Digital Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2018

Let’s have a look at what the industry leaders have to say about the digital marketing trends to watch out for in the year 2018..

Digital Marketing Trends 2018

Sakhee Dheer, Head of Digital, Global Business Marketing, Asia Pacific, Facebook

1. Consumption of video will be on a rise following trends of past years. Alongside, AR/VR will start making its presence felt in a bigger way.
2. Private sharing via messaging platforms will increase. Businesses will begin adopting messaging to reach, transact and service customers.
3. Advertising will be omnipresent with an increased focus on personalization and seamless customer experiences.

For marketers this means be aware of changing consumer behaviour whether it be the meteoric rise of messaging platforms, changing media consumption and ace the art of “being helpful’ while still getting your message across.

Bianca Ghose, Chief Storyteller, Wipro 

Everything, mobile-ready

2018 is increasingly going to be about the ‘solely mobile’, people whose only portal to the internet is the mobile. According to ComScore’s Global Mobile Report 2017, 70% of Indians are already mobile-only. Devise usage is only the starting point of understanding such customers, their choices and expectations and what marketers will need to do to hold their attention.

From online shopping, banking, gaming, watching videos, communicating, or managing business, marketing messages will need to find non-intrusive, native and useful ways to become part of audiences’ preferred mobile activity range. Increasingly, all content, products and services will come mobile-ready as the final mile of the consumer journey closes online, and on the mobile.

Voice it, like a human

According to Gartner, 30% of all online sessions will be through voice by 2020. As voice functionalities become increasingly sophisticated (Google’s speech recognition error rate is down from 25% in 2015 to 8% in 2017), people will ask questions of the internet in natural sentences – the way they would of a person. This will disrupt current SEO practices.

Marketers will increasingly have to adjust their content so that it appears as a good answer on voice search. Forget keyword stuffing, consider more conversational copy. Optimise your website / blogs etc. with content in the right structure, with answers to What, Who, How, When, Where. Question searches will also provide greater context on user intent and more insight into where the customer is in the purchase funnel, allowing advertisers to be a lot more effective (when intent is combined with personalization and targeting).

Over-targeting

Lured by continuously expanding audience targeting possibilities and innovative features that can create custom audiences, marketers may risk making their targeting strategy so specific that they end up with a severely reduced pool of potential customers. A growing pool of marketers are segmenting audiences too narrowly and ending up abandoning large groups of potentially lucrative customers. That’s possibly worse than an abandoned cart.

There is no ‘perfect’ customer. Marketers will need to curb the impulse to over-specify and micro-segment their audiences.

Rajnish Khare, Head Digital Transformation, Social Media & New Business and Mobility Banking, HDFC Bank

Marketing in the digital world is witnessing a paradigm shift and it has become imperative for brands to keep up with this transformation. Key Digital Marketing Trends that will help companies attain leverage:

Micro – Moments

The way customers consume media has changed drastically.  Increased use of mobile has brought a sea change in the way brands interact with customers. Today, more and more customers use mobile devices to gather information and the challenge lies in doing a good job of addressing the customer’s need at that moment. Building a marketing strategy by leveraging upon these micro – moments of the customer will help in improving the overall quality and effectiveness of the campaign.

Chatbots

Chatbots serve as an interactive platform which is fun and engaging in nature. The artificial intelligence capability in a chatbot helps in analysing the customer’s behaviour and preference which in turn can be used to market personalized content specially curated for the customer. Today, leading brands across India have leveraged upon chatbots to tap on the millennial generation, garner insights and drive engagement.

In the year 2017, a lot of focus was placed on Big Data technologies to collect customer level data from various digital platforms and understand customer behaviour. I expect that 2018 will be the year where Micro-Moments & Chat-bots channelize this data to provide customers with the right kind of product at the right time and at the right place.

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is going to be the latest buzz word for 2018. Major brands like Ikea, Pokemon Go have already showcased the potential of augmented reality by using an innovative way of connecting with customers and increasing engagement. Brands can use augmented reality for social media ad campaign, as a storytelling medium or provide an enriched virtual experience the opportunities available are endless.

Praveen Meloth, Head Digital Marketing, Shopcj.com