The Digital and Online Marketing Forecast 2018

Digital technology has been evolving at an incredible pace, and the marketing industry has historically and contemporaneously been a huge driving force behind these changes.  Just about every company of any size already has some sort of online presence, but those who wish to remain competitive within a changing market landscape need to pay special attention to the changes already happening and to those anticipated for the coming year.

Read on to find out about anticipated Digital Marketing / Online Marketing Trends for 2018 and how they can be expected to impact marketing strategies.

Augmented Reality Integration

As mobile devices become more powerful and begin to integrate with augmented reality, companies and brands can be expected to begin using these tools more effectively to their advantage.  While Pokemon Go was heralded as the pioneer in location-specific content, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media giants can be expected to follow suit in the near future.

Marketing experts who want to take advantage of location-specific sponsored augmented reality content should begin to develop these ideas now for future integration into this powerful new advertising platform.

Conversational User Interfaces

 

While Amazon’s Alexa was the first conversational interaction bot to begin reaching mainstream popularity, many other major contenders have already begun to jump on the bandwagon.  As these chatbots begin to find their place in consumers’ daily routines, the marketing industry can be expected to change accordingly.

This powerful platform for consumer interaction will allow companies and brands to interact more naturally with their target audiences, but only if the marketing experts responsible for creating content can manage to keep up with these changes.

Increased Personalization

Impersonal and non-targeted ads are quickly going the way of the fax machine.  Increased personalization and hyper-targeted ad campaigns have quickly been rising in popularity, allowing advertisers to actively engage more consumers to increase their conversion rates.

The best way for marketing professionals to take advantage of these changes is to connect personalized landing pages to each advertising campaign to help build a targeted connection with browsers.

Changes in Social Media Marketing

Influencer marketing has become a popular method for reaching new audiences in recent years, but its popularity seems to finally be on the wane.  While top-tier social influencers continue to garner serious attention, mid-level influencers seem to be getting lost in the crowd.

Instead of wasting their advertising budgets on ineffective influencer campaigns, companies may want to start focusing more on professional-quality live video streaming on social media, as it is already proving to be a better way to connect with audiences and potential customers.

Video Marketing

Live video isn’t the only means of video marketing that is on the rise.  Video marketing, in general, is quickly becoming the most influential form of digital content, and if done right it can have a dramatic positive impact on a company’s growth.

It’s important for marketers to recognize that browsers’ attention spans are swiftly decreasing, especially when it comes to advertising.  As attention spans decrease, video content must be tailored to increase immediate engagement in order to remain effective.

 

More Targeted Ads

Given how many ads the average consumer is exposed to on a daily basis, it can be difficult to capture a viewer’s attention using conventional broad marketing strategies.  As a result, many marketing professionals are beginning to create ads that are more singularly purposed with specific goals in mind.  These goals should absolutely include improved mobile experience, as mobile ad platforms are expected to show major growth in the coming year.

Contextual Targeting Strategies

As regulations concerning data protection become stricter, marketing professionals should expect data tracking to become increasingly difficult as a result.  Instead of utilizing traditional audience targeting strategies, they will have to begin using contextual targeting instead. In order to do so, advertisers will have to improve their understanding of individual page context and their ability to predict audience behaviors and expectations without the use of cookies.

Understanding of Customer Journey

While the data collected on consumer use of the internet can be a powerful tool for digital marketers, the ability to translate this data into an in-depth understanding of the customer journey will become essential in the coming year.  The first step toward this goal is to use the data to evaluate what consumers are doing along every step of their paths toward an eventual purchase.  Design features can then be incorporated into the website to help them along this journey.