Digital Marketing is changing the world in significant ways. The year 2017 has been an evolving year for the digital world. On the one hand, this year observed Instagram growing to new heights regarding user engagement, and on the other, Facebook’s organic reach was revived with significant tweaks. The digital world also witnessed influencers becoming a great part of each brand’s media plan.

Now, we are witnessing a continuous evolution of digital marketing. In 2018, all the businesses will eventually integrate their channels to get a holistic view of the consumer—and they will utilize this insight to give personalized service that exceeds consumer expectations.

I have gathered digital marketing predictions for 2018, a list that highlights the influence of technology, building customer authenticity and trust, and tapping ever-more data insight for engagement.

Here are some Digital Marketing Predictions 2018:

The Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will Grow

Given the plenty of data users leave behind (both knowingly and unknowingly), AI(Artificial Intelligence) gives a new and compelling opportunity for digital marketers to capitalize on. AI will also be necessary to provide consumers with a seamless, personalized digital experience in the future, and for brands to get cut through, and for marketing to help deliver ROI. Using AI to drive a better user experience, more robust analytics, and focused marketing will give marketers with significant opportunities for new growth.

AI will help marketers to identify how and where people are talking about their brands and cultivate that conversation for marketing purposes. This will help marketers to refine content and overall marketing strategy. AI is making an artful way for content marketers to learn how the social ecosystem drives content ahead to purchasing.

Here is the strategic view of how AI will impact marketing the most in 2018.

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Up until now, several marketers have been hesitant to include Artificial Intelligence into their marketing strategies. But, given the advancement of marketing applications and related processes (IoT, Big Data, and Machine Learning) over the past few years and the decreased possibility regarding ROI, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is ready to take off in 2018. According to Salesforce research, the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) by digital marketers will increase more than fifty percent in the following years. Gartner predicts that the twenty percent of the business content will be created by machines in 2018.

Video will Become Bigger

Videos have become a significant part of the digital world. The use of videos and images for marketing purposes has been on the rise. And rich content like videos is perfect for showcasing how a service or product works, in such a way that plaintexts and images can never do. There will be over 73 million video viewers every year.

With Facebook testing video monetization like YouTube, it is clear that the trend is here to stay. Subscription video platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Voot have also witnessed an increase in viewership. All brands are adopting video advertisements, video storytelling, collaborating with video influencer. In 2018, if you are not contemporary with video creation skills, you might be lagging behind.

Google Might Release Voice Search Based SEO Algorithm

With upcoming and new internet users tending less written content and more visual and audio content, video search might take a compact shape in 2018.

Currently, Google’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) algorithm mainly depends on user experience(UX), content and authority. Despite, with growing video content and audio searches, Google may soon come up with an audio search-based SEO algorithm. Right now, video SEO is highly dependent on the tags, or descriptions being created along with the videos.

A leading measurement and analytics company comScore predicts that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by the year of 2020.

However, in time, Google may start ranking videos based on voice/video quality, related to what it does to the written content.

Content Marketing Will Become More Important

Content Marketing is still somewhere close to the top of the marketing pile. It is one of the important digital marketing trends that is not getting old. But, it’s getting more magnificent, and it’s no wonder – 70% of people stated they would instead learn business by an article than an advertisement. Also, content marketing is less expensive than the various forms of marketing, and also it can generate more leads. 

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Keep in mind; content marketing can bring numerous forms – from blog posts to infographics and videos. It’s difficult to do it everything yourself while managing your business, therefore if you don’t have time, think about outsourcing your content creation to streamline your process.

Also Read: Powerful Content Marketing Tips To Achieve Success In 2018

Usage of Tools Will Increase

With the increased global use of digital marketing to perform personalized tasks such as reaching out to customers, conducting PR campaigns and even extending special offers to potential customers, the number of digital marketing tools used to perform these marketing tasks will significantly increase. It seems like every week there is a new digital marketing tool, platform or trend that gives new opportunities for businesses in all industry.

Keeping up with the growing digital landscape might seem complicated, but it is necessary for businesses to consider 2018 digital marketing predictions to prepare for the future.

Analytics and Data Will Play a Major Role

All the digital marketers have required tools to access and analyze data for automation, better decision making, and refine targeting. It’s common knowledge that marketers use hundreds of analytics and data tools to ascertain how customers interact with a company, its products, and services.

According to Teradata analysis,  87% of marketers consider data their most underused asset, and 60% of them mention the ability to make quicker decisions as the key benefit. So, this intelligence tools will give them the ability to integrate data from multiple sources and from various channels to get a comprehensive survey of their business. With this detailed view, they can easily understand their consumers and business. And with spending on these tools expected to rise by at least 60%, the importance of this aspect of marketing will also increase in 2018.

The right data-driven strategy for building customer-centric marketing and assists marketers to understand and execute on key insights, including:

• Who are the most expensive customers?
• Where are the customers coming from and how to get more customers?
• How the marketing affects consumer lifetime value?
• How to grow instantly and make sure not wasting advertising money in the process?

How analytics will help in digital marketing:

• It helps to understand the performance of the store on a day-to-day basis over metrics like income, and top clients.
• It serves to support your team around data and share metrics with key shareholders.
• It helps to understand repeat revenue and customer loyalty.

Focus on Mobile Advertising Will Increase

The importance of mobile in every aspect of the business has grown exponentially. And since people use mobile devices all the time for pretty much everything, it has effectively allowed marketers like me to target them for longer stretches of time and during every phase of their day!

Marketing will be Personalized

1 to 1 marketing or human to human marketing will come to the fore. New age marketers want users to interact with their online content, and they achieve the same by offering personalized content. The concept of personalizing content was introduced during recent years.

The personalization is a key to driving more sales and improving the shopping experience, for both B2B and B2C companies. This will be helpful for the firms who should be ready to run targeted promotions and make personalized products supports for the various consumer groups.

And to assure a smooth experience across the channels, they should be ready to give custom lists and pricing to specific consumers, or group of consumers. Also, delivering a meaningful and smooth experience is the capacity to get ready for these campaigns with tools to quickly stage, preview, and schedule product, content, promotional updates as well as pricing.

Paid Ads Become Unavoidable

It’s obvious, the other way to rank the websites on top of search engines is to opt for Adwords and PPC’s when SEO is harder. Efficient marketing campaigns capitalize on all channels for advertising. Although paid advertising costs more than owned or earned advertising, paid forms are an efficient way to expose your company’s name to a large audience.

So, all those digital marketing consultants who have avoided advertising will now be forced to do it. The different categories of paid ads — PPC, PPM, CPC PPI, and display ads — allow digital marketers to customize their campaigns furtherly. The growing prevalence of social media has recently turned websites such as LinkedIn and Facebook into efficient platforms for paid ads.

Conversions From Social Mediums Will Increase

In 2017, businesses were looking to promote themselves on social media by directing traffic to their site, introducing a call to action and eventually driving the visitors through such conversions. So, in 2018 social conversions will definitely become an active and successful strategy for all businesses.

SEO Will Get Harder

With the ever-growing algorithms of Google, namely Panda, Penguin, Payday, Pigeon, etc., it’s pretty obvious that ranking websites in search engines getting harder & harder. This shift will not only reduce the use of SEO tactics to improve the search experience for Google users but will also make it increasingly harder to rank in search engines.

Traditional Paid Media Will Drive Into The Digital Space

The year 2018 will be the traditional paid media—radio and television—moves into the digital space. Amazon, Facebook, YouTube has their own TV series’ now.

The benefit of the high-impact formats given by TV and radio, coupled with the data and tracking capabilities that are inherent to digital advertising. Create what will be a highly effective channel that will be immediately adopted.

ChatBots Will Take Over Social Media Messaging

Chatbots are now available on platforms like Facebook Messenger, that too being used intensively. According to a study made by Facebook, 56 percent of customers prefer to handle a customer service issue through chat vs. phone. As this trend keeps on growing, the need for appropriate responses on social channels will develop with it. Each visitor to a website or Facebook business page gives a chance to enter a brand’s funnel, and ChatBots helps to secure that potential leads.

The secret behind ChatBots is the capacity to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to increase its knowledge and ability to give sales and service support seamlessly.

Virtual and Augmented Reality Will Get More Faith

Pokemon Go might have come and gone, but its effects on marketing might not be so transient. The first attempts at augmented reality marketing seemed to be a bust. While that smartphone game was a real game changer (the demand for other smartphone games like Zombie Run show it’s still a big space), the next significant innovation has yet to hit. 2018 just might be the year when Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft —someone—find out how to interpret this niche technology into a household staple.

Mobile Video Consumption Will Rise

If your website, and marketing strategy more widely, and isn’t optimized for mobile in the last year, 2018 is the year to start. Search engines will penalize your website if it isn’t mobile friendly. In 2018, mobile video consumption is assumed to grow by 25%. So get ahead of the game now by planning a mobile video strategy.

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User Experience Will Become a Core KPI

The customer-centric approaches that online giants such as Facebook and Google have started employing are obviously going to push digital marketers also to put more emphasis on customer experiences. So, whether it’s social media, online advertisements, or your own website, digital marketing will need to make the customer focus of its marketing tactics.

In 2018, digital advertisers have a more significant responsibility to make strategies with the user experience weighted around as slowly as the core KPI. And, it’s getting popularity; 68% of marketers say their business is increasingly focusing on consumer experience in marketing.

A digital marketer should create a strategy that targets the right user at the right moment with a relevant offer—one that is tailored to their specific consumer journey and interests.

Digital Marketing Will Go Hyperlocal

Today’s world is more connected because of technology, more than it has ever been. The digital landscape is rolling it easier than ever for local businesses to interact with customers. But, at the same time marketing is getting more regionalized, localized, and even more personalized.

For instance, Facebook Local gives customers a more localized social platform. So, in 2018, companies will further decentralize their structure to increase their local influence.

Surely, hyperlocal may be a feasible strategy for some, although the year 2018 is not some specific year where all $205+ billion of US spending will magically move to the hyperlocal targeting.

Conclusion

All these essential digital marketing predictions & trends will shape the landscape of digital marketing in 2018. To keep your brand on leading of the curve, you will need to update your content and strategy to reflect changing consumer desires.

So, make 2018 the year that you create your best digital marketing strategy. Think local and digital, and you are ahead to a great start.

I’d definitely like to hear from you and eager to know as to what you think will be some of the digital marketing predictions & trends that will take off in 2018.