Marketing Trends and Integrations to Focus on in 2018

Following most of the major changes in Digital Marketing for the past 10 years, we have reached critical times where our lives are directly dependent on technology that is growing faster than we are able to catch up. Here are some of the Marketing trends and major integrations that we need to focus on in 2018 to augment our Digital Marketing potentials.

What are today’s most popular devices?

In the diagram below, we see that Mobile Devices are taking over the market, and they will keep on doing so year on year. We can also see that the use of Desktops and Laptops are also decreasing since most of them are replaced either with mobile devices or with portable smart devices. For designers who used to rely on the processing power of computers to render their designs and drawings, now they can do so easier and faster with smart design optimized devices that combine the portability of a tablet and the processing power of a desktop computer.

We are in the beginning of a technology era where most if not all devices are becoming smarter every year. From houses to cars, buildings and even cities where everything is connected to everything else. Currently, the yearly usability increase is at 30%, this number is expected to double by the beginning of 2019 and triple by end of 2020.

Which will be the most important Digital Marketing approach for you this year?

Content Marketing

Concentration on Content and Content Marketing has increased significantly over the past years and now it has become the focus. With so much content thrown online every second of every day, it is becoming harder for online advertisers and marketers to keep up, their content ends up either shadowed by thousands of others or they would never show up at all. However, that is not their only problem; there are millions of people online criticizing the simplest and smallest of mistakes, which are now public so it becomes extremely easy to identify them and make that content go viral. Some Marketers are taking advantage of that problem and turning it into a solution with content manipulation to turn that critic into a marketing tool for brand exposure.

Bottom line is that content is what drives the online community we have today, it is the most effective way of reaching the public and it is essential for every marketer who is considering on taking their brand online.

Big Data

When our lives revolved around traditional marketing, we used to print a piece of paper and hang it around somewhere hoping for people to see it. Then when people do see it and react to it, we would have no idea on how it happened, when it happened, and what was their reaction to it. With today’s technology, all that information is accessible and assessable, the industry created a new word for this Big Data.

We have the technology to track every single action a person takes on any piece of information shared online, we also know these people’s behavioral history, their personal information like name, address, profession, interests, likes etc… and we can now connect these people, identify them, and target them… enough said?

SEO and Content Management

Back in the day SEO was easy, throw in a few Meta tags, a title, an image, a few headings and you’re done. As we have seen in Big Data and Machine Learning; SEO has evolved and it has its own world now of content and media analysis, it is capable of analyzing the structure of the site, the content in each page, the grammar used and identify mistakes, and much more. It not only analyses the site it analyses people as well to be able to match and deliver the best results.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning

Artificial Intelligence was only introduced to the public the past year of 2017 and it hit hard. All the big fish are investing most of their resources on this technology that is expected to reshape the world as we know it. Considering the search engines alone, analyzing each individual search made out of the billions of searches done every day with an algorithm so complex, it would take a human month to run, analyze and return a single page of results for only one search input.

With the combination of Big Data and Machine learning, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be able to analyze and estimate faster and more accurately than all the world computers combined.

With the evolving technology, Traditional Marketing is dying out, the future of marketing will be online, and it will be Digital. There are currently numerous technologies capable of adapting to this change and can provide great results when it comes to creating campaigns, Identifying the target audience, Targeting that audience and performing the necessary analysis to improve and optimize future campaigns.

Virtual and Augmented Reality

It is a trend now, and you see these all over the market as well, whether using headgear for virtual reality or in online stores for augmented reality, we can see now products sold online with augmented reality in 3D where you can turn and flip the items you are thinking of buying. We hear Virtual Reality, we hear Augmented Reality, Multi Reality, and so on… what does each mean?

It all boils down to these two, Augmented and Virtual.

Virtual Reality is explained to be an environment meant to simulate a physical presence in an imaginary world or could be a real world and the person would have the ability to interact with/in that world. This could be headgear; like a mask, that takes you from where you are, into a virtual world where you can interact with anything and everything including other people.

Augmented Reality as described by Wikipedia “is a live, direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data.” This could be reworded as taking anything from the real world and applying an overlay on it. It’s not a port of it, it just augments it’s potential. An example of this is when Google first made an attempt to provide it’s consumers with Augmented Reality when it created the Google Glass.

I always say that the most important thing to have in a Digital Marketing strategy is consistency but people more often misunderstand what it really means. 

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Take a blog as an example, Consistency does not mean that if you write your first article with an image all the others you post need to have an image. Consistency is setting a timeline and sticking to it, it is and always was related to time, not content.

Bottom line, if you want to look at it in a more generalized view, you will see the connection and how each one can greatly influence the other.  Content and its creation have become the center of attention to everyone, and its distribution either through complex technology like Virtual Reality or Machine Learning is documented and saved forming what we call Big Data. This process of documentation is organized and fragmented using Content Management and Content Optimization. There you have it, the perfect cycle and the best Digital Marketing Strategy you can have for the year 2018.

The future of marketing is digital and it is already affecting traditional marketing. At some point in time technology will become even more a part of our lives that we can imagine and the only way to reach out would be through these technologies. The more we know about them now, the easier it will become for us to utilize them effectively in the future.