Paid search is expected to one of the top contributors to global ad growth in the next year. As click-through rates for Google paid search for many consumer categories sees considerable growth in 2018, what technologies will be will be informing search engine marketing in the next 12 months? Here’s what a survey [download page] from Mondo found.
The majority (86%) of the more than 1,000 creative and digital marketing decision-makers surveyed said that audience targeting is one of the technologies that is informing their search engine marketing strategies for the coming year. This is significant considering that research from Merkle has found that, in Q2 2019, some 3 in 10 Google search ad clicks came from audience-targeted ads.
Keywords will inform strategy for 83% of respondents in the next year, while about three-quarters (76%) of digital marketers will be using remarketing as part of their search engine marketing strategy. While the past has shown that retargeting has been effective in improving search advertising performance, marketers might be circumspect when using this strategy too much, as consumers do have a limit to how much remarketing they find to be acceptable.
Video (55%), interactive content (41%) and automation/AI (28%) were also technologies that will influence respondents’ strategy over the next 12 months.
Visual Tops Voice Search
Earlier this year, ClickZ and Chatmeter found that marketers consider voice search to be one of the top 5 search trends that will provide the biggest opportunities and challenges to digital marketing within the next 18 months. Although about one-third of consumers are using their voice to search and those people who use voice to search use it rather frequently, Mondo’s survey indicates that voice search is not necessarily a priority at present. Only 17% of respondents say they have optimized their website for voice search (or have planned to do so) for the next year.
By comparison, more than one-third (35%) of respondents are in that position for visual search, having already done the optimization or planning to do so. Additionally, one-fifth (21%) note that visual search is an important marketing strategy for their organization in 2019-2020, versus the 10% who say the same about voice search.
Video Marketing Trends
Beyond search engine marketing, Mondo reports that three-fourths (76%) of respondents indicate that video marketing is their top priority in the next year. Social is where the majority of respondents expect to concentrate their video marketing strategies, with two-thirds (66%) saying they will invest the most in Instagram Stories and 62% in newsfeed videos.
Mondo did find that B2B marketers are more apt to make newsfeed videos a top priority for their video marketing, while B2C marketers have made their main focus using video for Instagram Stories.
Additional video marketing types which digital marketing decision-makers will focus on in the coming year include gifs (52%), cinemagraphs (31%), live streaming (28%) and IGTV (21%).
The rest of the report can be read online here.
About that Data: Findings are based on a survey of more than 1,000 creative and digital marketing decision-makers.
