13 Digital Marketing Trends of 2018 You Need To Succeed

In past, artificial intelligence or visual search was considered a gimmick but time does not remain the same. There are numbers of digital marketing insights and strategies that are evolving in the current era and business need to follow them to succeed. The digital marketing landscape is vast and covers SEO, social media, PPC, content marketing and more you need to be updated because trends continuously keep on emerging. Therefore, some new strategies are integrated to stay ahead of the curve.

Here are the top digital marketing trends of 2018 to elevate your marketing strategy:

1. Artificial Intelligence

It plays a crucial role in marketing field today. It uses data from the blog posts and social media platforms to analyze the consumer behavior and search patterns. This fetched data helps business to understand the way  consumers find their product and services. It also offers information and tips to the user by getting into conversations. According to statistics (Gartner), in 2020, 85% of customer interaction will be managed without a human. Businesses that are adopting AI in 2018 will be able to save the costs and accelerate growth with an edge over their competitors. So, without any further delay integrate AI into your business.

2. Programmatic Advertising

It is essential to use AI to automate the purchasing of ads and being able to target the audience more specifically. This practice reduces the customer acquisition costs and increases the chances of success of marketing campaign. As per the statistics (eMarketer), in 2019, 84% of the digital display ads in the US will be programmatic. Adopt this to stay ahead in digital marketing!

3. Chatbots are in Trends

Chatbots are the new addition to the digital marketing trend in 2018. This AI-based technology uses an instant messaging format to chat in real-time, day or night, with customers or site visitors. Many businesses and customers prefer using it to interact with each other because of its responsiveness and accurate answers. They can answer the questions, provide complete information about product and services, ask for an email to send details, and save information so that customers do not need to start with a new interaction. According to Juniper research, by 2022, chatbots will help businesses to save over $8 Billion per annum, especially in the banking and healthcare industries.

Uber is using this technology to make the communication easier between their riders and uber drivers.They can easily hire cars even on Facebook Messenger. A passenger can use the menu, choose the type of ride, make a request, track a location of the car, send a time estimation of arrival, and even making payments. Very helpful indeed! What are you waiting for? Use them in your business to create a distinct identity of your business and make your communication easier with your clients.

4. Story Telling – A Great Digital Marketing Tool

It is a human nature that they get fascinated by a good storytelling. Now, the brands are focusing on crafting stories into their digital marketing strategy. To create good and interesting story, engaging content will play an important role. To achieve this, you need to design your content marketing strategy. Social media is evolving from a traffic generation channel to a customer engagement platform. Companies are trying their best to delight their respective customers through creative and attractive storytelling. Furthermore, with the help of this, they are telling about the transparency, purpose, benefits of their brands, products, and services. Craft your stories to share and engage your customers!

5. Live Streaming is Preferred

It’s not surprising to see that videos always dominate. There is a continuous shift towards video content particularly, live videos. If we look at the statistics of 2017, video streaming was 75% of all the internet traffic and it is showing no signs to slow down. Studies have found that viewers watch live streams 3 times longer than pre-recorded video.

In lieu of that, some stats on video marketing by Forbes are mentioned below:

• As per YouTube, mobile video consumption grows by 100% every year.
• Videos are expected to claim more than 80% of all web traffic by 2019.
• Addition of video to marketing emails can boost click-through rates by 200-300%.
• 90% of customers decide to purchase the product after watching a video. Live videos- a great tool to interact with the audience.

6. Personalization – Targeting Customers

Personalization is the key to bring your customer closer! You can say personalization or personalized content, both are the significant aspects of marketing. Content marketing for targeted audience holds an important place in Search Engine Optimization. If you are eager to search, “ How to Check If your SEO is Working or Not? Then personalization can play an important role in this. This delivers a unique customer based experience according to one’s own choices and preferences. Hence, it’s a better option compared to “one-size-fits-all “marketing. With the availability of data like purchase history, links clicked and consumer behavior, a business can easily customize their content and boost their ROI.

Keep in mind that 74% of the marketers believe that targeted personalization enhances the customer engagement. One good example is the campaign by Coke in 2014. The aim was to reach millennials. The campaign “Share a Coke” created a personalized brand experience for customers by printing most popular individual names on Coke bottles. Due to this campaign, there was a 2% increase in sales, spiking consumption from 1.7 to 1.9 billion servings per day. Bring your days too with this digital marketing trend.

7. Influencer Marketing

It is a type of marketing that focuses on leaders to deliver your brand’s message to a larger market instead of marketing directly to a large group of consumers. In this, you are paying an influencer to say a word for your products and services. Using influencers is a very effective marketing tool that attracts customers. An influencer can be celebrities on Instagram, YouTube stars, well-known bloggers and journalists who spread the word about the business or product through their social channels.

People interact and engage with a large network of followers and consumers on social media. They talk about a brand they love and share with their audience. People trust influencers because this is not an ad, they create a positive image of the brand in minds of people and attract more customers. Influence your audience by adopting influencer marketing for your brand or business.

8. Go for Social Messaging Apps

If you think that social messaging apps are just to send emojis to your friend, then you are on the wrong track. Have a look at these statistics:

• 1.3 billion users are active on Facebook Messenger.
• 2 billion messages are sent between people and businesses on Facebook Messenger every month.
• WhatsApp has 1.3 billion monthly active users.
• On WhatsApp 55 billion messages are sent every day.
• YouTube has 1.5 billion monthly users.

These numbers explain the popularity of social messaging apps. It is giving an opportunity for the businesses to move on these apps to expand their market. You can directly send the message to customers that will allow personalization and add value to the user’s experience. According to stats, 46% of people communicate via messaging apps while 49.9% prefer messaging over phone calls for business purposes. Do socialize!

9. Contextual Targeting Strategies

After the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) policy, we can expect that it will be more complicated for ad tech vendors to track user behaviors with cookies. Audience targeting strategies will be steadily replaced by contextual targeting strategies. Keeping this in view, during PPC campaign, it will be now mandatory for advertisers to understand what each page context is all about. In this way, it will ensure specific targeting and brand safety.

10. Visual Search – A New Way of Search

It is a new type of search engine and can take the user experience to a new level. With this, you can upload the image to conduct a search and get more specific results. Some of the good examples are listed below:

Pinterest: They have raised $150 million in venture funding at a $12.3 billion valuation to focus their efforts on visual search. They came up with a Lens, a new visual tool that allows the user to snap a photo of an item to find out here to buy it online. Additionally, it searches for similar products and views pin boards of related items as well.  

Google: Google Lens is a visual search engine by Google. It recognizes objects, landmark, and another various thing visually through a camera app. With this, if you take a photo of a:

Business Card: You can save a phone number, address, or contact.

Book: Get reviews and other details about it.

Landmark or Building: You can get more detail about it.

Painting: Detail about it.

Microsoft: It has his own version called Bing Visual Search that allows the  user to easily search for a particular element within an image.

CamFind: It is a visual search mobile app that help the user to search for anything from their mobile phones. Users just have to snap a picture and this app will tell you about it.

It is one of the top digital marketing strategy in 2018 to draw customers and serve them the perfect product.

11. Micro-Moments – A New Approach

Talking specifically about the US, consumer spends an average of 4.7 hours each day on their mobile phones. They check their social media at least 17 times a day. Brands should work accordingly to capture buyer’s attention. Micro-Moments is a “new consumer behavior”. It is termed by Google, that delivers your marketing, message clearly and concisely in a way that it should be of interest to the consumers- all this happening in span of seconds. If longer time is required, then the attention is shifted to another thing.

It provide right information to the customer according to the their need. People make instant decision on what to eat, which restaurant to choose, what to purchase or where to go. Marketers, use of Micro-Moments offer targeted advertising to buyers based on user-generated activities. Go for it ! A new way to learn about the consumer behavior.

12. Voice Search – A Way to Interact

As said earlier, digital era is frequently changing. Today, you can ask your all questions through search engines. You can get comprehensive information easily, but not have the patience to read through several paragraphs to fetch information.  Voice search play a significant role in providing all relevant information through audio content. In addition to this, artificial intelligence is getting better with time and errors made by voice assistant like Alexa, Siri, and Google and has reduced as well. Many brands have included voice search in their digital marketing to deliver value-based content effectively to their customers. For instance, Domino pizza uses voice search technology, a way to increase the sales and allowing customers to order pizza through Alexa. Voice searches are increasing day by day. Don’t miss it!

13. Think About Social Media Stories

The growing popularity of social media stories is forcing marketers to implement them in their digital marketing strategy. You must create your marketing strategy according to the user need instead of forcing people to engage with your business. First Snapchat came out with a concept of “My Story” and then later, Instagram and Facebook stories followed the trend. YouTube has his own story format, “Reels” in November 2017. Instagram stories hit 300 million daily active users.

You can create a story about your business by telling the story behind making of product, ask for reviews about your product and services, and give a glimpse of behind-the-scenes of photos or videos of your company. Create your story and share it with your audience to develop a better relation.

This year seems to be very promising for the marketers. It will provide new opportunities for brands to engage and interact its targeted audience in a whole new way. Customer experience is the top factor for digital transformation, and 2018 is more about personalized engagement. So, if you are looking to run your business on these strategies, hire experienced digital marketers of Marketalist to stay ahead in your business. The skilled and competent team will thoroughly review your business and will come with effective strategies to rank your business, increase you ROI, and audience engagement.