Diverse patterns have been witnessed in digital marketing trends over time to fetch appropriate results in year 2017. The need for post-digital marketing world has strengthened the need for assimilating digitalization to marketing concepts. That is why, as the New Year sets in, there is always an increased buzz about the predictions on latest digital marketing trends and its effects on industry. We all know that the digital marketing industry is growing fast and so are its methods. Therefore, the possibility of changes in its trends is always at its high. As the year 2016 is near to its closing, an increased concern among the marketers has been observed regarding the key trends of 2017 that every company should follow to become successful in the long run. This year I have also jotted down Facebook Marketing and Advertising Trends for 2017, you might even want to explore that in detail.
Digital marketing forecast revolves around the behavior of the consumers. 2016 had been a great year for the digital marketing industry, let’s be a bit more hopeful for the upcoming year! Here are some of the most important trends that marketers need to watch out:
- Virtual Reality Trends – Using computer technology for creating the effect of an interactive three-dimensional world in which objects are sensed as spatial presence is what we mean by Virtual Reality. 2016 has been a year for Virtual Reality content, not for everyone, (being expensive not practical for an average person) but for many of us. The concept of allowing users to experience a product, campaign, theme or a situation without any direct physical effect gave a boost to future of experiential marketing through digital means. Almost all brands can make use of Virtual Reality to market their ideas, products and services to their audiences. Many real estate brands in India have attempted to venture in Virtual Reality based engagement models.
Best Virtual Reality Campaigns and Examples 2016
Samsung Gear VR #BeFearless of Heights – Using Samsung Gear VR the giant gave an opportunity to people to overcome the fear of heights. 27 people those were afraid of heights came from different countries to partake in the campaign. Virtually people went through 3 different scenarios at different levels of difficulty. The campaign reduced the anxiety level by 23.6% among participants.
Game of Thornes – Introduction sequence of Game of Thrones was rendered in 360- degree for giving virtual reality experience among fans. This added excitement and took social media sharing to a different level. The video was viewed more than 1.7 million times from three hours of going live.
There are various ways Virtual Reality will help Digital Marketers in 2017 including real-time data collection, improving customer engagement and to interact virtually provided new content strategies keep coming.
- Building Smart Custom Audiences – If you are digital marketer, you already know advertising with subscribers email list, Facebook, Twitter etc can be fruitful. Because your best business goes high with the people you already know (virtually or physically). However, above methods had their own limitations, but 2016 been a year of Facebook’s Custom Audience. This feature allows to create a list of people you want to target Facebook ads at based on a list of email addresses, gender, location, unique Facebook IDs, phone numbers, website visitors, look-a-like audience etc. Learn how to build Custom Audience, to get a larger picture and gauge the effectiveness of Custom Audience. Thousands of advertisers are already using Custom Audience for targeting their campaigns, and we see an upward slope for this digital marketing trend in 2017.
- Mobile App Personalized Push Messages – Push Notifications are extremely powerful tool used by various industries including, Utility & Financial Service, Taxi & Ride Sharing, Sports, Food & Beverages, Social and eCommerce. It totally eradicated the dark annoyance of unwanted calls, SMS, banner ads, pop up ad etc, which in-turn increased customer engagement without being brash. On the other hand, Personalized Push Notification is a boon to app publishers as it sends notifications even if users are not logged in or using the device.
Here are top 5 reasons why a person stop using any app and highlights the importance of offering personalized experience so that your app is never ignored, forgotten or uninstalled.
Image Credit – Localytics
Some Interesting Facts of Personalized Push Messages:
- CTR of Push Messages are 50% higher than emails
- Among total app users 68% of customers have Push Notification enabled on their app
- 92% higher mobile app retention rate
- Behavioral based segmentation helps to increase 8.6% CTR, Profile Based Segmentation boost CTC by 13% and both ideas combined can increase campaign CTR by 30%
Now cleverly with the invention of Personalized Push Notification, people are at lower risk of frustration:
A report published by midiaresearch said, about 63% of android users take action and opt in for such messages, with about 78% of vendors at its high and 58% of vendors at its low. Whereas, the figure averages at 43% for ios users making it 46% at the industry high and 39% at industry low. Such data explains why creating tailored experience for customer is necessary. More App developers and marketers will need to focus on Personalized Push Messages in a polite and humorous manner in to understand the value of users in 2017!
- Marketing Automation– Today using marketing automation techniques/tools/software is a standard practice. As the capabilities with automation are massive; it allows marketers to automate email campaign, track analytics, outreach social media and much more. Tools like Zapier, and AWeber that offers robust features have brought growth in marketers adopting automation.
More and more digital agencies are seeing the benefits offered by a strong marketing automation strategy. That’s why field of Marketing Automation is growing at an amazing rate, and for various reasons:
Image Credit – MarketingCharts
Marketing Automation Facts:
- Currently 49% of companies are making use of Marketing Automation
- 51% of marketers use combination of in-house and outsourced resource, 12% hired a specialist, while 37% made use of in-house resources.
- About 63% of “Very Successful” marketers used their marketing automation in an extensive ways, while 37% achieved great with limited use.
Following are the types of marketing technology brands prefer using, while marketing automation still need to buck up, it is surely performing well in 2017.
Image Credit – Ascent2
- 10x Content Strategies – 2017 is the year of 10x content strategies, infact this is in continuation with what was assumed for 2016. However, not many companies have used content as a core product, rather have created content for the products and services that not much on the lookout. Content Marketing is powerful and with a proper strategy for implementing it across social media can bring predictable outcomes and scalable results.
Image Credit – Smartinsights
No matter, whether the content is in written, PDFs, Infographics, video or audio form, the key to growth lies with understanding your audience and sharing relevant content. In simple terms, Content developers, equipped with rich content strategies, will over perform the dabblers in 2017.
Some interesting facts about Content Strategies:
- Currently more than 80% of B2B marketers have a content marketing strategy
- 72% of marketers have a well-organized content strategy.
- According to IBM, 56% of marketers believe that personalized content bring higher engagement rates.
- Effectiveness of content strategy lies in – Audience Relevance – 58%, Engaging and Compelling Storytelling – 57% and Triggers a Response/Action – 54%
- Facebook and Instagram Domination – Social networks are now completely established, with Facebook sitting like a king on top in terms of user engagement. It is also the first ever network to surpass 1 billion registered accounts with 1.71 Billion monthly active users. Instagram on other hand currently has 500 Million monthly active users, which is quite impressive for a 6 year old network. It is interesting to note that, Instagram has already left Twitter behind by almost 100 Million. With cool features like Video in Carousel ads , Stories and more to come, Instagram will continue to attract more user base and is expected to jump from 32 to 48% in 2017.
Image Credit – Statista
- LinkedIn Recruitment is Gonna Evolve – LinkedIn acquired by Microsoft has fueled almost entire recruitment industry with its early growth. For corporate recruiters the database or source offered by LinkedIn has a larger percentage of passive prospects.
Image Credit – LinkedIn
LinkedIn is also superior for other reasons, including that the user profiles are accurate and consistent, which allows employers to locate potential job seekers.
Here are some interesting facts that will prove how LinkedIn is eating entire recruitment industry and evolve in future.
- Currently there are more than 6.5 million active job listings on LinkedIn
- 94% of recruiters use LinkedIn to hunt for potential candidates.
- 60% of recruiters are women, and 40% of male are HR and recruiting leaders.
- Keeping updated profile makes 18 times more searchable by members and recruiters.
- Personalized YouTube Channels for Music Lovers, for Different Jonures – By now we already know that YouTube is the biggest and fastest-growing music streaming network on the planet. The network receives more than 1 billion unique visitors every month. The most sought-after content on YouTube today is Music Videos. There are over 100 Channels on YouTube dedicated to different jonures of Music and eligible channels gets a chance to personalize it using Custom URL. These personalized YouTube Channels for Music Lovers will continue to capitalize on music fans in coming years. Also 80% of internet traffic by 2019 is expected to come from Video predicted by Cisco, so it is never too late to enter the game.
- Video Marketing and Advertising is Gonna Steal the Show: Video Marketing and Advertising is a serious business and it will be around for years. A well-done online video campaign continues to rise inimitable via sharing and engaging users. In future, top brands will be partnering with entertainers for launching episodic video content. Most websites, marketing strategies and campaign will involve various types of videos including Emotional, Funny, Memes, Videographics and Series Videos to snag the attention of viewers. Also to meet the demand for video content, companies will start hiring video strategist to implement overall advertising plan.
Interesting facts about Video Marketing and Advertising:
- Adding Video on a landing page can increase conversion rate by 80%
- 90% of users said, a product video help them in taking decision
- Including a video in email push the CTR by 200 to 300%
- 36% of online customers trust video ads
- 92% of mobile video viewers share the video with fellow users
- Content Marketing is About Real-Time – There cannot be a better example of real-time content marketing than what we saw on 8th November when Indian Currently 500 and 1000 got demonetized. Social Media and Messenger apps were exploded with creative messages that unfolded the effect of content marketing in real-time. Also the best notable objective of RTM is not about selling products or services directly, but to engage audience in real-time that build meaningful relationships with them.
Ways to perform Real-Time Content Marketing
- Responsive social media engagement
- Live coverage of breaking social media events
- Live-stream event promotions
- Sending actionable emails
- Selling digital content based on real-time interactions
- Location-based content marketing
Those were just handful, however brands need to understand that RTM is not about sporadic actions, it requires carefully planned strategy with handful resources leading to right trends and audiences. This digital marketing trend is already catching fire, and for it to outperform brand will get involved in more live videos, 360 images, and even more real-time content posting for audiences to experience the event virtually. It is one those digital marketing trends that will shape media in 2017.
- Leverage Mobile Advertising and Marketing Heavily – Mobile Advertising and Marketing is no longer an option, it is essential! India being world’s second largest smartphone market in Asia Pacific, the number of mobile Internet users is expected to grow 600 million by 2020. As mobile today is the preferred medium of content consumption, growth opportunity for marketers in mobile advertising and marketing segment are fuelled high. Additionally, advertising on mobile build credibility and relevance when users see and interact with posted ads.
Here is an interesting inforgrapics from Facebook that display the impact of native mobile advertising. Moreover, many big companies have already sensed the importance of in-app mobile ads, which allows to target audience in real-time. As a result, majority of budget allocated for digital adverting are targeted towards mobile. Many research also forecast, mobile advertising and marketing expenditure to augment by $64 billion by 2018, thanks to widespread adoption and greater integration to consumers daily lives, this is going to be a trend of future.
- Innovate on Facebook Advertising – Over a decade we have seen Facebook is constantly improving on its advertising capabilities, which are proven worthy for marketers around. With more sign up, more posts and heavy interactions, Facebook keep testing more ads with users. Right from innovative methods of Facebook advertising to targeting Facebook ads to non-users, all performed well in 2016. Grippingly, 92% of social marketers are already using Facebook for Advertising and we see more innovative Facebook Advertising methods coming up in 2017.
- Twitter Ads Will Struggle to Show Clear ROI – Marketers across all verticals have to face one major challenge – “Clear ROI on Spent Money”. While many ad platforms are coming up with option to report as clear as possible ROI on money spent, Twitter is struggling with their monotonous ad offering style. Twitter is neither innovating nor flexible as Facebook on budget, leaving advertisers unsatisfied. Twitter is clearly struggling to find ways to win over advertisers, but other service such as Instagram and Snapchat are slowing expanding their footprints.
- Instagram Will Kill Snapchat – Instagram that launched just a year before SnapChat is already 5 times bigger than SnapChat. Instagram currently enjoys 500 million monthly active users compared to SnapChat that settles with 100 Million. Of course there is a difference between the photo sharing and messaging app, but the recent addition of “Stories” to Instagram changed it all. In a “Your Story Format”, Stories let you share all moments of the day with much creativity. The feature has already generated buzz around social network, more and more people are sharing the captured moments of life through Stories. Also, Instagram is way better in terms of interface, audience, features and ad platform. In 2017 Instagram will surely snap the SnapChat!
- Employee Advocacy Will Become a Mandate Process – We recently explained the benefits, key ingredients and best platforms for Employee Advocacy which is hot-buzz in entire social media today. Industry veterans agree that employees are most valued asset for their organization and having a strategic employee advocacy program can be powerful. It is predictable that employee advocacy will become a mandate process for major brands in 2017. Tools like Social10x – Employee Advocacy platform will start getting more visibility.
- Influencer Marketing Will Change the Industry Paradigm – Influencer Marketing will become an increasing focus in 2017. Amplifying content through key influencers will be a credible challenge to paid marketing/advertising strategies. But again the challenge of finding right influencer will continue for many small brands.
