It’s that part of the year where we start to look at what the new year has to offer and make our marketing predictions for 2018. To help you get ahead of the game, we here at The Marketing Optimist have put together five marketing predictions for 2018 that you should consider adding to you marketing strategy in the coming year.
Voice search will be huge
Voice search is going to be massive in 2018 due to devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo in your home, and office and of course Siri and OK Google on your phone, so it’s important that your website content contains natural language so that voice searches will give a better match.
Camera search is on it’s way too. Google revealed a new product called ‘Google Lens’ in October this year which works by pointing at objects so it can search for what it sees, surely an off shoot of the Google Glass experiments. This will be a huge improvement for search technology (if it takes off).
Further customisation
Who really wants to pay to engage with 100 people who aren’t relevant? Customising your content so that it reaches a potential customer is a dream for marketers so why not make it a reality? Users are now starting to get bored of seeing the same posts over and over again on their news feed which is why it’s as important as ever to create relevant content that will encourage people to engage with it.
2018 should be the year you start to make this a reality. Whether it’s sending more traffic from Twitter to Facebook or producing more customised landing pages to create a more personalised website experience, it should be something on your list to test.
More focus on videos
Videos will no doubt evolve further in 2018, even though they’ve been an important factor in digital marketing for many years. Many companies seem to ignore videos as a key component in their marketing strategies, but as video platforms like YouTube continue to grow and attract a huge amount of traffic and engagement on a regular basis, they’re not to be ignored. With Facebook focusing on live video content more than they ever have throughout 2017, don’t be surprised to see live streaming fully take off in 2018.
Chatbots will evolve
For some people in the world, chatbots are now becoming just a normal part of life. Most people use chatbots when they’re ordering online or if they need additional information about a specific product/service, but in 2018 we may start to see chatbots transfer into businesses. Could a chatbot do your job better than you? It’s worth thinking about if their instant response becomes faster in 2018.
‘Dark’ social will be solved
Are social networking platforms reading your messages and then selling the data to companies? It may not be happening yet but the conspiracy has been a talking point for some time. There’s a huge amount of private data held on social media platforms but is it really protected by the ‘privacy settings’ as users are lead to believe? Have social networks already made use of this information? What impact will GDPR have? In 2018, we may finally have the answers.
Will these marketing predictions for 2018 actually happen?
Who really knows what the world of marketing has in stall for us in 2018? After all, due to advancing technology and ongoing trends among users, it could be that some of these predictions never see the light of day. However, through analysing the current advancements in search, voice and social media, we reckon it’s highly likely we’ll see some if not all of these implemented within the next year. Are we going to be proven right? We shall see!
