The move into 2018 also comes with a shift in digital marketing. New trends are entering the marketplace and your company needs to pay attention or you may be forced by the wayside. With the need to become more visible and reach more customers, the digital marketing of tomorrow offers advancements in emerging technologies as consumers demand a more integrated experience.
Fifteen members of Forbes Agency Council share what they think will be the major digital marketing trends of 2018. Here is what they had to say:
Forbes Agency Council members offer their best insights.
1. Augmented Reality Integrated Through Social Media
As our mobile devices become more powerful and social apps better integrate with AR, brands will use AR to better engage with consumers. For example, using your location, brands could trigger sponsored AR content, which can only be accessed at that spot, at that time. Pokémon Go was the pioneer with this idea, and I feel Instagram and Facebook will soon be integrating this tech into its platforms. – Chris Carter, Rep Interactive
2. Collapse Of The Influencer Market Brands pour millions of dollars into influencers now, but by and large they’re either not measuring or not seeing the results they could get from alternative marketing spends. The market will collapse as brands zero in on a few select individuals who drive results or move to organic grassroots promotion, and away from high-cost, middle-tier influencers who drive awareness but little ROI. – Craig Greiwe, Rogers & Cowan
3. True Understanding Of Customer Journey Data-driven marketing is a powerful tool, but how that data translates to the customer journey will be paramount in digital marketing success in 2018. Strive first to use data to know where your consumers will be on every step of their purchasing path, learn what appeals to them, and design your marketing to touch them all along their journey. – Katie Harris, Spot On Solutions
4. More Targeted Ads With Specific Purpose People already have minimal attention spans and get served with so many ads on a daily basis. I think ads will become more singularly purposed in nature, with a very specific goal and goal conversion place in mind, whether it be a mobile or desktop experience. I also think that the mobile ad platforms will show major growth in 2018, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. – David Kley, Web Design and Company
5. Professional Live Video Video will continue to be a trend in 2018 but not just video, professional live video. Every social media platform is jumping into live video and adding new features monthly to their platforms. Live video is a great way to connect with your audience, and the shaky, holding-a-phone-in-your-hand live video won’t be acceptable anymore. – Thomas Brodbeck, Site Strategics
6. Conversational User Interfaces Conversational interactions, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, chatbots and others, will continue to find their place in consumers’ daily routines and lives. Conversation is the original user interface. It’s extremely natural and will allow for brands to naturally interact with consumers that want information, or to transact, or just to be entertained. – Andrew Howlett, Rain
7. Video Marketing Video is becoming the most popular and influential form of digital content for businesses today and if done right, it can have a very positive impact on your business. As our attention spans decrease, marketers are heavily relying more and more on creating video content to boost search engine rankings, increase engagement and website traffic rates, as an example. – Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS
8. Personalization Along All Stages Of The Sales Funnel Impersonalized email blasts and ads are going the way of the fax machine. Becoming hyper-targeted and focusing on personalizing every interaction is becoming increasingly important. Personalized landing pages should be connected to every one of your advertising campaigns. Attention is a currency, and building a personalized connection with prospects will be critical for digital marketing in 2018. – Twila Grissom, Acorn Digital Strategy
9. Contextual Targeting Strategies In the context of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we can expect that it will be more complicated for ad tech vendors to track user behaviors with cookies. Audience targeting strategies will be progressively replaced by contextual targeting strategies and it will be mandatory for advertisers to understand what each page context is all about, for targeting and brand safety purposes. – Julien Verdier, Adyoulike
10. Cost Per Experiment As A Leading Metric Smart digital marketers will continue to get closer to a true ROI on their work by identifying all the old metrics rolled up into a cost per experiment — those old metrics like CPM (impressions), CPC (clicks), CPL (leads) and even CPP (pixels) the advanced marketers were tracking. With too many channels and even more martech tools to consider, marketers must run experiments and measure outcomes. – Todd Earwood, MoneyPath Marketing
11. Native Advertising Companies seeking to enhance market reach, brand relevance and improve overall engagement can benefit greatly by implementing native advertising into their digital marketing strategy. Engaging with your audience by utilizing native language and your proprietary tools increases the opportunity to expand viral sharing and can lead to developing a more involved relationship with your target market. – Timothy Nichols, ExactDrive, Inc
12. Digital Integrated Into Offline Experiences I believe that in 2018, digital will no longer stand alone as a separate discipline. We will see it become more integrated into real-life experiences and the two will become seamless. We have started to see this in professional sports and arena events where the online experience begins prior to the event and continues during the event. I expect to see marketers experiment with this in 2018. – Lisa Allocca, Red Javelin Communications
13. Voice Marketing Google says that 20% of its mobile queries are voice searches, and that number is only going to increase as consumers get used to asking Alexa, Siri and their smart fridge for insight on what to buy. Marketers need to prepare by creating content that captures these types of searches, and advertising in non-traditional places (like sponsoring smart-fridge recommendations). – Brett Farmiloe, Markitors
14. Predictive Algorithms Application programming interfaces are opening for machine-learning algorithms, natural language processing and artificial intelligence. This is enabling any size business to better predict its marketing spend to optimize its overall budget. This is a huge advancement, given that marketers are often biased in their methodologies. – Douglas Karr, DK New Media
15. Different Kind Of Content Marketing With new formats evolving every day and the popularity of video, content marketing is no longer about writing blog posts and listicles. Voice search will alter a lot of content strategies to aim more for featured snippets or present interactive tutorials that can be spoken to people as they complete mundane or complex tasks. Content will be more interactive and integrate with other UI features. – Kristopher Jones, LSEO.com
–
