Consumer expectations are higher than ever before—and that means everyone is upping their game. The future of marketing is all about delivering relevant, useful, and assistive experiences. The playbook, however, is still being written.

Brands need insights and technology to build for today’s consumer. That’s why we at Google are pushing advancements in technology and machine learning, helping marketers to improve their understanding of the consumer journey. Consumers have hundreds of touchpoints on their path to purchase and marketers need to figure out what resonates—and what doesn’t. We’re introducing new tools and innovations to make attribution, store visits measurements, and programmatic buying easier and more effective. Fresh from Google Marketing Next, here are four key insights to help build your new marketing playbook.
The ways people get assistance will evolve
Mobile has conditioned consumers to turn to their devices in I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy micro-moments. Now the ways people get assistance will evolve too, from typing on devices to speaking to them. For example, in the Google app, 20% of searches are now by voice.1 And that’s just a preview of what’s to come.

Consumers want a frictionless mobile experience

Getting the mobile fundamentals right is critical. To stay ahead of consumer needs, it’s important to lay the groundwork with mobile now. Marketers need to think about optimizing their brand’s entire mobile footprint to ensure success in the future. And speed is key here. No matter how great your mobile site looks, if it loads slowly, users will abandon it.

By analyzing 900,000 mobile ad landing pages across 126 countries, we’ve established new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed. The open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project launched 18 months ago helps make the mobile web faster and better. And now we’re working with advertisers to send paid mobile traffic from search ads to AMP landing pages, making the path to purchase faster for consumers. That’s a critical milestone given that for every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20%.2

People are blending their offline and online worlds

The customer journey is far from linear today. Still, a holistic view of customers is now possible. Innovative measurement tools will help marketers understand the full customer journey across channels, devices, and media types—bridging the digital and physical worlds.

Accurately measuring store visits is key to understanding the full value of your marketing investments. In less than three years, advertisers globally have measured over 5B store visits3 using Google Ads.4 With advanced machine learning and mapping technology, marketers can accurately measure more store visits at scale and use these insights to deliver better local ad experiences.

Expectations for advertising are rising

Today, consumers believe they should receive marketing messages that are tailored to their unique needs. So, once you have a comprehensive view of your customers, the next step is to reach them in the right moment with the right message. And reaching your audience just got much, much easier.

The programmatic revolution has focused on combining data, machine learning, and automation to drive better performance. However, few of these benefits have carried over to the world of media planning—where the foundations for campaign success are built. To save marketers time and improve performance, Google Marketing Platform5 has been optimized to streamline campaign planning. It uses machine learning to analyze past campaigns and recommends the right inventory and targeting based on your unique goals and what’s performed well historically. That makes it easier to go from insight to impact.

All of these trends and innovations are shaping a fast-changing marketing landscape. To meet and exceed consumers’ expectations in an assistive future, we at Google continue to innovate. And by arming yourself with the right tools and insights, you can ensure that consumer expectations won’t outpace your ability to deliver on them.