5 trends that must be part of your digital marketing strategy 2018

2018 started with a bang/bummer with Mark Zuckerberg announcing a change in Facebook’s algorithm and how the new news-feed would work. Of course, Facebook “page likes” kinda metrics were invalidated in seconds. You may have 2 likes or 2 million, its soon not going to show posts from pages in anybody’s feed. 2018 is bound to be a year led by excessive zest for personalisation.

Your Facebook page likes don’t really count anymore — Not Kidding !!

Despite the bummer, the future of digital marketing is interesting for 2018.

Here are the top picks we found from our conversations with experts.

1. Decline in Influencer marketing

We see Influencers being primarily of two kinds:

1. Those who get you the brand awareness and they there could be a hundred you engage with.
2. Two, those who get you the conversion and make people buy your product.

With brands beginning to experiment on how they market, it also means that the budgets to engage with influencers are likely to reduce. Brands on a budget and in need of making a choice between ROI and awareness campaigns will need to choose from engaging with a hundred generic influencers or 10 specific ones.

2. Mobile campaigns

Google earlier shared that 60% of all searches come from mobile devices. If that doesn’t whack the sense into you then I don’t know what will. Designers, developers, writers — every single person needs to think mobile first and then desktop.

3. VIDEO.VIDEO.VIDEO.

You’ve probably heard this from a hundred people before and we don’t mind being the 101st here telling you this. Video is going to be what rules. If you’re not focusing on a video strategy yet then I suggest you shout out a loud “Arrrgghhhh” and then get cracking on it!! With smarter gadgets, faster internet and better buffering this is what your competitors are planning this very moment.

As Lisa Lubin, Founder and CEO LLMedia says — “Video informs and entertains people, Good or bad, today most people prefer to watch a video than read a page of text”

4. Voice marketing:

Google said in 2016 that 20% of searches are voice based. This number has only grown and now marketing communities are actively discussing it. How can marketers cater to such searches and be better prepared to rank higher?

eg Voysis is using AI to provide a voice AI platform for e-commerce. How cool is that!! Its gonna be as easy as asking your phone to put the spaghetti into your shopping cart and bill it.

This year and next few will be about how you make SIRI and Alexa your BFF’s. Leaving this question to you.

5. AI and machine learning

You might wonder what these have to do with digital marketing. Well, a lot! MarTech — That’s Marketing technology will see the exponential rise of chatbots, virtual assistants, personalisation and trigger based automation in email campaigns etc.

Would love to hear from you guys on what you think of the best that’s coming on digital marketing ahead ?

5 trends that must be part of your digital marketing strategy 2018 was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.