There’s a saying in the military that goes “adapt and overcome” and I think it applies as much to marketing as it does to the military.
What separates a good marketer from a great one is their ability to read the landscape, anticipate changes and adapt quickly. To help you stay ahead of the curve, we thought we’d share a few of our insights on what we believe will be the most significant changes to the search marketing landscape in 2019.
Google Smart Features
Google’s newest update released Smart Campaigns, which are designed to simplify the creation and automation of campaigns for smaller businesses/general marketers. While they are simplified, they can still cause confusion to the uninitiated. Larger agencies can take advantage of the new features to help automate and cut down on time creating campaigns, but smaller or less-experienced digital marketers will still require specialists to guide the process.
How Voice Search Is Affecting Keyword Bidding
Although the preferred method for many consumers is still to type their search queries, voice search is becoming increasingly more popular and available—and that means longer—and different—search phrases. Bidding on longer, more focused search queries as well as including additional Q&A messaging can help to capitalize on this new trend. Being able to answer questions to potential voice queries in your text ads could be a great opportunity to capture traffic and generate more qualified leads.
CPCs on the Rise
Costs per click (CPCs) have been steadily rising over the past four years but is something we’ve really noticed firsthand in the past year. As ad quality and competition increase, it is no longer enough to just bid more aggressively. In order to combat the rising CPCs, advertisers need to rethink their approach to messaging and how to qualify and identify their core audience. Increasing the quality of messaging, coupled with the increasing use of automation should help to control the rising CPCs and improve quality scores.
While no one knows what the future holds, this is our best (educated) guess at the what’s on the horizon in the search marketing landscape. We’ll keep you posted.
