Photo: Thomas Kolnowski.

The way you market your ecommerce business today may not work tomorrow. This is true for all marketing and all time. Companies should watch important marketing trends — adapting and experimenting to discover what forms provide the best return.

In 2019, you’ll likely hear about artificial intelligence, influencer marketing, virtual reality, and any number of other marketing and advertising possibilities. But some may be a few years from having an impact.

So what about something a bit more practical? Here are five ecommerce marketing trends your business should consider in the coming year. None of these are new, but they should be effective.

1. Site Performance

Marketers have long been involved in website design and development. Think about it. The marketing department often controls site content, manages search engine optimization, and defines layout and navigation.

Sure, it will be a technical person, a code writer, who does a lot of the work. But marketing drives the decisions in many businesses.

In 2019, expect site performance monitoring to also become an important marketing task as an extension of SEO and user experience.

“According to Google, the average time it takes for a mobile landing page to load is now 22 seconds,” wrote Edwin Toonen in an April 2017 article for Yoast. “Compare that with the three seconds visitors need to decide if they want to stay for your page to load. People are impatient. They want something, and they want it now. While page speed is important for your SEO, it is even more important for your UX, conversion, and general customer happiness.”

Google has made page speed a ranking factor. Good ecommerce websites will be fast-loading progressive web apps and accelerated mobile pages.

“We’re working towards greatly improving all aspects of the user journey. The first step was reducing page load speeds across the site by optimizing image file sizing, types, and resolution. This improved conversion rate, mobile organic rankings, and customer happiness,” said Alan…