Top 10 Digital Marketing Trends You Cannot Afford To Miss in 2017
Consumers are smarter now! They can sense an advertisement from a distance now, and this is why marketers need to be cautious and innovative enough to keep serving new and interesting every time to catch the maximum eyes.
When it comes to digital marketing, options are unlimited and can be used to their full potential to generate interests. Here are a list of the most convincing digital media marketing trends that can guide your marketing game plan and online campaigns. Check out!
1) Invest in content marketing
Almost all marketing strategies are directed towards content marketing. Content marketing is nothing but an art to keeping your users and targeted audiences engaged with your brand by serving relevant content with the intention of luring customers.
Here, you might get confused between content marketing and native marketing. Content marketing is not an activity that is paid and finished, as native ads are. All brands use content differently and maintaining a consistent, credible brand voice entice the target audience.
The marketing teams are assigned tasks of producing content like white papers, case studies, and webinars that can push sales. Case studies help to observe the performance of other business regarding marketing campaign. The white papers are pieces on thought leadership and help your client to gain insight of your organization.
The main motive behind content marketing is to boost your brand’s visibility by adding a character and personality to it by publishing relevant content frequently.
Trends might come and go, but the content is still a king, and is expected to be a top trend this year too!
2) It is a year of live streaming video and visual storytelling
Videos are wonderful when it comes to connecting with people as they are better able to connect with people through emotions when compared to static words. This is the reason why live streaming video is expected to become a compelling marketing strategy in 2017.
You can gauge the popularity of live streaming from video sharing portals like YouTube which has over a billion users now. The Facebook live is another game changer which feature allows you to generate and share content from any nook and corner. It is an easy and fast method of connecting with the users along with being a great broadcasting and marketing tool.
Live streaming social content is expected to take a forward plunge in 2017 and marketers would have to evolve innovative and interesting ways to make the best out of videos.
3) Allow your social content to expire
Lending an expiration date for the social content is working in the favor of marketers. This is because of a simple reason that it offers urgency to the content and engrosses the consumers as well. They either need to grab it now, or lose it forever! When a deadline is laid out to the viewing of content the reader’s curiosity is at its peak. While this might even prove to be troublesome for companies as they have got a small deadline to get engaged, but expert marketers are sure to reap the full benefits out of it through proper social media marketing tools!
4) The value of big data
Digital media marketing experts spell out big data as the next big thing to watch out for in digital marketing. There is a rise in data explosion due to the emergence of proper online marketing analytic tools, latest plans in mobile marketing, internet technology, and social media forums.
The Big Data is a storehouse of information either structured or unstructured that can be utilized by internet marketers for predicting and evaluating the business situation to evoke more purposeful decision-making system.
There is a large amount of data that can be extracted easily from your digital marketing campaign which can tell a lot about why certain campaigned work, and why the other failed. Using agile analytic tools you can segregate and interpret the information and have a better knowledge of consumer behavior.
Quantitative data about your consumer’s direct engagement with your business helps you to know about their purchasing history and inbound and outbound interactions and web analytic data such as a number of visits and customer comments. Qualitative data assists you in following a greater productive marketing strategy for converting leads to sales. Besides this, employing big data analytics also lends you a marketing base for a better marketing campaign that produces purchasing customer retention and lead conversion.
5) Propel engagement with marketing automation (including CRM, behavioral email marketing, and web personalization)
2017 is all set to achieve the most from online marketing through marketing automation including CRM plus ERP integration, direct engagement with targeted behavioral email marketing and web personalization. The ease with which intricate behavioral marketing campaigns using drag and drop features to convert your contacts can be created is making headlines. You can add up social buttons, RSS feeds or personalized content to achieve proper marketing response. Your email campaign can be further enhanced by uploading images and can also have videos or animations to capture your audience.
Device optimization makes your email campaign reach the targeted audience irrespective of their location. A behaviorally responsive engagement visualizes exactly each element of the campaign to which the target audience will respond.
Personalization and segmentation strategy maximizes engagement by dispatching content based upon your recipient’s behavior and activity. If you know your contacts at a personal level, you can optimize the benefits from emails by classifying your information into targeted lists and transmitting over personalized dynamic content. Market automation helps to send targeted SMS messages, forward direct mail, overhaul contact records and generate follow-up actions with your CRM. Automation is important for marketers for their success in marketing across channels.
6) Voice-driven SEO is the new frontier
Search that is hands-free is the latest landscape for SEO. Connected home devices have become the center stage with the emergence of Google Home. The latest home devices come with an audio component that plays a vital role in the Internet of Things that connects devices and gadgets with each other and also with its users. The type and read searches are soon expected to go outdated. In the coming years, the marketers have to deal with the concept of voice-activated search results and use early analytics to their benefit as they are circulated from platform owners.
7) Data visualization for better engagement
Data Visualization such as Infographics is a potent tool for marketers to let their consumers view the visual presentation of analytics and recognize new patterns. It helps you by increasing your profit by promoting business opportunities. Using charts or graphs to process information is much easier than mulling over spreadsheets plus reports.
Data visualization helps to explain the factors that impact customer behavior. You can also predict sales volume by data visualization. It can create meaningful visuals of your data and discover both market and business trends. It’s an engaging method of data representation that can spread the message quickly and conveys information to your audience in the simplest way.
8) The Internet of Things (IoT) & wearable technology
The latest trends in the enterprise, information process, and communications frontiers are IoT and wearable gadgets. The interactions with our gadgets that are equipped with intelligent sensors to produce a hyper-connected eco-system or the IoT are something we all desire. These smart devices generate data to assist the marketers in providing better service to their customers. Intelligent vending machines or data sensing gadgets are crafted to seek far-reaching business advantages by utilizing real-time information.
The adoption of these wearable technologies has provided huge data for marketers to mine upon. The IoT has emerged as a massive tool for marketers to engage with potential customers in the immediate future. Perhaps, ads will begin to target persons based on their actions and habits. The marketers will have to work upon data that is highly behaviour-driven, and though such device may seem alarming, but you will reach your preferred goal.
9) Reach out through mobile marketing (mobile advertising, site development, and apps)
The immense potential of mobile apps has brought in rising sales and loyalty. The role of mobile marketing in the process of purchasing is significant for marketers more so in the early phase of information search. Besides, the mobile channel can also be utilized for promoting products or services. Any information reaches instantly through mobile and it has the potential to reach your customers. The mobile apps are a great sell out and promote customer loyalty. Marketing techniques, at times aggressive, are already is use when you save an item as your favorite or let it remain in the shopping cart, you receive an e-mail to resume purchasing. In this manner, visits from the mobile are converted into a sale proposition.
Mobile marketing was already on its high in the previous years and is expected to set its own benchmark this year.
10) Ad visibility
The viewability of ads placed on a web page has been a concern for marketers who desperately want their meticulously made ads reach their chosen audience. The present year, 2017 is the right time for digital advertising marketers to revamp their strategy on ad visibility and monitor the outcome of campaigns far down-funnel. The repercussion of campaigns on business metrics and finally on revenue will become game changers for marketers believing in real stats. The viewability scores along with the metrics can be used to create effective marketing plans to determine the efficiency of ads not only in websites but even on social platforms and search engines.
Your Turn
Take a clue from the above-mentioned digital marketing trends which are expected to make headlines in 2017 to make the most out of your marketing strategy. The fact that these trends keep on changing is what keeps the users engaged and further makes the competition interesting. In order to run a successful strategy, it is essential that proper thoughts are given on the recent trends and adopt the ones that are really required.
What are your views on this? What all strategies and trends have you already planned to follow? Do let us know in the comments.
