You must know the 10 digital marketing trends for 2018 ,

10 digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2018

Digital_Marketing_Jkmast

Is your business still practicing old techniques of digital marketing? Are you wondering why Digital marketing is not getting you the desired results? 

If yes, then this article will surely give you some live examples of how you can use some of the latest developments in the industry. It will help you focus on what all can get you better results while promoting your business online. 

There are primarily 4 factors that are driving the evolution of Digital Marketing in today's times 

1. Technology 

2. Storytelling 

3. First Mover Advantage 

4. Mobile Focused Digital Marketing 

The above-mentioned factors are driving businesses to create experiences that customers can literally fall in love with. Technology is helping marketers to strategize and measure more effectively. It is also helping in making digital marketing operations smoother and more productive. Advancement in technology ensures that you know more about audience behaviour and preferences to be able to run campaigns that are extremely personalized. 

Storytelling, on the other hand, is evolving because of fierce competition among marketers to get audience attention. In 2018, you will be assisting your customers in taking even more informed decisions. You'll have to know them in and out and make sure you are educating and entertaining in a way they like. Let's first look at some of the ways in which brands are using technology to enhance their Digital Marketing efforts: 

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Technology 

AI and Chatbots 

Starbucks, the popular coffee chain is using bots to help customers place their orders. 

If you are a Starbucks customer, you can use voice commands or text and the bot will tell you everything about the status of your order. The bot is available in the Starbucks app. 

Bots are now helping companies provide superior customer service. Brands are making use of Facebook Messenger and Slack to develop their own customised bots for improving their service standards. 

While sometime back everyone was talking about social media as a channel for customer service. The times to come will see Chatbots dominating the space. 

You can benefit from 3 big advantages that chatbots come with 

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1. Chatbots are mobile first and so their user experience is already streamlined according to a mobile audience 

2. They are easy and quick to develop 

3. You can get real-time insights from the Chatbot activity - so you have tons of data to run personalized campaigns. 

Big Data and Predictive Analytics 

American Express recently created sophisticated predictive analytics models to analyze historical customer transactions based on 115 variables. This model helps them to forecast the potential churn rate. 

So, for example, in the Australian market, the company can actually predict the exact percent of accounts that will close in a period of four months. Such analytics is helpful in creating customised campaigns that would reduce the churn rate for the business. 

Travel and eCommerce companies are using predictive analytics to personalize product recommendations to each and every site visitor. Recommender systems are being used to understand the behaviour and preferences of the site visitors and then make a recommendation that's best suited for them. 

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality 

L'Oeal's makeup app uses virtual reality to allow the users apply makeup virtually. It helps them understand how they would look after using any of their products. Elle magazine recently made use of virtual reality to create a 360-degree virtual tour of its photo shoot. 

VR and AR are helping brands to provide fascinating experiences to their audience. These technologies are going to play a big role in helping brands to differentiate themselves. 

Marketing Automation 

Mumsnet is the largest parenting site in the UK. Mumsnet uses marketing automation to run personalized campaigns for parents. Parenthood is a journey and each one has their own. Therefore, their pregnancy newsletter is fully automated and personalized. 

When someone is about to get pregnant, she can share her due date on their site and she would start getting educational mailers from that very date. 

Automation along with predictive analytics makes your digital marketing campaigns super-productive. 

The technology helps you to segment your audience on the basis of their demographics, behaviour, and preferences. You can know more about them and create customized campaigns. The additional advantage is these campaigns can be fully automated according to preset triggers and customer actions. 

Tools for Digital Marketing 

You must ensure you are using the latest tools for managing Digital Marketing for your business: 

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Hubspot 

Tools such as Hubspot will dominate how businesses manage their leads, campaigns, and conversions. Such tools provide a single dashboard to manage and measure all of your digital marketing activities from a single dashboard. 

An all-in-one marketing cloud software like Hubspot can help you do everything from storing, managing and segmenting your leads to creating automated campaigns to analyzing the results from each of these campaigns. 

BuzzSumo 

BuzzSumo is a unique content research tool that helps you find out content pieces that are getting the highest number of social shares. It gives you a deep understanding of the type of content that will do well for your business. 

PowToons 

Technology now enables you to create professional looking videos without having any technical knowledge of video editing. Catch hold of tools like PowToons and YouTube video editor to create videos that your audience can value and share. 

Apester 

Apester provides content publishers to easily create interactive content types like polls, quizzes and personality tests. 

Google Trends 

Google Trends is a multi-purpose tool that you can use for keyword research, newsjacking and brand monitoring. The tool will play a crucial role in helping marketers hack trends and stay ahead of the competition. 

Storytelling 

Most businesses are now creating tons of content to promote their business. So how do you differentiate your business amidst the existing noise?Creating content that is thought-provoking and entertaining can help you to grab their attention and engage them for longer. Content, therefore, takes the form of a story that your audience can enjoy and communicate with your brand. So, how can you make sure your content is story-driven? 

Newer content formats are paving the way for marketers to make sure the content they create is experiential and influences how the audiences think and act. 

Formats such as online videos and interactive contests quizzes and polls will give you a tremendous opportunity to create some remarkable content. Online Influencers, on the other hand, are playing a big role as creators of culture. If brands can collaborate with them to propagate their ideas then they are bound to gain tremendously. Let's now look at how brands are using these storytelling techniques to break the clutter and build emotional relationships with their audience. 

Video Marketing 

This video from iPhone X received more than 19 million views. 

Video is the type of content that is helping brands to go viral and get more shares and impressions. Take a look at this heart touching example from dignity health. 

Interactive Content Marketing 

Siyaram's, the popular textile brand recently created an interactive content marketing campaign. The campaign was called #10DaysofGoodwill. They created a 10-day contest during Navratri. The audience was given one new challenge every day. 



Contests like these get the audience to participate while tagging their friends and relatives on Facebook and Twitter. The campaign was a huge success and received 32K organic impressions on Twitter and a total of 750 participations. 

Such interactive campaigns can help you to get a much higher reach and engagement with your brand. 

Here is another example of a compelling piece of interactive content in the form of Digital Marketing Quiz from Digital Vidya. 



The quiz has got three levels - Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert. It helps site visitors to gauge their level of digital marketing expertise and learn along the way as well. 

The Hubspot blog topic generator is another piece of interactive content that helps marketers to easily generate ideas for their blog posts. 



Digital Marketing

Influencer Marketing 

Axis Thought Factory is the digital arm of Axis Bank. The company is working on innovative technology solutions in FinTech sector. They tied up with tech bloggers in Bangalore, to spread awareness about the brand and what it aims to achieve. They organized an influencer meet to present their vision to all the bloggers who then covered the story in their respective blogs. 

The brand got tremendous results from the activity as #AxisThoughtFactory was trending on Twitter India for one whole day. Every niche has online influencers and bloggers who have a big audience for their content. You will now find a growing number of influencers each with a big audience. Brands who will collaborate with them would surely expand their reach and get better results. 

The First Mover Advantage 

Digital marketing is fairly dynamic and if you need to get more from it, you must hack the latest trends. 

For example, until a few years back, businesses used to get a very reasonable amount of organic reach on their Facebook page posts. With an influx of new business pages, the organic reach fizzled out into oblivion. In today's times, if you are not running a paid campaign on Facebook, you would practically have no reach on your posts. Similarly, 'live streaming' on Facebook and Twitter are big now and so are temporary content features such as 'Stories' on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and now Whatsapp. 

Quora 

Quora is another very interesting platform to solve problems that your audience is facing and build up a follower base that will eventually give you business. Take a look at these examples: 

The experts shown above have garnered millions of answer views and thousands of followers by consistently answering questions on this bustling community. 

As a community Quora is growing and if you wish to showcase your professional expertise then you must not miss out on this exciting platform. 

LinkedIn 

• Ever since Microsoft has acquired this 500 million plus strong professional social network, it has suddenly become a bustling platform for both B2B and B2C marketers. The platform allows you to publish or re-publish content that your network of connections would be interested to read. LinkedIn provides you with a huge opportunity to go viral and improve your reach by posting some quality content. 

Here is an example of a post, which I republished on my LinkedIn profile and yet it received good response. 

You can now do a lot more on LinkedIn. You can use @mentions to tag influencers in your industry. LinkedIn now allows you to follow those who are outside of your network, view their updates and engage with them. 

You can organize and post short interviews with your customers and industry influencers. You can tag them and leverage from reaching out to a bigger audience. LinkedIn now also allows you to post videos. You can showcase your expertise in a smartphone video and put it up as an update on your LinkedIn profile. 

You will be surprised by how much value this platform can provide to your business. 

Snapchat 

If you are marketing to millennials and Gen Z then you can't miss out on SnapChat. The instant messaging app got popular with it's stories feature which was later copied by Instagram. The app is still doing very well and has got 178 million daily active users. Snapchat has got some cool features that its users love to play around with - 60 second snaps, drawing with emojis and custom geofilters etc. 

Cedar Point a popular amusement park created a Halloween centric campaign to get 233% more engagement on Snapchat than on other social media platforms. Snapchat has got this really cool feature which notifies you if a user has taken a screenshot of your snap. 

Cedar Point created a snap with a ghost footage of less than a second. They then asked their users to take a screenshot of the ghost as quickly as possible. They rewarded the quickest five participants in the competition. Similarly, you can use any other unique feature of this amazing platform to surprise your audience and get them to participate. 

Mobile Focused Digital Marketing 

In the year 2016 Google announced the mobile first index which means that by 2018 Google will rank websites on the merit of their mobile versions as opposed to their desktop versions. This move came in because most internet users are perpetually on their mobile phones. 

How does that affect your digital marketing? Here are some tips 

1. Make sure your website is mobile friendly and loads faster than three seconds (on the mobile device too). 

2. A mobile audience is more akin to watching video content. So, creating videos can surely help you more in a mobile first world. 

3. Create paid campaigns that are more skewed to mobile users (You'll find yourself getting better results from the mobile device while optimizing your campaign). 

4. You can utilize user location to create innovative and contextual campaigns for your business. 

5. Use live streaming to build deeper relationships with a mobile audience. 

Conclusion 

2017 is coming to end and it is time to shed old techniques, tools and strategies in favour of those that would bring your business incremental results. Those businesses that will tell unique stories and provide jaw-dropping experiences to the their target customers are bound to leap ahead of their game. You've got to watch for the latest features of the key digital marketing platforms and create personalized and innovative campaigns for your audience. 

Knowing your target audience better through technologies like predictive analytics and machine learning would always work to your advantage. Whatever be the size of your business, make sure you're aware of what the world is doing, so you can always compete and stay ahead. 

Would you like me to share any other trend or channel to focus in 2018? I would love to learn from your experience. Please share your inputs/questions in the comments section. 

The author is a serial entrepreneur. He's the CEO of Abroadpedia , one of Asia's leading Educational web If you want to know about Scholarship and gateway to study abroad then you can find more about their digital marketing training programs. He can be reached at @DrJyotish on Twitter