The digital marketing landscape is changing rapidly. Recently, marketers flocked to new social media platforms, like Periscope and Snapchat. But these channels soon were replaced with Facebook Live and Instagram Stories. These rapid shifts illustrate the importance of identifying the right marketing trends to jump on. When you do, you can “ride the wave” as a specific trend grows in popularity. Finding the right strategies can lead to more brand awareness, traffic, leads and sales, among other things. As such, here are five growing trends in the digital marketing space that you can start using right now:

1. Email marketing 2.0

Email marketing is decidedly not a new marketing tool. In fact, it’s one of the original methods that businesses used to reach customers online and stay in touch with them. However, email became uncool during the advent of social media marketing. In fact, many marketers thought that email marketing would be “dead” in due time. Fortunately, email marketing never fell entirely out of fashion. In fact, email marketing is making a giant comeback. Two micro-trends illustrate email’s surprising return to favor.

First, there are many email service providers constantly entering the market. One of the most successful of these emerging players in the ESP space is ConvertKit.

Second, there’s a large amount of growth in the paid newsletter space. This is evidenced by the rapid growth of Substack, a platform for folks that run paid newsletters.

2. Influencer Marketing Goes Niche

According to a survey conducted by Social Publi, 93% of marketers already use influencer marketing. That’s largely because influencer marketing can often bring in a higher ROI than SEO (search engine optimization), content marketing or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.

However, as more businesses jump into influencer marketing, costs are rising. This market saturation puts a significant dent in influencer marketing’s formerly unmatched ROI. Instead, they’re seeking “microinfluencers.” Microinfluencers are individuals on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok who have a relatively small following. The advantage of microinfluencers is that their followers tend to be highly engaged. But most importantly, microinfluencers generally charge much less than influencers with millions of followers, so that’s why brands of all sizes are starting to seek them out.

3. Chatbot Use Continues to Grow

It can be counterproductive for any of your employees to spend a lot of time answering the same set of questions several times. As a solution to this challenge, Bing came up with chatbots several months ago.A bot is a program that interacts with users using natural language. This will take the repetitive call answering task off your employees so they can focus on their core responsibilities and this also save you some cost.In the process of answering calls, some chatbots can also do a little bit of digital marketing. Not only that, chatbots respond instantly and internet marketing requires quick response to inquiries as prospective customers are usually very impatient. They require an answer as quickly as possible.

4. PPC Becomes Largely Automated

Using software to help run PPC campaigns isn’t new at all. In fact, almost as soon as Google Adwords (now Google Ads) came onto the scene, software programs emerged to help marketers optimize their campaigns. A big reason for this adoption is that, unlike in years past, the ad platforms themselves now offer in-house automation tools. For example, Google Ads campaigns can now be managed with Smart Bidding, and marketers can use Facebook’s Dynamic Creative to quickly test thousands of ad variations.

5. Video Becomes the Default Medium

YouTube reports that users watch 1 billion hours’ worth of videos every day. That’s a staggering number, especially if you take into account that YouTube is just one of many video-supported channels out there. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Reddit all support video content, and many are transitioning to become “video first” platforms.Marketers that learn the skills behind creating engaging videos (like planning, scripting, lighting, shooting, editing and graphics) will have a leg up over those that only write text-based blog posts.