Digital Marketing Predictions for 2017 - Part 1

Welcome to the first instalment of my digital predictions 2017 - are you currently sitting at your desk wondering what is going to change with online marketing over the next 12 months?

It is more likely that are that you are too busy to consider the changes that are or you've put a plan into place and will be sticking with it whether you've considered this or not. But there will be some companies that are interested in the experts opinions, are not busy enough or have not made a plan and are just bumbling through! You are the companies that might need this advice or guidance. So this is part one of a 3 part series for you to better understand the market and make an informed plan.

Looking the top techniques for 2017, we can see that the more traditional digital activities will feature heavily, social media marketing with a good improvement, SEO for long term sustainability, paid search always showing it's face and CRO being ever important for every single website. But we will start with the big numbers on this graph.

Content Marketing - It is still the king

Content marketing has been in the top 3 techniques for the last 3 years and is number 1 now, so it shows the aspiration for content marketing to commercial success. Content marketing makes perfect sense for the modern marketing mix as it supports the integrated approach to digital marketing where content is used to fuel an increase in engagement across different inbound channels, including organic and paid search, social media, email marketing and also out outbound. Content marketing can support a strategic approach based on engaging different customer personas across the customer lifecycle, rather than treating different channels in isolation.

Big Data & Marketing Automation -Applying Machine Learning

You may think that big data is limited to huge businesses with big budgets. But big data is just a term that describes the large volume of data that inundates a business on a day-to-day basis and a solution to help manage it. But it’s not the amount of data that’s important. It’s what organisations do with the data that matters. Big data can be analysed for insights that lead to better decisions and strategic business moves.

By Applying Machine Learning, a technique that was much hyped in 2016, those complex calculations that take human beings minutes and hours machines can complete in seconds. Saving you time and the phrase fit's well here

Thanks for reading part 1, I will post part 2 later this week. Any comments or questions are welcome!