Top Marketing Trends of 2018
A majority of business influencers will tell you that marketing is a crucial part of any business. Well, they are wrong. Marketing is not a part of the business; it is the business itself. The aspects surrounding business evolution revolve around certain marketing strategies. The past couple of decades have had massive effects on marketing practices, and technology has become the driver of marketing operations. Therefore, the intensive revolution in technology is bound to have a significant effect on marketing trends.
These trends are changing every year. The patterns that worked in 2017 will most likely not work in 2018. It has, therefore, become paramount for every business to scrutinize their position, and intensify their efforts on making their marketing strategies effective. Below are the top marketing trends of 2018.
Intensified Consumer-Oriented Efforts
As a marketing agency, your core business is to convert prospective clients into consumers of a particular product or service. Gone are the days when agencies worked solely on visibility rather than conversion. Conversion is optimized by a proper understanding of the prospective consumers, their needs, intensified efforts to assure the prospective consumers that you can adequately satisfy those needs and assurance of best customer experiences as well. All these can be achieved by proper consumer research. Any marketing agency that ignores research is inflicting doom on itself. 2018 places more emphasis on customer experience rather than anything else. Customer experience directly affects the percentage of returning customers, referrals and the general perception of the target market about your business.
Response Time
Response time might seem like a trivial detail in marketing strategies. However, a careful look at the trends that defined 2017 will prove you wrong. Artificial intelligence comes in as a major player in marketing operations. Why? To ensure the quickest response possible. Potential clients will quickly develop a soft spot for a business that responds quickly to their queries. Chatbots technology will continue to be optimized in 2018. These bots are set to anticipate the inquiries to be made on their communication channels. They then have automated responses to these inquiries. Current efforts within most marketing agencies are currently geared towards optimizing these chatbots to give case-sensitive responses. These responses need not be similar; they should be able to engage the prospective clients in intuitive conversations.
Content Optimization
The onset of social media has revolutionized marketing operations. Marketing has moved from the good old adverts and became a science of grabbing people’s attention and converting that attention into constructive engagement. A lot of business owners are misguided, believing the effectiveness of marketing content on social media is defined by how many people it reaches. Although reach is crucial, engagement by those reached is an indicator of how well your content is doing.
For many years, SEO writing has been a popular technique of rising through google ranks. However, this machine-oriented writing is not a popular strategy anymore. Other common practices such as auto blogging and use of clickbait’s are also proving to be counter-effective. A plethora of likes and clicks are no longer a reason to rejoice anymore. They reach many people but are reducing their trust in your business, thus less engagement. Content optimization towards the conversion of the target audience’s attention to engagement has been an ongoing trend over the previous years. These efforts have only been kicked a notch higher in 2018. Woe unto the marketing agency that does not get on the bandwagon early enough!
Micro-Influencers
Celebrity marketing is an ancient trick that has worked well for so long. However, using micro-influencers is proving to be superior. Micro-influencers are connected more personally with their followers as compared to big celebrities. Therefore, they stand more chances of converting the connections into client leads for marketing agencies. This year more and more business have explored the possibilities of having a pool of micro-influencers. Micro-influencers offer direct avenues of conducting consumer research as well as reaching out to them. Celebrity marketing has been dwindling over the years, not because it is ineffective, but because micro-influencers are making more conversions. In 2018, marketing agencies will engage more micro-influencers to drive their strategy forward. It is vital to ensure you get the right influencers though. Ensure their connections and network consist of potential clients. Having the wrong micro-influencers could turn out to be a very costly affair.
Employee Empowerment
The greatest asset of any company is its pool of talent. First, always ensure you have the right people at all times. This is an old trend, but it has continued in 2018 and will continue to do so. Having the right team that is motivated is half the journey, that is effective marketing. Marketing agencies will be empowering their employees to create more connections and networks. They will also be making it possible for them to work remotely. The ability of these agencies to ensure that every member of the team shares the business’ dream even while outside working hours is critical. Employees of a marketing agency should be able to comfortably engage and interact with potential clients without feeling out of place or getting intimidated. For instance, it is common for a senior member of a team to convert a lead into a potential client in a case that a junior member failed. The ability to constructively interact with potential clients counts significantly.
Product/Service Design
A client will engage in any business for their products or services. Times change and so do needs, tastes and preferences. The ability of a business to keep up with these changes is central to their survival. Marketing departments are responsible for anticipating these changes and adjusting accordingly. This has been a common trend across decades and continues in 2018 and beyond. Marketing will be working intensively to find an ingenious way to revamp their products and services. The changes should always be informed by the requirements of the target market. Your marketing agency will defeat competition by coming up with a product that goes beyond the expectation of the target market.
These trends do not mean that you have to abandon what is working for you at the moment. It wouldn’t hurt to experiment though. One or two of the techniques tried could turn out to be very helpful. It is not guaranteed that they will all work, but they will be there. You never know, 2018 could be the year the mentioned old trends go extinct!
