How 5G will disrupt the digital marketing landscape in 2022 Share via

5G, or the 5^th Generation Wireless Network, promises to be a game-changer in how digital marketers communicate and reach potential customers. Although 5G has been around for some years now, it is still not widely penetrated, and as experts believe, it may take some more years to make a significant impact across the globe. But brand marketers have started to devise strategies to leverage the 5G technology to its full potential as it promises faster internet speed on the mobile device with very low latency. Once the technology is rolled out to the masses, digital marketing specialists believe that there will be enormous changes in how digital marketers design their marketing campaigns and how new and more attractive visual mediums will become the need of the hour to target consumers.

The most significant changes brand marketers will look to bring into their campaigns is using high-definition video content targeting the consumers’ mobile devices. Although video advertising has increased exponentially during the 4G era, 5G will allow brands to integrate rich and immersive video content into their marketing campaigns once the technology’s adoption reaches a significant level. In addition, since 5G dramatically reduces the downloading time, it is expected that users will likely be more receptive to open HD video advertisements.  According to Cisco, 79% of global mobile data traffic will be video by 2022. That’s up from 59% in 2017, or a nine fold increase.

In fact, many brand marketers have said that they will be significantly increasing the investment to bolster their video capabilities as they are witnessing higher consumption of HD video content, which is likely to go up in the near future. In addition, the access to lightning speeds will also bring AR and VR into the picture more prominently. According to a Gartner report, by 2020 itself, 100 million consumers were expected to shop online and offline using AR capabilities.

But, one thing that will still make a difference is the ability of brands to personalize. Just because your content loads faster now doesn’t mean that the user will be interested in it. The consumer will only open your advertisements when it is personalized to suit their requirements.

So, is 5G going to help the marketers personalize their offerings to their customers better? Digital marketers feel that 5G will enable brands to personalize their customer experience like never before. Riding on the back of high-speed internet, brands will have the ability to create hyper-personalized customer experiences that merge detailed customer data with real-time analytics, which was a much difficult task for organizations earlier. In addition, devices connected with 5G networks will generate an enormous amount of customer data that can be broken down into granular details to aid marketers in personalizing their campaigns better.

5G will also have a massive impact on the m-commerce business. According to eMarketer, m-commerce remains the preferred channel among shoppers across the globe, and it predicts the global retail m-commerce sales to reach nearly USD 4.5 trillion by 2024. As per the report, these numbers suggest that 69.9% of total retail e-commerce sales will be done on mobile devices. However, consumers often face issues with various mobile applications because of their low performance owing to the slower internet speeds, which acts as a huge setback for the companies. But once 5G becomes commonplace, this issue of latency is expected to be resolved, which will eventually benefit both the companies and the customers alike.

For brands, it is also imperative to consider mobile-first marketing and advertising in the coming days and streamline their shopping apps to improve customer experience. Adding new features like interactive games, in-app ads, live shopping can help them with higher engagement and conversion rates. Furthermore, adding heavy data features to make the app more engaging is what many marketers will look into in the 5G era.

There is no doubt that 5G will open up a lot of new opportunities for the marketers and brands where they can experiment with innovative and immersive features to attract and acquire new consumers and retain the existing ones. Apart from the strategies that we have discussed above, there are a lot of other initiatives that brands will explore once the usage of this technology becomes mainstream.