As more and more traditional marketing dollars are spend on digital marketing, it’s important to keep up with the trends. The digital marketing landscape that ecompasses SEO, PPC, Social, Webdesign just to name a few, is always evolving. We collected some insights from our department experts to comment on some trends they’ve picked up on and what you should watch out for next year in 2018.
Social Media Predictions – Sophia Pollock
Trend: Instagram becoming more commerce driven / bigger source of revenue for brands.
How does this impact your channel? Instagram is quickly becoming more commerce driven, it now integrates with shopify allowing brands to tag products in their images (see more about this here). Our Facebook rep has been incredibly vocal about us opting in to more platform placements, especially Instagram and continues to hint at the fact that Facebook is going to give preference to brands running multiple placements.
In the past, we have considered Instagram campaigns brand awareness, but we are starting to see them drive stronger revenue. This includes people converting off of instagram story campaigns. I expect there to be a stronger shift in this direction as we continue to move in the mobile first direction.
What are some tips for brands? Opt in to running on multiple platforms (FB & IG). Use it for retargeting campaigns and cold traffic. If you use shopify try to get approved to integrate it into Instagram.
Influencer Marketing Predictions – Sam Wormser
Trend: Influencer marketing being a fully pay-to-play marketing channel.
How does this impact your channel? Influencer marketing gifting campaigns are going to fizzle out, as smaller micro-influencers have already started to create professional media kits with sponsored fees for inclusion. Influencers, even the small ones, can see how bigger influencers are making a living off of promoting other brands and are wanting to do the same.
What are some tips for brands? Ask the influencers you are working with for hard metrics to see if it’s even worth it. As them to share prior case studies with impressions, clicks, and engagement metrics that they can screen shot from Instagram now to really see how big the audience they are reaching is.
Content Marketing Predictions – Alexa Engelhart
Trend: Content/Topic Clustering becoming essential for brands to succeed SEO-wise.
How does this impact your channel? We are going to start seeing more and more brands take on the content clustering strategy in order to boost rankings on specific topics. Recently, top publications like HubSpot and SEMrush have published studies on the content cluster strategy and proven how effective they can be when it comes to SEO and content marketing efforts. We have even seen special tools being built within these platforms that will help marketers create their own clusters.
What are some tips for brands? Remember: your content cluster is not complete until you internally link them all together. This is KEY to a successful content cluster and you most likely will not see success without it. Also, do not limit yourself when it comes to the number of articles in your cluster. The sky is truly the limit here – we’ve seen clusters consisting of up to 55 topics!
Web Design Predictions – Ryan Picardal
Trend: We are going to see some new design trends in the web design space.
How does this impact your channel? Web design, and technology in general, are so fickle that it’s so important for designers and developers to keep up with the trends. As technology continues to expand and emphasize the use of mobile devices, it’s important to ensure that your website can keep up with the times.
What are some tips for brands? For starters, if your website isn’t responsive then you need to revamp your site’s design immediately. And if you choose to redesign your site, make the user experience is at the forefront — the simpler the better. If your site is easily navigable and appealing to the eye, then you’re golden.
Here’s a link to some design trends that can spill into the next year.
There you have it folks! Digital marketing trends with some tips for you to get your strategy and marketing budget inline with the online trends predicted for next year.