Trends in digital marketing and information technology are inextricably linked and have undergone several changes in this decade alone. Those involved in these businesses are the ones who need to keep updated on each and every change that occurs. Not only this, but they have to become fortune tellers of a kind; predicting future trends based on past events.
Luckily, there are several ways in which one can gauge what would be popular in digital marketing in the coming year. If you are focused and clear-minded, you can prepare yourself for any change and benefit from it. Read on below to find out how you can utilize the coming and ongoing trends to optimize your digital content and activity. This would vastly increase your effectiveness on social media and other digital marketing platforms:
1. Marketing With Lifecycles
Digital marketing is a complex world, made even more so by the range of methods adopted to attract customers. Each customer is different from the other, and it can hence be difficult to work out just how to make anyone customer make a purchase. In order to get around this obstacle, digital marketers need to think about the customer’s lifecycles more than anything else.
This means that customers would be targeted through personalization, customization, and whatever relates to their lifecycle. There are certain touchpoints that affect social media users and Internet users in general. Lifecycle marketing makes great use of these points and uses them to influence customers. This could mean search engine optimization, influencer marketing, personalized loyalty programs, and so on.
2. Enhancing Customer Experience
Customer experience is one aspect of digital marketing that has not lost its importance over the years. This is only to be expected since it is customers that make the sales. Sales and revenue, of course, are the ultimate goal for any marketer whether they operate in the digital or physical world.
With the huge amount of blogs and websites clamoring for a customer’s attention, digital marketers have to focus all the more on customer experience. They need to make sure the customers can have smooth dealing while asking questions, placing and receiving orders, even when lodging complaints. Hence, they need to make sure that customers are drawn in with tactics such as shorter and more personalized content and excellent customer service.
3. The Ubiquitous Content
When we are looking at customer experience or any other aspect of marketing, content would still be king in 2018. The main two branches of digital marketing with respect to content are B2B and B2C. These are expected to become more detailed and branch off into more specialization soon. Digital marketers hence have to brush up on their knowledge about content and hire relevant professional content creators.
No matter what a marketing budget is, there should always be room for acquiring high-quality content. This includes not just making the content, but also optimizing it through frequent publication, angles, and customer engagement. For instance, you not only have to keep your blog updated every week or so but also make sure you reply to comments. Staying on top of the responding game could be the reason for customers returning to your website and thus promoting your brand.
4. Personalization On A Higher Level
The question of personalization is, as discussed above, a complex one. However, there is a way to personalize your output on a mass level. Gone are the days of simple mass production. Now marketers have to focus on collecting big data, which means a whole lot of customer data. This would give them the key to analyzing and responding to customer behaviors.
When companies have a lot of data on their consumers, they can then apply it to a relevant algorithm. This use of artificial intelligence would allow them to develop a customized marketing strategy thus; they would be able to target their customer on a much higher and more specific level than before.
For instance, if a company keeps up to date on what its customers are following on Instagram at the moment they could plan their marketing accordingly. If their customer base is following a certain celebrity or a certain kind of YouTube channels, companies could focus on getting the influencer party to promote their products and/or service.
This sort of strategy obviously required a huge amount of data, which is easily available from social media, browsing activities, and even app downloads. There are technologies specially formulated for collecting just such data so that companies can make full use of it.
5. Access For Multiple Devices
When mobile phones first came out, there wasn’t much attention paid to optimizing websites or blogs for small screen viewing. On the contrary, many mobile users had to do with the same huge, unwieldy sites on their phone that they saw on their laptop or PC screens. As a result, they got irritated by the inconvenient placing of add, the tiny buttons, and the unconscious menus. Horizontal scrolling is also a trigger for deep frustration for any mobile user.
However, with smartphone usage growing every day, 2018 would probably see much more activity on the go. This trend has no doubt already started, with many companies now actually opting to develop their mobile sites before their regular large-screen views.
Several websites and blogs have the option of manually switching to mobile view. However, it is now more considerate and convenient to have your pages automatically detect the device in use and change their display accordingly. These kinds of setting can be very easy when you use a traditional blogging platform such as WordPress. However, a digital marketer may have to get working on some lines of code if they run their own website without any host site.
Wrap-Up
The importance of knowing these trends is essential for all digital marketers who are sincere in their work. They will be able to attract organic traffic to their profiles and platforms, instead of resorting to barely legal means. Keep an eye on these methods for the coming year and make full use of them to stay competitive, relevant, and successful.
This Article is contributed by Anna Marsh, a Digital Marketing Expert, and a Blogger. Apart from being an ace marketer, she is also a veteran educator who guides students for best essay writing.
Enhancing a user experience is one of the major focus points to get more out of the website.
If I talk about my plan, I have focused more to give best user experience and tested the site that works for all sized of devices. As a result, I get more conversion and leads.