By Philip Piletic
Source: Vator
We all know that 2016 was a year of mobile and that 2017 was a year of video, but what’s next?
Digital marketing has seen constant growth since 2010, and customers have had seven full years to outgrow ads and boring content. They’re used to being fished and spammed by so many ads all over the web. The expansion of digital industries maximized friction toward brand ads, and 2018 is about to change it all.
As customer’s attention spans become shorter, marketers need to constantly find new ways of keeping them interested. Users often feel under attack from ads and are massively using ad blockers in order to avoid sales messages. They are more likely to buy something from a website that provides them value than to engage with a CTA, however compelling. We all know that 2016 was a year of mobile and that 2017 was a year of video, but what can we expect in 2018?
Voice search
Since the introduction of Siri with Apple’s IPhone 4, virtual assistants have started to take over the search game. This started a revolution in search marketing to be felt in years to come. In 2017 we saw a huge growth of voice search versus text search, which resulted in less traffic for all those keyword stuffed websites.
What can be done here? Instead of stuffing your website with keywords and short terms, try to predict whole sentences and give answers to it. People are “speaking” to their Virtual Assistants, asking full questions. Words like “how”, “where”, “who” and “when” are mostly used at the beginning of a sentence. Just an example: if you are running a top rated online car cover website, you shouldn’t stuff your website with keywords like covers for cars, cheap car covers etc, but try with “where to find car covers online”, for instance.
Social media and chat channels
Social media has been present in digital marketing for years now, but what has changed? Although customers can be engaged with content, marketers have moved towards video and engaging ads. Twitter use is slowly dying down due to a focus on perfecting ad platforms rather than improving user experience. When it comes to Instagram, an educated guess is that it will become a more powerful platform than Facebook itself, when it comes to sales and lead generation.
Let us not forget Quora and its new ad platform, which will be used more in 2018. Reddit is known for its simple and unassuming interface and due to people feeling safe here. It looks organic and people feel like they can trust this platform. Youtube is a popular video channel that is increasingly being used as a social media platform, as is Twitch for gamers. Let us not forget Slack and Telegram as legitimate channels for brands to communicate with their customers.
Read Full Article: https://vator.tv/news/2017-12-08-digital-marketing-changes-we-can-expect-in-2018