Word has spread that in the increasingly digital world the importance of customers continues to grow explosively and there is general agreement on the importance of customer relations for the creation of value for a company’s success.

But why do customers then feel so little about all this and still not have the status they deserve?

In their insightful report Break Through the Hype: Uncover the Reality of AI, Oracle and Bronto point out that a growing number of commerce marketing software providers claim their systems use AI, explaining in a nutshell what this means:

WARC, the global authority on advertising and media effectiveness, released Marketer's Toolkit 2019, an annual report outlining companies’ priorities and the challenges brands are facing in the year ahead. The report is centred on a survey of more than 800 senior marketing and advertising professionals from around the world and takes an in-depth look at strategic priorities, technology and media challenges, besides covering interviews with nine leading marketers, as well as examples, best practice guidance and a round-up of what this all means for brands, media owners and agencies.

From a consumer perspective, companies have what it takes to save social media from the crisis of confidence. They see companies in a position to leverage their influence by compulsory heckling with the big social media platforms.

2019 will be the break through year of what has been predicted for years but hasn’t yet materialized to any significant extent: big brands, advertising agencies, retailers, and leading media will disappear into insignificance, creating space for new things and better solutions besides new social- and value systems. The trend towards something new and the challenges in digital marketing will simply increase even more: it continues to be all about personalization, voice and the increasing dominance of Instagram; Amazon will go head to head with Google and Facebook in online advertising market share; and collaboration within agencies and agile brand management will keep on being important.

A recent study by elaboratum, a German expert consultancy firm for digital business and cross-channel strategies, shows that optimizing your website for emotional and intuitive decision-making factors can significantly improve your conversion rate.

Hootsuite, the leader in social media management, released in collaboration with We Are Social, the eighth annual report, Digital 2019, which examines digital trends and social media use across 230 countries and territories, uncovered that more than one million new people go online every day, and that 45% of the world— nearly 3.5 billion people annually—are logging in to their favorite social platforms. That’s a near 9% released increase year-over-year despite growing concerns of fake news, fake followers and data privacy in 2018.

Customer Experience (CX) is in vogue, as Google hits for CX confirm, which have risen from 80 million in 2011 to over a billion in 2018, apart from the fact that CX has been mentioned in many studies as a top management issue, even though companies are still struggling with it. Nowadays, it is obviously not the price-performance ratio that is decisive, but the best price-experience ratio in a price range, and people no longer speak of digital transformation, but digitization in the sense of optimal integration of the digital and analog worlds.

As you can imagine, the digital disruption in sales stirs up existential fears, even among long-established distributors, since intelligent sales support in the form of software, apps and artificial intelligence are often not in place. The traditional methods of conducting sales negotiations need a fresh push as well this year, considering that analogue and digital communication will at best converge to a 360-degree dialogue competence. So, expect the winners of disruption in distribution to be companies and vendors that recognize this development potential and acquire new strategies.

Considering that digitization was still smiled at a few years ago, two-thirds of retailers look at it today as an opportunity to thrive, aware of the fact that shop systems will be much more than just additional distribution channels in the future. The boundaries between online, offline and mobile will continue to merge and the distribution channels no longer coexist but used in combination the way consumers want them to. Hence, the cross-channel shopping experience is at the top of every merchant’s list when it comes to customer expectations.

The leading AI-powered social media marketing platform Socialbakers released a comprehensive report at the end of 2018 a comprehensive report that offers detailed information about the state of social media engagement and advertising, as well as emerging themes for the year ahead. The trend report dives into demographics and brand trends, advertising effectiveness, engagement best practices, and emerging trends involving influencer marketing and privacy and security.

Adobe unveiled its vision and strategy to make every experience shoppable by integrating Magento Commerce Cloud into Adobe Experience Cloud, enabling enterprise companies to create highly engaging, personalized shopping experiences.

Jeff Bullas, who has been named by Forbes one of the world's top social marketing talents, has published a helpful article for all those who want to find out how social technologies add value to their daily life.

Some social media key performance indicators (KPIs) only relate to individual social media platforms while others have overall significance. Therefore, as with almost any social media target, the question arises how marketers can measure success - or failure.