To answer that question, we have to go back to the very definition of digital marketing. It’s the concept of delivering advertising through digital channels.
It may be your website, online ads, social media, apps, or email. It’s a very broad term that grasps the essence of a modern marketing campaign: reaching the online audience.
Without a strong online presence, the marketing campaign for a business is not complete. It’s not good enough.
So it’s clear: every business needs a digital marketing campaign. Moreover, every business and marketer has to follow the trends in digital marketing. Let’s focus on the aspect of trends, shall we?
The Digital Marketing Trends of 2017
To understand where we’re going, we have to know where we’re coming from. In short – what notable digital marketing trends made 2017 special?
Big data – online marketing campaigns were based on predictive analytics, coming from market and customer insights.
Internet of things – it’s a trend that just started, but it’s changing the way small businesses approach to content
Influencer outreach – we’ve seen almost every social media influencer promoting something.
Mobile advertising – it’s going stronger by the day.
Live videos – people mostly use them to share moments of their days, but marketing experts are slowly finding their ways to benefit from this trend.
Marketing automation – since businesses have to be present on several online channels at a time, they are automating parts of the marketing campaign.
We’ll just stop there. Some of these trends will be growing in 2018. We explore and expand them to a whole other level.
Now, let’s look forward. What digital marketing megatrends will make the upcoming year different than 2017? What should business owners and marketing experts focus on?
Virtual Reality Is Getting Bigger
VR is better with friends. That’s the motto of a new Facebook project, which is still in its beta version. It’s called Spaces, and it brings virtual reality to social media. With this feature, people will get to be themselves in a different kind of reality. They will use their Facebook photos to build the VR character.
How will brands translate this trend into their digital marketing strategies? We’re sure of one thing: the opportunities are endless. They can create their own VR characters and stories, and use them to build relationships with the target audience.
Big data was one of the most notable marketing trends of 2017. It continues to grow bigger! We’re seeing more people getting connected with more objects, using more services, and sharing more of their preferences.
We’re constantly getting an increased volume of data to work with, and that helps us elevate the effectiveness of our marketing strategies.
The forecast leaves us in awe: the revenue from big data and business analytics on a global level are expected to reach $168.7 billion in 2018.
What customer is tracking data sets will we see in the upcoming year? Digitally-mature brands will rely on customer journey data and customer experience mapping. With these techniques, they can understand the experience of their users and deliver a personalized service. A business that doesn’t rely on this trend risks wasting time and developing ineffective marketing campaigns.
It’s not something new, but it’s a trend that will definitely grow.
Conversational Marketing
All businesses are aiming towards the very responsive to messages badge on Facebook. When people see that badge on your profile, they are encouraged to drop you a message with their questions or comments.
If they want to get in touch with the customer support to solve any issues or get answers before buying the product, they expect quick answers. With this badge, you prove that your support system is impeccable.
Facebook’s Messenger allows businesses to interact with the audience at a fairly face pace. That’s part of the marketing process, too. It’s the type of conversational marketing that’s going to be huge in 2018.
Let’s say you’re trying to buy snow tires for your car, and you found few local businesses on Facebook. They all sell different kinds of tires with different prices. You may write on their profiles, but maybe you don’t want all your Facebook friends to know what you’re looking for.
You’re just interested in the offer and the price, so you want to directly contact the support. If you do that via Facebook Messenger, you’ll most likely choose the business that does conversational marketing well.
Generation Z Is Now in the Focus
Move over Millennials; Gen Xers are about to take the spotlight. In 2018, the older representatives of the Generation Z (also known as Post-Millennials, Homeland Generation, or iGeneration) will be hitting the workforce.
They will have their own money to buy our products and services. Thus, marketing experts will have to include the needs of this generation in their promotional processes.
What makes this generation different than the Millennials? For starters, they prefer Instagram and Snapchat over Facebook. They are younger and more vibrant. They have more free time on their hands.
They use more devices in a day, and they are experimenting with every platform you throw at them. They would rather type a message than have an actual conversation.
Most of all, Gen Xers are Internet experts. Thus, your digital marketing campaign will have to live up to their standards.
Social Media for the Entire Organization
Digital marketing will no longer be limited to the marketing department of a company. We’ve seen this in action: employees promoting the company in its best light. MAC Cosmetics involved its employees in a social media campaign back in 2012. That gave a more “human” touch to the entire marketing process.
The online audience does not particularly trust corporate marketing. They want a subtler approach. When a company involves its employees in the process, they deliver what the audience expects: direct contact with the brand. Plus, they get to promote products and services along the way.
Chatbots are everywhere, yes?
Chatbots
What does a chatbot have to do with marketing? Isn’t it mostly for customer support? It is. However, the customer support process is part of a good digital marketing strategy.
If you have an impeccable customer service department, it will promote your business in a good way.
Chatbots saw a quick rise in 2017. We still haven’t seen the TacoBot, but we expect it to revolutionize the concept of the chatbot. We have to admit one thing: the marketing campaign developed around this tool is pretty great.
The chatbot itself is smart, effective, and it has a sense of humor. It gives us a hint into a very special trend: chatbots are the future of customer service!
Personalized Content Marketing
Internet users are demanding personalization. They want it in the customer support processes. They want it in the service delivery. However, they also demand personalization in your content marketing campaign.
According to Monetate, “94% of in-house marketers believe that a personalized website experience is “critical to current and future success.”
Personalized web experience – that’s where content marketing gets merged with the process of personalization. Most visitors share names and emails to get valuable content, such as eBook or long-form articles. We can use that basic data to provide a more personalized content marketing campaign via email, as well as on the site.
Video Marketing
According to Forrester research, a minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. Whoa, that’s a bold statement, isn’t it? But, it’s true. A video is much more effective than written content. Content is in the essence of video marketing, so we’ll still need writing services like Essay Geeks in 2018. However, chances are we’ll be needing more video scripts.
If you check your Facebook or Instagram feed, you’ll notice that videos are dominating the platforms. As you scroll down, a video will catch your attention, and you’ll stop for a moment thinking “let’s see what this is!” That’s exactly how most social media users react to videos, and it’s exactly why digital marketers will focus on this element of their campaigns.
Infusing Marketing into the Customer Journey Mapping Process
The customer’s lifecycle tells us a lot about the way the user approaches our products or services. The process of customer journey mapping is quite complex. It goes through three important stages:
Outlining the buyer persona
Defining all stages in a customer’s journey
Designing a customer journey map
Through this map, the business understands how their ideal customers behave. Why is this important for the marketing campaign? The data you get helps you design a truly effective marketing campaign. You understand how your target user considers, buys, uses and maintains your product or service.
In 2018, we expect to see an evolution in the way marketing strategies are designed around a customer’s journey. It’s easy for us to start thinking from a user’s point of view and trigger the action we want them to take.
As highlighted in Econsultancy’s Content Strategy Best Practice Guide from July 2017, “solid understanding of the customer journey through customer journey mapping can establish a firm foundation for success.” In 2018, digital marketing strategies will be moving in that direction.
More Influencer Marketing
When you think of influencer marketing, you think of Instagram. It’s the center of this trend. We’re seeing people with millions of followers promoting all kinds of brands, products, and services through the platform.
But that’s not where it stops. Influencer marketing is present on all other social media channels, too. It involves bloggers, who influence to convince people to try anything they recommend.
This is a prominent current trend. With the rise of Instagram stories, it’s taking a different dimension. We expect influencer marketing to grow in that direction throughout 2018.
Through their stories, our favorite Instagrammers are not only sharing moments of their days. They also make recommendations that we trust, and they don’t seem intrusive by doing that.
Since the platform doesn’t serve this content in your feed, you see only the stories you want to see. That’s why you trust them more. That’s why brands can benefit from this marketing method.
Digital Marketing Growth Is on Its Way
With the ten upcoming trends we described above, we tried to predict how businesses will approach digital marketing in 2018. That brings us to the final and most important trend: digital marketing growth. It’s a never-ending process that doesn’t allow us to remain in any comfort zone.
Many of the old trends are still persistent, but we keep adding new ones in our practices. Digital marketing transforms the way businesses operate. In a good way. Does your business have a specific digital marketing growth program in place? It should have. Consider the above-listed trends and make sure to include them in your strategy.
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Chris Richardson is a journalist, editor, and a blogger. He loves to write, learn new things, and meet new outgoing people. Chris is also fond of traveling, sports, and playing the guitar. Follow him on Facebook and Google+.
It is simple. Marketing is a form of communicating with people to sell them a product or service. However, it’s often a complicated dance of finding new and exciting ways to persuade them. The top marketing initiatives will add to this discussion.
In this social-media-dominated world, the conversation is increasingly detail-oriented and high-tech. It’s for this very reason that the most powerful messages remain human-centric.
Technology will help marketers engage consumers more directly by circumventing distractions and increasing their marketing reach. These tactics appeal to fundamental aspects of human nature.
As such, they can help marketers create carefully coordinated campaigns and conversations. Brands and consumers seek to coalesce into a shared experience, don’t they?
Are you one that believes that creativity can be learned? We are among that group. We also believe in suggestions for innovative thinking can boost team creativity through effective collaboration.
Through a series of sparks and not a single flash of insight. Certainly our way of thinking.
Here are 19 primary marketing initiatives that deserve your time and attention. If you capture their essence, they will help you address the challenges, opportunities, and complexities you’ll undoubtedly face as you move forward.
Interactive Content
There’s content you can read, and then there’s content with which you can interact. The second variety is certainly increasing in popularity.
For example, BuzzFeed’s “Which City Should You Live In?” quiz has been one of their home-run pieces. Think of ways to get readers to actively participate instead of passively consume.
Interactive content can include assessments (such as the classic Cosmo Quiz setup), polls, surveys, infographics, brackets, and contests.
Mobile video
Have you studied your Facebook feed recently? The chances are that 95% of it is video. And here’s a fun stat: mobile video views grew six times faster than desktop views in 2015.
In fact, in Q4 of 2015, mobile video views exceeded desktop views for the first time. We now live in an age of mobile video, and it’s time we embraced it.
Influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing
Influence marketing isn’t new, but it is certainly maturing. Warren Whitlock, a noted influence marketing pro, says, “Everyone has influence.
Influence marketing is the practice of finding people who are already influencing your market. They will welcome your help to serve their audience better and reward you with reputation and trusted leads.”
What’s more effective than an ad in selling your product? A lovable social media personality is speaking highly about your product to his or her fans and followers. Influencer marketing is on the rise because people tend to trust recommendations from people they see as thought leaders.
The right influencers establish credibility through each social media post or advertisement. When they work with brands, it’s because they genuinely believe in them, and that trust is passed on to consumers.
Virtual and augmented reality
One of the recent biggest highlights was watching a screen-afflicted population carry their mobile devices out into the world to catch, yes, Pokemon.
The biggest takeaway from this phenomenon was augmented reality’s ability to drive real business results. This has become a very viable option for marketers looking to bring online into the real world.
Mobile-first strategy
A huge understatement is that the future is mobile. Internet traffic is now coming more from mobile devices more than desktops. If you’re not catering to your content, ads and online experience to a mobile user, then you are missing a massive opportunity.
And remember: It’s not just about “optimizing” for mobile; it’s also about making sure that piece of content gets integrated with a user’s lifestyle on the go.
Back in mid-2014, we reached the official tipping point when mobile devices officially overtook desktops as the preferred method of viewing and downloading content on the web.
By the 4th quarter of 2016, 50% of all B2B companies had implemented a responsive design for their websites, according to Gorilla Group. (Responsive design allows a website to be more easily viewed on smartphones, tablets, and notebooks.)
That was almost double the percentage of sites with responsive design in 2015 (26%). That trend will undoubtedly continue in 2017, as more and more B2B marketers realize the necessity of deploying mobile-friendly sites.
Mobile was in the top 3 three years ago, but as more companies have adopted mobile responsive web design and email templates they have seen less need to focus on it, or at least there are fewer opportunities for growth.
However, research shows that retail conversion rates are significantly lower on a smartphone, so there is work to be done for many businesses to optimize conversion on mobile, although they will likely always stay lower than desktop.
Chatbots
Do you think of chatbots as an annoying popup on a website that looks like it was built in the mid-’90s? Not me. I believe chatbot technology has become much more sophisticated.
A great example is the behemoth Facebook, which invests a significant amount of resources into bot programs that provide users with news updates, personalized responses and more.
Are you talking to a human or a bot? If you can’t tell, then the bot is working as intended.
Native Advertising
Viewers, followers, and consumers are getting wise to the tricks of advertisers, and it’s becoming harder and harder to earn and maintain their trust.
Native advertising means integrating your advertising efforts into content that already provides value to readers and viewers.
For this reason, it tends to be more effective. Look for ways to weave your products and offerings into a larger narrative, instead of just blasting with ads.
It’s much less intrusive, can provide educational benefits for the reader, is more likely to be shared, and can be very cost-effective for the advertiser.
This type of content usually is useful, interesting and targeted to a specific audience — all of which makes it one of the best platforms to launch any marketing campaign.
Data-driven marketing
There are two types of marketers: those who want to use what’s popular and those who use what works, regardless of whether it’s popular or not. Data tells you what’s moving the needle, and the truth is that every marketer needs to be conscious of it.
Data-driven marketing applications include market and customer insight and predictive analytics.
Social media “buy” buttons
We are moving into an age where purchasing doesn’t need to happen on a third-party site. Users are on a social platform, so why should they have to leave to buy something? “Buy” buttons are quickly turning social media sites such as Facebook and Pinterest into social shopping experiences.
Internet of things (IoT)
IoT is one of the most important marketing technology applications of the last 2-3 years, but it is of most relevance to device makers and retailers. This makes it relatively high-up in this ranking of priorities.
There are expected to be 75 billion connected devices by 2020, meaning there will be ten times as many devices able to talk to one another as there will be people on the planet!
The implications are huge and far-ranging. All this sharing of data will transform the way we live our lives.
Personalization means segmenting your content to reach different types of audience members based on their preferences, habits, etc.
The most common form of this strategy is through lists, where certain content gets sent to certain types of users based on which lists they’ve opted into. In a world of too much content and not enough time, personalization is a huge win for brands looking to earn the attention of their consumers.
But daily information overload has made people more resistant to advertising. Today’s consumers can spot obvious sales pitches or marketing come-ons, and they’ll be turned off by it.
Targeting consumers on a personal level allow marketers to cut through the torrent of stimuli.
To capture an overwhelmed customer’s attention, marketers must reach him or her with personalized, relevant content. It’s all about creating marketing tactics that home in on exactly what consumers are looking for or thinking about.
Tracking consumers’ habits, interests and browsing histories is essential to creating strategies that get them to execute a purchase.
Above and beyond viewability
Currently, most companies use viewability to measure their success. Instead of solely focusing on views or clicks, companies should measure their ROI on things such as sign-ups, downloads, and purchases.
This requires going beyond CPMs and looking at the performance-based metrics instead.
Customer experience balance
Probably the most impactful marketing trend will be a tighter focus on improving the customer experience. Strive to use a balanced approach to building customer loyalty.
Instead of focusing solely on “customer-centric” methods based on your customers’ lifetime value, offset it with “customer-focused” techniques that enable you to provide relevant experiences across all touchpoints. Concentrate on what your customers value most.
Artificial intelligence/machine learning
The integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into marketing techniques will continue to increase. Recently, Forrester Research predicted that “AI will provide business users with access to powerful insights before they are available to them.”
How?
Through the use of cognitive interfaces in complex systems, advanced analytics, and machine learning technology. Many vendors are already embedding components of cognitive computing capabilities into their solutions.
Visual content marketing
According to HubSpot, marketers still place increasing emphasis on the importance of visual content in their marketing portfolios. The primary driver is the desire to make content more engaging, compelling, and shareable than just the written word.
The most common forms of visual content that are being used are the video (including 360-degree video), infographics, and images in blogs and social media posts.
Top marketing initiatives … experiential marketing
Instead of just sending a marketing message to a prospect, experiential marketing creates an opportunity for your customers and prospects to truly experience your brand, whether in a virtual setting or in person.
Spend some time educating yourself about the latest experiential marketing strategies and techniques, and give some thought as to how you could integrate them into the interactions with your customers and prospects.
You might also want to consider how experiential marketing could be used within your organization for engaging, educating, and energizing your employees.
Social media
In 2016, 39% of marketers reported significant ROI generated from social media marketing, contrasted with only 9% in 2015.
While this data implies that challenges still exist, year-over-year increases show that marketers are becoming more successful at converting social media activities into sales leads, and ultimately, revenue.
Next-gen automation
Some studies conducted by Aberdeen Group, Ovum, Marketing Sherpa, and others have revealed that the adoption of marketing automation technologies continues to be one of the fastest-growing marketing trends today.
The next generation of marketing automation tools is now being used by all sizes and types of organizations to accomplish a variety of objectives. These objectives include driving e-commerce revenue, generating and nurturing leads, accumulating customer intelligence, managing cross-channel campaigns, among many others.
According to Forrester Research, 58% of the top-performing companies where marketing contributes more than half of the sales pipeline have adopted marketing automation.
Marketing automation is growing at an impressive rate, with 71 percent of companies currently using this tech. Marketing automation does exactly what the name suggests, using software platforms designed to put repetitive tasks on autopilot.
Collaboration
Although the need seems obvious, most B2B organizations still aren’t willing—or don’t know how—to align their marketing and sales efforts. You can argue that customer experience should be added to the equation as well so that all three functions are marching to the same drummer.
That approach will help tear down the inherent silos that exist in most organizations and will encourage everyone to turn their focus to the customer.
Also, experiment with incorporating shared goals in your compensation programs for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
It’s amazing what financial incentives can do to change behavior when it comes to alignment and collaboration.
Content marketing
Content marketing sometimes is confused with native marketing. Though the two often go hand in hand, content marketing is its beast.
Native marketing is simply another way for marketers to distribute content. Content marketing is a strategic marketing technique to create and distribute relevant information to attract a target audience. It’s not a paid-and-done transaction, like placing a native ad. Rather, it’s an ongoing process that’s best integrated into an overall marketing strategy.
It can serve as the cornerstone to nearly any marketing plan and works for all types of brands because everyone uses it differently. The key is to be consistent, staying in character for your brand. If that brand voice is clever, interesting or funny, your target audience can’t help but be engaged.
The bottom line
Ditch the dream and be a doer, not a dreamer.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
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