but companies need to be talking the same language whether they talk to the customer by phone, contact them by email or visit them in person. “When you meet people at a conference, you represent the brand you are working in so you need to be consistently enforcing your message and brand,” he said.

The Marketing Cloud Race

Marketo was recently acquired by Adobe from Vista Equity Partners for $4.75 billion. The move could have implications for other competitors like HubSpot, Oracle, SAP and Salesforce. “In the marketing world it’s all about who controls the cloud,” said Tripathi. “On the OEM side, it’s Salesforce with B2Bs spending with Adobe and Salesforce–for B2C, more and more consumers are shopping on Amazon.”

Email

Break your email down into 2-3 steps – don’t try to put all the information on one page. Instead, send 2 to 3 emails to nurture your prospects. It’s more around persona-based marketing streams, and automation is going to be huge. “Email generates 50% of our revenue and works super for most of us if you do it right,” he says.

Attribution

Looking at channels – marketers are going to be well informed and knowing attribution is the key. “If you don’t attribute your sales and your leads, you won’t be able to scale your sales or your marketing program. Attribution is going to be huge,” he says.

App Marketing

“Object-oriented started in the late 90s, and today apps are the new websites,” said Tripathi. “They are the future as you can tell by the number of apps we have.” The app experience is around UI and narrowing it down to what exactly your customer wants in the way of virality, reviews and synergy between the web world and app world.

Podcast

Tripathi advises that it’s a great time to get into using podcast for marketing. More and more people are going to adopt podcast and a huge jump is predicted – ad spending on podcast are expected to hit approximately $1 billion in 2 years.

“Weave ads into the story. Podcast are the perfect medium for niche audiences,” he said. “It’s going to be huge unlike any other channel. It’s something you want to look for,” he said.

Social Advertising

Daily active users have been decreasing on Facebook, but social advertising is still a great way to advertise, especially on Instagram to engage audiences. “Instagram right now is the crown jewel – with lots of innovations. Give users the same customer experience you provide in other ways on whatever social media you are using,” states Tripathi. “Millennials use Snapchat– It’s all determined by who your audience is, so go after that.”

Twitter is still big. Reallocate your demand generation accordingly. Chart an effort/impact analysis chart on your social media to get the highest rate of return on where you are putting your efforts. “Pick just a few channels and do them amazingly well,” said Tripathi. “Be a YouTube star or spend money on facebook – whatever your objective is, and then when you are done playing, go on LinkedIn, where the real money is made!”

To see Bob Tripathi speak during his traveling road show tour or connect with him on his webinars or Bobcasts, visit BobTripathi.com. He would love to connect with you!