New Year, New Marketing Strategy?

Marketing Trends for 2018

The digital marketing landscape evolves with each passing year. What factors will you need to consider in your marketing strategy for the coming year?

No area of business has been immune from the effects of the technological revolution over the past decade or so, but most business leaders agree that the marketing function has seen the biggest changes.

In delivering SEO services to clients, we are working in an environment of constant evolution. One of the key issues in recent years has been the shift to mobile internet and the smartphone generation, which has changed the way people surf the net and had a profound impact on every aspect of digital marketing.

So what will be the biggest factors to consider in your marketing strategy for the new year? Here are our top four:

Content Marketing

Each year, there has been a gradual but noticeable increase in the focus on content marketing, and businesses are finally getting wise to just how fundamental it is to the overall marketing strategy. Content is the fuel that powers every aspect of digital marketing communications. Search, email marketing, or social media engagement, content marketing makes or breaks it.

It is important to understand that content marketing is not just about the creation and distribution of great content – important though that is. Your content marketing strategy also needs to look more fundamentally at the role of content across every stage in the customer life cycle, and at how content marketing can connect with other sales and marketing strategies.

Actionable Insights

Another topic that has been around for a while, but steadily gained momentum, is big data. Digital marketers are becoming increasingly aware of data’s potential to provide what are called actionable insights. For those businesses that have been rich in data lacking in ways to get the best value out of it, actionable insights provide a crucial bridge between analytics and actions.

AI and Machine Learning

A recent TV series charted “the rise of the machines” and looked at artificial intelligence in day-to-day life. While the business applications of machine learning might not make such compelling prime-time viewing as having robots walking around the house, the implications and potential are even greater.

As is so often the case, Google led the way with the launch of RankBrain in 2015, an artificial intelligence system that is now fundamental to the search algorithm. Since then, machine learning tools have become steadily more accessible to us all. The potential influence of any tool that can better analyse diverse scenarios using large sets of data, content, context, and channels on a digital marketing strategy goes without saying.

Social Media Influencers

Any marketing strategy worth its salt will already incorporate social media channels, but these need to form an ever-stronger focus. Already, the age of the millennial is on the wane, and by 2020, Generation Z will encompass some 40 percent of all consumers. These are people who have grown up in a world of social media influencers, and your business needs to be speaking to the new market through the right channels.