Digital Marketing Trends 2018

Digital Marketing

What’s new in Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing has come a long way and it’s constantly evolving making it harder to grasp the full potential of it, as it comes with a constant learning curve and a lot of testing to get the right ROI.

However, if we closely look into the emerging trends, we might be able to get success through digital platforms before others are making it a common practice or we shall be able to create defining moments for our customer by creating next-generation product or experiences.

As a digital agency, we look into the trends & practices of digital marketing almost every day. We came up with the latest trends in digital marketing in late 2018 to understand how the market is going to change in the coming years. Let’s take a look at it together.

Mobile & Video

Smartphone has redefined our way of life and the recent spike in video consumption is making us glued to it. This isn’t going to change anytime soon, as brands and social media companies are investing heavily in video products that are grabbing our every attention from text-based content to interactive content consumption.

Vertical Video:

Well, you have already experienced it. The vertical video is a portrait video consumed by us preferably in a mobile device. The term vertical video was first coined by Snapchat, but it was replicated by major media outlets and other tech companies like Facebook. With the rise of Instagram TV or IGTV, brands need to focus more on vertical content which is getting popular and eventually mainstream for their followers.

With the rise of IGTV, the vertical video is everywhere. Instagram even came up with a handbook for IGTV. You can download it for free from here.

Digital Marketing

While most of the filmmakers and broadcaster will disagree that vertical videos cannot bring the full length of content to life, some of the major broadcasters like BBC is already adapting vertical video format to their apps.

Vertical videos are still considered as a close-up medium as we see it from our hand mostly from smartphones. Do you know, that

94% hold phones vertically for recording videos

and,

3 OUT OF 4 MILLENIALS WATCH VIDEOS VERTICALLY ON MOBILE PHONES.

Grabbing the Micro-Moments

Imagine you’re doing something or you’re in the middle of checking your work emails on the desktop. Suddenly, you feel the urge to check your smartphone to take a quick look at your facebook notification? Even if there was no urgent need? Approx 91% of us experience this.

Digital Marketing

According to Google, these short bubble of interest is micro-moments. They also divided them into 4 types.

  1. Awareness: I want to know

  2. Location: I want to go

  3. Ideas: I want to do

  4. Purchase: I want to buy

They key to catch the micro-moments are creating mobile-friendly contents that helpful, relevant & accessible when your customer is looking for it. The brands will also need to shift their focus from just the customer demographics to understanding their daily needs to get the full benefits from this micro-moments.

Researchers found out, that brands are missing out 7 out of 10 potential customers using traditional targeting. For instance, 40% of baby products are bought by people purchased by households without babies and 45% home improvement searches are actually done by women.

It’s important to map out your customer’s challenges develop relevant content based on the four type of micro-moments (I want to know, go, do, buy) content, that’s visual, discoverable and starts with your customers intent.

Live Photo & Video

While Live Video is a pretty hot topic since last years. Now, Facebook has bought features like Youtube to premiere your pre-recorded live videos to another time. So, brands, celebrities and influencers can focus more on conversation than filming a perfect live video.

Facebook Premiere is now available for all brand’s page. That not everything. Facebook also launched Facebook 3D photos, that uses AI to stimulate a depth feature. This is available on iOs only for now. So, now you’ve got a use of iPhone’s live photo to be shared on social media at last.

Social, Ads and Apps

While Facebook is moving away from the breaking news option, Twitter holds it to create a new experience for its users, known as the new EXPLORE tab. When twitter thinks a particular news is relevant to you, it will send you a notification. Even they introduced new ad placement options. A visual card with brand’s ad on top of the explore feed.

On the other side, LinkedIn also introduced Sponsored Carousel Ads just like Facebook which supports 10 carousel images just after launching their video ads a couple months back.

Digital Marketing

Instagram is also launching an option to add music to their Instagram Stories and you can select a specific part of the music to set the right mood for you.

Google also rebranded their Google Adwords, created an AI-based smart ad creation experience for small businesses with the limited knowledge and added programmatic ad system within Google Ads for marketers to manage their brand efficiently.

Snapchat also created an AR like experience in their lenses to try out products in Augmented Reality form and integrated in-app purchases, so brands can get a solid ROI from the Snapchat marketing efforts.

Artificial Intelligence

Chatbot

The AI-powered conversational digital experience that automates responses between customers and brands. While chatbots are really a hype right now, the adaptation of chatbots by social media giant Facebook has given it a certain legitimacy and brands are using it for interacting with their audiences in a new way. While it may not be wise to create a chatbot right away for your customers. You should first understand if your business really needs it right now or not. We explained more in details in one of our blog about that chatbot. You can take a look at it from here.

To experience a chatbot first-hand, click here.

Voice Search

Voice search is becoming an important channel for brands. Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins said that Google Voice Recognition is pretty close to humans – around 95%. The estimate suggests, that

In the next couple of years, half of search will be voice activated.

Digital Marketing

So, what brands can do to jump into the bandwagon of voice search?

Unfortunately, 70% of the voice speaker market is now dominated by a couple of companies namely, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft & Google. As these devices are mostly proprietary, organizations and brands need to develop actions or skills for each app they want to work with. They are basically, customized interactions performed by digital voice assistance similar to chatbots with texts.

Some used cases are. Laundry Detergent Tide developed an Amazon Alexa skill that lets users ask Tide, how to remove stains from clothes.

Digital Marketing

Since they are still managed by Google or Amazon. The true understanding of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) would require to excel in the next level of voice search for the brands. That means, creating voice content that answers your customer’s questions.

Data & Privacy

Data and Privacy are becoming a major phenomenon for tech-industry success. We do not have watergate scandals now. It’s scandals from Wikileaks, Facebook’s data breach and political manipulation by the Cambridge Analytica and most-recently Google’s data breach of 50 mn users that led them to close down the consumer version of their social media Google+.

With GDPR becomes a law in the United Kingdom, but create a ripple in all over the world, there will be a surge of data & privacy initiatives from global tech giants and start-ups. For many businesses, it’s now important to understand the implication of GDPR (General Data Protection and Regulation Act) and their use in marketing any product or services.

We will update this article till the end of 2018 in case, there’s new trend comes up along with VR & Machine Learning Innovations. You can reach out to us to get more data & use-cases for your particular industry for your digital marketing initiatives.

 

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