Can you believe it’s October already? 2016 was supposed to be the year to end all years in the world of marketing. And yet it’s passed us by in a flash of lighting. Now the focus is shifting towards the year ahead. 2016 was disruptive from a digital marketing point of view. But 2017 is set to be even more of a game changer.
Just staying up to date with the latest developments can be challenging enough. Facebook, LinkedIn and Google all have their own policies and procedures. And with over 250 paid and organic marketing strategies on Google alone, it can be overwhelming. Companies like Google are constantly changing their products too. For example, Google recently announced its new Shop The Look Adwords feature. And now practically everybody in the e-commerce sector is trying to figure out what it all means for their businesses. Because of this, new education providers are stepping into the fray. They are offering digital marketing training specifically for business clients. The Simplilearn offer here, for instance, examines employees on Adwords and YouTube marketing.
With all these changes, it’s probably best to try and stay one step ahead in the rapidly evolving world of digital marketing. Industry analysts have identified what they call several “megatrends” that are going to dominate the year ahead. These are trends, rather like the movement towards content marketing, that look set to change how we conduct ourselves online. So what factors did they identify?
Skyrocketing Smartphone Usage
The behaviour of consumers is a big driver of the way in which digital marketing evolves. Just look at the amount of effort companies put into making their adverts into viral memes.
When it comes to digital marketing, businesses need to understand the importance of cadence. The factors that determine the form digital marketing takes evolve at different rates. Take memes as an example. The latest meme doing the rounds on the internet can change from one day to the next. But the underlying technology and communications supporting that meme change far less rapidly. Different timescales reveal different trends and help us to plan for the future.
Mobile Marketing Trends recently compiled the data on the projected number of global smartphone users. After 2010, the number of users took off, particularly in Asia. Now analysts are predicting that we’ll see continued massive growth throughout 2017. But it’s not just the devices that are making an impact. They’re also beginning to dominate usage time as well. According to the data, more than 50 percent of searches are now made on mobile. 91 percent of all Facebook use is also on mobile. And Facebook gets four-fifths of its advertising revenue thanks to people logged in from mobile devices. Apps are also dominating the time that people spend online. According to the data, 90 percent of media time is spent within the apps themselves.
Messaging Apps Will Never Die
When the original Nokia 3310 came out way back in 2001, text messaging was big business. It was immediately apparent, even in those early days, that messaging had a bright future. Today, the messaging ecosystem is varied and extremely user-friendly. The popularity of messaging apps is being driven by the desire to have private, one-on-one conversations.
People want to be able to communicate outside the major social network platforms. And they’re willing to switch apps if their current provider doesn’t give them the service that they want.
This is a challenge for digital marketers of all stripes. The problem is that many of these messenger apps are ad-free. As a result, people are slowly falling out of the sphere of marketing influence.
In 2017, analysts expect that that trend will reverse. Marketers are looking for clever ways to market to consumers as they move to messenger applications. And they hope that they can have an impact here as they have on social media. There will be challenges, however. Many messenger apps are attractive because developers have assured users that they’ll remain advert-free. If that were to change, they might lose popularity.
Application of AI To Customer Services
2016 was the year in which AI started to deliver on its incredible promise. Facebook’s Bot Engine for Messenger went live back in the Spring. And Google’s new service assistant was announced back at Google I/O this summer. AI promises to change the way that companies interact with customers. The first generation of AI assistants will be used to carry out routine troubleshooting help at a fraction of the cost. Finally, customers won’t have to pay a premium just to get in touch with a company about their product. They’ll be able to interact with an AI, essentially for free.
Customers will also be able to talk to their devices in a more conversational way to get them to do what they want them to do. Take Apple’s new assistant, Viv. The idea behind Viv is that people shouldn’t have to memorise a bunch of phrases that the machine understands. They should just be able to talk to their AI assistant in a normal way. And then the AI assistant will carry out their instructions, like putting a note in their diary or sending an email. As we go into 2017, these types of conversations will become standard, and companies will begin adopting them more and more. Business apps may become entirely conversation controlled.
Growth In Predictive Analytics
Right now, digital marketing is dominated by the human input of the marketer. In Adwords, for instance, it’s the marketer who decides on which keywords to use, and which not to. But in the future, keywords might not be as important, or even relevant at all. Predictive analytics is all about trying to work out how somebody will behave in the future based on what they did in the past. These data can then be leveraged by marketers to target their ads better. User interest won’t be defined by whether they type in a particular keyword. It’ll be defined by things like how often they visit a page, dwell time, and they type of content they use. AI, therefore, will need to be able to understand natural language and be able to collect data on user interest. Marketers will, in turn, need to use automatic scoring to know which ads to show, and when.
Mobile Marketing With Cross-Device Optimisation
Most small businesses get the basics of mobile marketing. They understand that their website needs to be mobile-friendly. And they know that they need to obey the rules set down by almighty Google if they’re going to get found online.
As we go into 2017, we’re likely going to see the emergence of what’s being touted as “adaptive design.” Adaptive design changes how the website code is used, depending on the device from which the site is being accessed. This, in turn, may require marketers to optimise conversions for more devices. There’s also a risk that Google will further penalise sites that use popups. And so getting conversions is likely to mean that businesses have to start getting smarter.
Inbound Marketing
Over the past half-decade, content marketing has become increasingly popular. Businesses have put substantial investments into growing their content offerings. And websites, like Hubspot, have seen massive growth in their popularity as a result. Now that content marketing is maturing, we can expect the conversation to change somewhat. Next year, it’s unlikely we’ll see so many bloggers talking about why content marketing is so effective. Instead, they’ll be debating how the timing, frequency and quality of blogs attract new customers. We’re also going to see the rise of terms like ROI of content marketing. Should businesses invest large amounts of time into producing detailed content and posts? Or should they spam out smaller posts more often? There’s debate right now concerning which tactic is best, and it’ll probably come down, as always, to target audience. It’s worth noting, however, that Google prefers longer posts to shorter ones when it comes to SEO. So perhaps we’ll see established players sticking with punchy posts, and startups going for longer word counts.
Digital Transformation
One of the cool things about being a startup is that you can be nimble. You can make quick changes to the way that you do business, and you can even change things as fundamental as your name. For larger businesses, this is obviously a lot more difficult. There’s always a lot more investment wound up in their processes and the way in which they present themselves. Now large companies are realising that the pace of change in digital technologies means they have to plan for the future. Their strategy can’t just be reacting to new technologies as they come online. They need to have a roadmap, detailing predicted technologies and how the firm can move toward them in advance. Big businesses need to focus on inbound marketing, marketing optimisation and overall customer experience.
So there we have it: seven major trends that are all set to change the way businesses do digital marketing next year. Your company should start moving towards these trends now and think about how it might benefit.
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