Digital Marketing Trends for 2018

One of the beautiful things about digital marketing is that is constantly changing, with innovative changes taking place all the time. Over the past few years, we’ve seen vast changes and improvements in mobile and smartphone usage, social media marketing, and paid and organic search, to name a few. 

As digital marketing is constantly ever-changing, here are five digital marketing trends to look out for in 2018:

·      Use of Artificial Intelligence: The use of artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to grow, with 57% of marketers already implementing them. Artificial intelligence can be implemented in a number of ways, including speech/text recognition on search engines, marketing forecasting, and recommendation engines on ecommerce, streaming and other similar platforms.

·      Augmented Reality: Like artificial intelligence, augmented reality is another trend which is already popular, and will continue to grow in the coming years. Augmented reality allows apps to use aspects such as a users’ location to activate sponsored augmented reality content. Apps like Pokemon Go and Snapchat have already integrated them into their apps, and others will surely follow in the near future.

·      Video Usage Will Increase: Already highly popular on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, video usage in marketing is expected to increase in popularity in 2018. The statistics back this up, with 87% of online marketers already using video content due to it’s popularity. This is evident on platforms like Twitter (82% of users watch video content on Twitter), Facebook, and YouTube (45% of users watch over an hour of Facebook and YouTube videos weekly). Live videos in particular will also continue to soar in popularity, especially if more social media platforms follow Facebook and Instagram’s lead and implement them.

·      More Reliance on Data: As technology advances, data collection has become much more common. There is a massive amount of user data available for businesses to use for their marketing, with tools like Google Analytics available for marketers to use. Websites and social media platforms are now able to collect user data, such as their age, where they’re visiting from, how much time they spend on certain pages…etc. With all this data available, it’s no wonder that businesses are now using it to better understand their customers and build relevant marketing campaigns. Expect to see more of this in 2018.

·      Increased Focus on Mobile: Everyone seems to be on their smart phones nowadays, which means it’s no surprise that marketers are shifting their focus towards mobile. In fact, nearly 60% of Google’s ad revenues last year were from mobile ads. This shift towards mobile has led to improvements in apps and is the basis for augmented reality. Therefore, it is critical for businesses to embrace this shift towards mobile, through ensuring they have mobile-friendly websites, and launching mobile apps and compatible digital marketing campaigns.    

By : Sherif Radwan / Business Development Intern / Eureka Digital