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The Top 2018 Marketing Trends to Incorporate into Your Strategy

Website Project Planning

The Top 2018 Marketing Trends to Incorporate into Your Strategy

It wasn’t that long ago that we were discussing the most influential marketing trends of 2017 but the year is nearly over. Now is the time to look ahead at the 2018 marketing trends that your organization needs to incorporate into its strategy. These trends in marketing will hugely impact how successful your efforts are in the year to come, so seriously think about how you can implement these tactics for your business.

Stop Selling, Start Helping

If you’ve noticed that your sales-focused content no longer performs as well as it once did, you’ve tapped into a major trend for the year ahead. There’s plenty of advertisements posted online. Successful brands must shift their strategies to creating useful, informative, helpful, and unique content that isn’t pushing a sale.  

Integrate Marketing Into the Sales Funnel

Of course, marketing is intended to boost sales. However, there is often a disconnect between marketing and sales efforts. Every piece of marketing content your organization creates needs to serve a top, middle, or bottom of sales funnel goal. For example, your blog posts should be acting as a way of capturing the top of funnel leads and moving them down into the middle of the funnel.

Embrace the Personalization Pyramid

Technology has made it simple for organizations to personalize the customer experience. Through the three different levels, optimization, segmentation, and 1-to-1 personalization, brands relate directly to customers and their needs. Each level serves a different goal that, similar to the sales funnel, transitions interested individuals into paying customers. Yes, enabling the personalization pyramid requires a bit more time but pays off big in the end.

Make Videos

According to data from Google, YouTube had 42 million unique visitors in March 2017, compared to only 40 million unique visitors using the conglomerate’s search engine. More people actively went to YouTube instead of Google search, making the video platform the most popular search engine online. There are so many opportunities to build awareness, educate, engage, and communicate with your target audience using video marketing.

While video once had to be expertly produced, this is no longer the case. A smartphone, tripod, and Internet connection are you all need to make videos for your brand. Using free video editing software adds to the production value, but isn’t required. You don’t even need a script. With the growing popularity of live streaming (which viewers watch for three times longer than pre-recorded videos), you can jump onto Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter, and live stream a video of you discussing any topic.

Cozy Up to Screen-Free Users

Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa aren’t just personal assistants for your to day-to-day life. These voice-based services are a delivery method for content. Users away from their screens (computers, smartphones, and tablets) still want to engage with interesting content, which is why they turn to Siri or Alexa. For your business, that means creating audio content for your audience. For example, Ask Purina is a service available through Amazon that allows pet owners to ask questions about their furry friends via Alexa.

Build Relationships with Micro Influencers

Macro influencers, like the Kardashians or others of their ilk, are probably too expensive to get onboard with your influencer marketing strategy. However, micro influencers, individuals with 1,000 to 100,000 followers, are more likely to engage with your brand and its marketing efforts. These micro influencers hold real sway with their followers because 90 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations.  

For instance, watchmaking company Daniel Wellington, which started as a small startup, gifted their products to micro influencers to promote the brand. The micro influencers then posted pictures of themselves wearing the watches with a unique discount code for their followers. This strategy resulted in 1.3 million Instagram posts using the brand’s dedicated hashtag and 3.2 million followers on the photo-sharing channel. Not bad for a company that launched in May 2011.

Rethink Social Media

While platforms like Twitter and Facebook dominated the social media space for years, the landscape is changing. This year, Twitter focused on what turned out to be unsuccessful attempts to acquire new users rather than putting their efforts behind an improved ad platform. Now, the micro-messaging channel is hurting.

Also, Instagram now has 800 million monthly and 500 million active daily users. Their Instagram Stories tool is more popular than Snapchat less than a year after its launch. Yes, people still use Facebook but users are losing interest due to the channel’s algorithm that values paid content over organic content. In the year ahead, it’s up to brands to rethink how they use social media to engage and interact with their audiences.

With the new year rapidly approaching, you might need some assistance planning your 2018 marketing strategy. Call Alt Creative today to chat about developing an effective strategy for your organization.

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