Digital Marketing Trends To Be Aware Of in 2019

Digital marketing is no longer a desirable feature of a brand’s strategy; it is a necessity. Without dedicating the time, energy and resources to this integral aspect of marketing, how can a business hope to expand their online audience and draw in new customers across the globe? Digital marketing allows a brand to build their reputation, boost their profitability and increase their bottom line, often for a fraction of the cost it would be for a physical advertisement. Although digital marketing encompasses a variety of specific tactics, as the arrival of January throws us into the new year, it’s crucial to review your techniques and methods to stay up to date. With that in mind, the following article will introduce you to the top digital marketing trends of 2019.

Digital Marketing Trends Of 2019

Content Still Reigns Supreme in the New Year

Every digital marketer is aware of the importance of great content. Great content can attract and hook in your target audience, opening the doors to engage and educate readers on your products, and keep people coming back for more. Content shows no sign of slowing down in importance for digital marketing; in the new year, it will continue to be an integral element. Therefore, content is not a new trend to be aware of in the new year. Yet, it is a highly crucial aspect of every digital marketing strategy, which you can’t ignore in your 2019 plan. However, in addition to the great content readers expect, digital marketers will be expected to delve deeper into the ‘why’ factor in the new year.

• Why does this content matter?
• Why should your audience pay attention?
• Why is it being created in the first place?

Quality is always going to be essential, but when digital marketers focus on their target audience to a deeper extent, it’s only natural that the quality will increase due to a greater understanding of what readers want.

It’s the Year to Embrace Video Marketing

If you haven’t welcomed video marketing into your digital marketing strategy, this is the year to do so! This highly versatile, engaging content format gives your audience a new perspective into your company. What’s more, consumers value video as it’s easy to digest and extremely accessible. As many people now spend their free time scrolling through their social media feeds, creating a video marketing campaign which you can feature across a range of platforms, including your social channels and website, is an incredible way to reach a wide number of people. For businesses selling specific products, video marketing is highly significant. Modern consumers want to see something in action before they buy. Creating and producing slick videos which introduce features and elements of your products is the perfect way to entice and intrigue viewers. To do so successfully, ensure you provide enough information which clearly explains the use and the purpose, but don’t over-explain every aspect. While viewers want to learn more and be educated, they ultimately don’t want to be patronised. It’s up to your marketing team to find the delicate balance. However, another crucial video format for brands to harness in 2019 is video reviews. This ties especially into influencer marketing, which saw great popularity in 2018. Influencers can be extremely beneficial to a brand’s reputation and relevance, so by enlisting influencers to post review videos on their channels, you can boost your engagement and trust factor.

Don’t Forget to Utilise Live Video

Following on from video marketing, live video is an incredibly useful tool for marketers to utilise in the new year. While video marketing is ideal for explanation and review videos, live video takes it one step further and allows your audience glimpses into your brand, humanising it. For example, a business can highlight their team members on a night out, showing the fun and exciting side. Alternatively, it can be used to provide sneak peeks at brand new products before they are ready to launch. With Instagram and Facebook both providing exceptional live video functions, there’s no reason why a brand cannot quickly and easily stream to their audience. To take Instagram as an example, Live Video is a fun feature which is straightforward to use. When you access the camera function by swiping left on your Instagram feed, you have the option to go ‘Live.’ When you are ‘Live,’ you can see the number of viewers at the top of the screen, along with any comments they make at the bottom. The comments, however, will be visible to all viewers, so turning comments off is also available. Interestingly, you can also save your Live Video to share again later. This feature means you always have a file to review to see what went well, and what didn’t connect with your audience, enabling you to try something new or continue with the same format in the future. To check the interaction and potential of your social media channels, it is worth checking their scope with a free service like this at Max Your Web. After an initial audit, these types of company can build an effective social media campaign that should produce fast, reliable and data driven results for your business.

Voice Search Will Continue to Grow

Particularly relevant to SEO, this trend will see the use of longtail keywords and phrases becoming the norm for optimisation, rather than shorter, generic phrases. Due to the increase in popularity for home hubs, such as Google Home and Amazon’s Echo, marketers predict that there will be an increase in voice searches. This makes sense, when you take into account how easy it is to simply say “Hey Siri” or “Hey Alexa” before asking a query. For this reason, the dynamics of keyword insertion into content will no doubt be changing. It will require a different approach in the years to come to ensure the device finds your particular page or product. One specific way voice search will change digital marketing is in the way content is created and written in the first place. Certain descriptions, such as meta descriptions, will need to be written so that they sound appealing when said out loud. By doing so, when a voice-activated search reads out your result, you can be sure it will engage and intrigue the searcher.

Final Thoughts

Digital marketing is not a passing trend. It’s here to stay, and as such, it needs to be taken seriously, with the right time, energy and resources allocated to ensure you succeed. By taking into account the above trends, you can be sure your marketing stays up to date in the new year.  

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2026 Update: What I Would Tell My 2019 Self Right Now

I wrote this post back in 2019 with what felt like a pretty solid grip on where digital marketing was heading. Reading it back today, some of it holds up surprisingly well, and some of it makes me wince a little. So before you scroll down to the original content, let me give you the honest 2026 picture, because the landscape has shifted so dramatically that a few of those 2019 predictions need serious context.

The biggest single change since 2019 is, without question, AI-generated content and how it has forced every marketer to rethink quality. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are now standard parts of most teams' workflows, and that is fine, but the marketers winning right now are the ones using AI to support their thinking rather than replace it. Google's search experience has changed significantly, with AI Overviews pulling answers directly on the results page, which means your content needs a genuine point of view to earn clicks. Generic, surface-level posts simply do not cut through any more. I have seen this first-hand with clients across industries.

Social media in 2026 looks nothing like 2019. Short-form video is no longer a "trend to watch"; it is the default format. If you are not showing up on TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts with consistent, personality-driven content, you are invisible to huge chunks of your audience. The organic reach conversation has also matured. Paid amplification is essentially required now, even for established brands, and your targeting needs to be sharper than ever because audiences have grown far more selective about what they stop scrolling for.

Email marketing, which I championed back in 2019, remains one of the strongest channels available, and I am glad that advice has aged well. What has changed is the expectation around personalisation and segmentation. Batch-and-blast is genuinely dead. Your subscribers in 2026 expect emails that feel relevant to where they are in their journey, and tools now make that level of automation achievable even for small businesses and solo marketers.

My honest take heading through 2026 is this: the fundamentals I wrote about in 2019, knowing your audience, producing useful content, building trust, measuring what matters, are still the foundation. But the speed at which tactics become obsolete has increased considerably. Stay curious, keep testing, and please do not treat any blog post, including this one, as the final word. Read the original below for context, then come back to this section as your filter.

Related reading: 3 Digital Marketing Trends to be Aware of in 2019.