The Digital Ready coaches had our annual get together recently to look at what 2019 had delivered in the digital landscape, and gave us a chance to collectively gaze into our crystal balls and forecast the future for the dawning of a new decade. I’ll save our predictions for January, and for this blog, the retrospective of 2019.

Firstly, it’s hard to even conceive it is the end of 2019, it feels like minutes ago we were doing 2019 projections. What did our coaches feel were the most impactful changes of 2019? If you didn’t make it to the year in review session, let’s start with one of the headliners – the move by Facebook and Instagram to remove visible likes from posts. This was promoted as Facebook/Instagram taking responsibility for the mental health issues that so much comparison seemed to be having, but that was seen as a cynical move by many from a company all about shareholder return.

The belief is that this move is squarely aimed at destabilising the increasing power of influencers and clawing back some control, forcing businesses to use regulated advertising to grow their markets. What it points to, however, is a more macro marketing truth that businesses need to recognise social media isn’t a silver bullet, and is a long, patient game where you grow real relationships with your customers that may result in a sale once trust and value is established. You have to be strategic and consistent across all your channels to tell a meaningful, compelling story about what you do.

This also pushes businesses to do the work of strategy, or customer journey, or brand analysis, whatever you want to call it to make it feel comfortable for you to do the heavy lifting on understanding who your customers are so you can deliver what they want, when and how they want it. We must truly be in service to those we want to purchase goods or services from us if we want to grow our customer base.

Google upset some apple carts with the introduction of BERT (see this blog). BERT is equalising search with an algorithm that promotes natural language use in search terms over keyword stuffing, again, moving us towards digital products that are built for real people, with real people behaviours, as well as making the internet a more equal playing field for those who have access issues like reduced literacy and vision impairments. This move also plays into one of our 2019 predictions that digital is being shaped towards a dramatic increase in voice searching thanks to devices like Siri, Alexa and other voice activated tools to help us manage our lives.

While on SEO and ranking, short, clear, real and authentic copy that garners engagement is the product of BERT, but also what people want to read #toolongdidntread writing for mobile devices which are continuing to make up the majority of places information is being accessed, along with aforementioned brevity and access simply makes sense, save the longform essays for Medium or your blogs. Considering mobile users means that you need to check your website for how well it’s doing – Digital Ready have built a tool for that, if you haven’t tried it out on your website do it before the end of 2019 and make a resolution to upgrade in 2020.

As predicted, video continued to dominate, but murmurs are beginning to surface about quality and quantity. We love to watch, but there is a lot of dross, so make your moving pictures count, and have some call to action that links with your strategy and actually offers your peeps additional value. Ephemera continues to gain momentum, think Insta and Facebook stories, but again, quality and meaning are the cornerstones, as is knowing your audience and what they are looking at – your feed or your story or both. Continuing to analyse the impacts of your digital marketing efforts is paramount to understanding your business, your customers and how to position your marketing.

What’s the haps for 2020? Plenty on the near horizon, but you’ll have to wait till our January post to see what’s in the crystal ball!