Saturday, January 13, 2018
Digital Marketing Trends For 2018
5 Digital Marketing Trends that will shape your 2018
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other popular social media networks continuously update their platforms, which is why it’s critical for marketers to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in the social media space.
So to help you prepare for the changes to come in 2018, we’ve put together a list of the top social media trends you need to know about.
1) Video on demand, in demand
Nothing on social media is as eye-catching as good video content. Whether you’re marketing on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat, it looks like social video engagement stats are going to be through the roof in 2018.
If you’re not convinced, these social media video statistics should prove why video is worth your attention:
- YouTube viewers watch a billion hours of video each day
- Facebook users consume over 8 billion videos every day
- 82% of Twitter’s audience views video content on the platform
There’s a huge variety of formats this video content can take, from 360-degree videos to live streams. This gives marketing teams a serious amount of flexibility when it comes to planning video campaigns.
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that mobile comes first. After all, 90% of Twitter video views and 60% of YouTube views are now from users on mobile devices.
The marketing community has seen the writing on the wall---65% of marketers are preparing to increase their budgets for mobile ads to focus more on video within the next few months.
2) Social media influencers gaining more...influence
At this point, the advantages of social influencer marketing have been well-established. That’s why marketers should expect heated competition if they want to work with top brand influencers this year.
To avoid the pressure of competing with rival brands, marketers will be looking to develop more long-term relationships with key social media influencers in 2018.
But why bother looking to partner up for the long haul? Just look at Louis Vuitton’s 2016 partnership with Selena Gomez. It ended abruptly when rival fashion brand Coach managed to sign a new deal with the celebrity influencer, leaving Louis Vuitton out in the cold.
Another key advancement in influencer marketing strategy this year will be authenticity. Consumers can easily detect influencer-brand collaborations that seem forced and call them out, which is why savvy marketers will focus on building organic relationships with influencers that mesh with their brand in 2018.
3) The EU’s crackdown on data collection
In 2018, the European Union is getting serious about companies collecting consumer data. On May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is going into effect. Will your company be prepared?
Basically, the GDPR gives EU citizens more control over their personal data. Every time a company wants to collect information from a consumer, they’ll now need explicit consent from the individual.
That data could be anything from their location to their name to their email address. On top of that, the company will need to tell the person what data they plan to collect and how they’ll use it.
I know what you’re thinking---if my business isn’t in the EU, no problem, right? Well, the GDPR is applicable to any company that collects data on any EU citizen. And U.S.-based companies are actually more prepared for the GDPR than European ones; less than 75% of European companies will be GDPR compliant by May, compared to 84% of American companies.
What happens if your business doesn’t comply? It’s not pretty: you’ll be faced with an EU fine of up to 4% of global annual turnover or 23 million USD---whichever is greater.
10 Marketing Tips - Growth Strategy For Businesses
10 Marketing Tips and Tricks to Bring Your Business Up to Speed
Consider the Best Strategies for Instagram Growth
If you’re looking to use Instagram as a marketing platform for your business, you need a strategy. There are plenty of different ways you can go about growing your Instagram presence. And Lilach Bullock discusses some of them in a recent post on the DIY Marketers blog.
Evaluate the Authenticity of Marketing Services
Once your company has grown enough that you can’t handle everything yourself, you might consider hiring a marketing service. But how do you know which services are authentic and which ones aren’t? Jeremy Webb of technologi.st offers some insights.
Grow Your Low Traffic Blog
You don’t need to start out with tons of blog traffic in order to use a blog to grow your business. In a recent Web Hosting Secrets Revealed post, Gina Badalaty shares an interview with tips for low traffic bloggers. And BizSugar members also comment on the post.
Don’t Put Everything Off Until Tomorrow
Procrastination can be a major problem for small business owners. If it’s something that you struggle with, check out the discussion in a recent Crowdspring post by Arielle Kimbarovsky, who shares six reasons why tomorrow can be your business’s worst enemy.
Learn How to Handle Social Media PR Disasters
Even though social media can be a great marketing asset, it can sometimes lead to PR problems for businesses too. When that happens, you need to know how to mitigate the damage. Ben Steele shares some tips in a recent Social Media HQ post.
Promote Your Brand More Creatively
If you want your brand to stand out from the competition, you have to get creative. In some cases, you can learn from larger brands that have unique marketing strategies. Susan Solovic offers an example that small businesses and marketers can learn from in a recent blog post.
Plan for These Google Changes and SEO Trends
SEO continues to evolve as Google makes adjustments to its algorithm. To stay ahead of the curve, you can see some predictions and insights in a recent Search Engine Land post by Pratik Dholakiya.
CES 2018 - Marketing Trends: Voice Search, AI
Three Trends From CES That Will Power Marketing in 2018
If you’re a marketer who is not in the consumer electronics industry and attended, or have been following the highlights from, CES, you’ve probably had your fill of bigger and brighter TV screens and gadgets that solve yet-to-be identified problems. Yet among the hype, and the 20,000 some product announcements, we’ve found three relevant trends that will power marketing in 2018 and beyond.
Planned Obsolescence as a strategy is now Obsolete
What has been a running joke at CES is now a firm reality: everything is now either Smart or Connected. Gartner predicts that in the next two years, 95% of new products will have some sort of IoT technology. This means a world where suitcases will need to be paired to your phone, shower heads will require wi-fi and pillows will need firmware updates. It’s crazy.
Back in the early part of the last century, GM pioneered a strategy where if you wanted the newest and the latest features, you had to buy an entirely new automobile. Consumers in this century flatly reject that approach. Why? Because software has made it possible to continually evolve products. Tesla deftly set the bar very high in 2015 by issuing a software update over-the-air called Ludicrous Mode which improved the acceleration of the Model S. Alfred Sloan would be shocked.
And consumers eagerly expect these updates. Have you noticed how quickly your iPhone’s App Store icon shows you have 20, 30 or even 50 apps that need updated? Behind each of these updates is a set of Release Notes. These are no longer just highlights developers share with each other internally. Because companies know how closely they are followed, it’s very common to have brand guidelines specifically for tone and voice of their app’s Release Notes.
A common response we heard this year when inquiring about product features was: “that’s not quite available yet, but we’ll have it in the next update”. Which undoubtedly will be true. To consumers, frequent updates reinforce a product’s value and improves brand affinity. Modern software is built on three-week release cycles. Similarly, product marketers will need to think the same way in how they communicate with consumers.
The Domination of Voice Interaction and Search
Speaking of voice…. At CES 2017, nearly everyone was caught off guard at the explosion of devices proudly displaying the “Works with Alexa” badge and featuring demos with an Echo in their booth. It was quite a coming out party for Amazon despite having no official presence on the show floor for the device.
This year, it was more or less expected that every device would have integration with the voice platforms. It was also a very visible arms race between Amazon and Google to outshine each other in advertising and booth presence around product integrations.
What has been seen the past few years as a niche device for early adopters has quickly crossed the chasm to be a mainstream product. In Amazon’s final earnings call of 2017, Jeff Bezos opaquely acknowledged that more than 20 million Echo devices had been sold.
CES this year showed that voice control is moving beyond the smart speaker. On the floor of the Central Hall (where the likes of Intel, Nikon, Sony and Panasonic all have major presences) we saw that nearly every manufacturer of a television screen had embedded one of the voice platforms in their TV.
The combination of broader penetration and increasing usage means that this is the year brands have to get serious about SEO for Voice Search. It’s a quickly evolving discipline to manage what will be returned when people ask about your products in a voice search.
It’s also a big question of brand safety. Remember the Burger King stunt where they said “Ok Google, what’s inside a Burger King Whopper” at the end of their commercial? Pranksters online quickly edited Wikipedia so that the response was “100% medium-sized child”.
One of the first steps to take is building a voice lab with every relevant platform and regularly QA’ing your digital presence to understand how it is represented with voice searches.
WWE: Virtual Reality Wrestling - Business Technology
WWE Tags NextVR for Virtual-Reality Wrestling Highlights
WWE is launching a new virtual-reality initiative in partnership with NextVR — promising to bring fans literally inside the ring with up-close-and-raw VR highlight recaps of select 2018 WWE events.
The companies expect to produce six VR experiences this year, each slated to run about 10 minutes in length. They’ll be available to watch for free on a new WWE channel in the NextVR app following each event.
WWE took its first crack at VR more than two years ago in a pact with Samsung. Since then, the virtual-reality space has evolved and VR now has the potential to not only super-serve WWE fans with unique content but become a real revenue stream, said Michelle Wilson, WWE’s chief revenue and marketing officer.
“It’s an incredible fan-engagement opportunity,” Wilson said. “We’re going to provide these amazing, oh-my-god moments in VR.”
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