How to integrate digital media and technology to increase the contribution of di

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Which marketing trend will be most important to you and your business in 2018?
We have asked this question over the past few years and it's been really interesting to see what 'rocks your digital world' since there are some common themes amongst the top 3 and some activities surprisingly low. The question we asked was around the most important commercial trends. We had around 850 votes from marketers in different types of business from around the world. Thank you if you voted! Here's what you thought:

By asking for just one technique from many, this helps shows the top 3, 5 or 10 top-level trends. There are a clear top three techniques, each over 10%, but with a long tail of many other techniques showing the potential for optimising different areas of digital marketing. Let's take a look at the top three...

It's no surprise to see content marketing 'top of the pile' since this has been in the top three for each of the years we have run this poll. We see content marketing as the 'engagement' fuel that powers all digital communications from search to social to email marketing to creating website experiences which convert. Our content marketing toolkit is popular since members want to learn a more planned approach to mapping content against personas across the customer journey.

More of a surprise is that Big Data is in second position. I think this is because marketers are aware of the potential of using data as what we call 'actionable insight'. To help the decision on which technique to choose, we expanded upon the short labels you see in some polls to help scope the response more carefully. 'Big Data' is a nebulous
term, but when we expanded the definition to include insight and predictive analytics, it shows the value of the specific marketing techniques for Big Data and this help explains why this is in position number two.

In third position is Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. We added this to the poll this year with the interest in it and it's 'straight in at number three'! It's good to see the interest in these techniques which we have been covering a lot on the blog and in our member resources this year. In trend 8 we show how different AI techniques can be mapped against the customer lifecycle.

Here is the full listing of digital marketing techniques:

Big Data (including market and customer insight and predictive analytics)
Content marketing Communities (Branded niche or vertical communities)
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) / improving website experiences
Display (Banners on publishers, ad networks social media including retargeting and programmatic)
Internet of Things (IoT) marketing applications
Mobile marketing (Mobile advertising, site development and apps)
Paid search marketing, e.g. Google AdWords Pay Per Click
Online PR (including influencer outreach)
Partnerships including affiliate and co-marketing
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO or organic search)
Social media marketing including Social CRM and Social Customer Care
Wearables (e.g. Apple Watch, activity trackers, augmented reality)