The State of Digital Marketing 2018: 5 Trends To Look Out For

by Startacus Admin

Nina Ricafort is a Growth Marketer specialising in acquisition channels, social media and events. As part of the Jobbio team, she helps people find their place in the world.

Here, Nina shares 5 crucial Digital Marketing trends to watch out for in 2018...

1. Conversational User Interfaces (“the best interface is no interface”)

Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs), i.e. interacting with technology via text or voice conversation, exploded in 2017, thanks to the likes of Facebook’s Messenger Bots or Amazon’s Echo. 

CUIs enable businesses to interact and converse naturally with consumers. They can provide increased user engagement, deliver personalised content (more on that later), and remove obstacles from the buying process.

How to get started: Experiment with Facebook’s Messenger Ads for lead generation. You can send direct promotions to people who have engaged with your business and begin to generate revenue directly from this social media channel. 

With nearly 50% of people using voice search when researching products, marketers (in particular small or local businesses) need to prepare to optimise for voice searches. Start by identifying long-tail keywords (since voice queries are more conversational) and creating content that focuses on these longer search terms. 

2. Automation and Personalised Customer Journeys

Gone are the days of mass email blasts. Now your digital marketing campaigns need to rely on targeted, personalised messaging in order to better convert prospects or retain customers.

How to get started: Map out the journey that you want prospects or customers to take, decide what data you need to capture and how, and storyboard what communications will be triggered by user activity. At this stage, you will likely need a marketing automation tool to help you deliver these personalised messages.

With so many vendors out there, selecting a marketing automation tool can be a tricky process. Highlight all your use cases and involve other departments (such as product or sales, who might want visibility of a prospect’s journey) in order to ensure the tool meets all requirements. Bespoke solutions may even be required, in which case working with a smaller vendor who can cater to your needs might be a better fit than other bigger solutions.

3. Being Proactive Against Bad Ads

On February 15, Google Chrome’s built-in ad blocker will go live. This means sites with spammy, intrusive, and “bad” ads will see their advertising blocked. 

How to avoid it: The standard for “bad” ads are determined by the Coalition for Better Ads - click here to see what constitutes.

4. Video Marketing

If “content is king”, video has dethroned other forms of digital content to clinch the top spot. Between 64-85% of viewers report they are more likely to make a purchase after watching a product video and conversions increase by as much as 80% on landing pages with an embedded video. So, investing in high-quality videos for 2018 is a no-brainer. 

How to get started: Use video in engagement campaigns to get a wide reach at a low cost, and boost your brand. Re-target those who watched a percentage of your video with a clear CTA to make a purchase. If you don’t have a large budget, get started with free tools like Lumen5 for social videos.

Always remember to optimise the video for the channel it is being distributed on (for example, vertical on Snapchat or square on Instagram), post natively (on Facebook, native videos have 10 times higher reach compared YouTube links), and make sure to add subtitles.

5. General Data Protection Regulation

Not a trend per se, but definitely worth highlighting: GDPR will apply in all EU member states from May 25 2018. Once it comes into effect, businesses must ensure that personal data is processed lawfully, transparently, and deleted once it is no longer required.

How to get started: Run an audit to evaluate which third party tools are GDPR compliant and clear data from platforms where information is not specifically required. Going forward, give users the ability to see what data you have about them. Most companies work with lawyers or an agency to become compliant.

Nina Ricafort is a Growth Marketer specialising in acquisition channels, social media and events. As part of the Jobbio team, she helps people find their place in the world.

About Jobbio and Startacus. 

Startacus and Jobbio recently partnered together to create a startup focused jobs channel for the startup community. Employers (new to Jobbio) can post their first startup job for FREE and job seeking talent seeking employment within the startup community can also view and apply for a whole host of startup jobs.

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Published on: 21st December 2017