Digital Marketing Opportunities For 2018

[Monirul Islam]

With a new year comes new opportunities, and the digital marketing industry is certainly no exception, but can you truly say that you are aware of the digital marketing opportunities for 2018?

Every digital marketing opportunity has the potential to benefit your business in the here and now, potentially even helping you to reach a more precise audience and increase your brand awareness, so what have you got to lose?

In order to help you step up your digital marketing game this year and prepare for the countless changes in digital marketing to come in 2018, we've put together a list of the top trends you need to know about.

Personalization In Digital Marketing
In 2018, offering a personalized online experience should be a key part of your marketing strategy. An increasing number of consumers are beginning to demand more from brands and the services they provide so when it comes to personalization in marketing, it is essential to ensure customers are recognized as human beings and are treated in a way that makes them feel understood. With this in mind, there's no denying that integrating personalization in your digital marketing strategy is essential.

Personalization never goes amiss when it comes to impressing your customer base, and can significantly boost engagement and increase conversions. It can even make conversions considerably easier for your business to achieve! And it doesn't have to be difficult, either. Simply referring to the customer by their first name can do wonders!

The Rise Of Influencer Marketing
With each New Year comes the opportunity to build a whole new marketing campaign, and to kick it all off the right way, we strongly suggest investing in influencer marketing as a part of your digital marketing strategy. For those that are unaware of what influencer marketing is, it is simply a form of marketing that places focus on influential people, such as celebrities and YouTube personalities, rather than the target market as a whole.

What do we mean by this exactly? Well, by promoting and selling products through influencers who can have a positive effect on your brand's success, you can gain customers simply through the 'Halo Effect'. This is where consumers who are fans of a certain influencer will transfer positive attitudes onto the products that this influencer promotes.

Influencer marketing has completely changed the game for businesses in any industry. This kind of marketing is one of the most effective ways to utilize the rise of social media for business in order to drive increased traffic to your website so this year, you really need to take advantage of influence marketing. One of the main reasons for this is that traditional forms of digital marketing are becoming increasingly ineffective, and thus influencer marketing is the ultimate opportunity to get your brand heard. Other benefits of influence marketing include:

Improved brand awareness
Increased ROI
Effectively reach your target audience
Enhances your content strategy
Opportunity to build new partnerships
The Power Of Social Media
As a professional marketer, you will most likely already have the power of social media drummed into you, and you'll be thrilled to know that we're here to remind you of its importance and what it can do for a brand.

However, while some social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, continue to experience rapid growth, Twitter especially failed to increase its user base in 2017. In November 2017, Twitter announced that it would double its traditional 140 character count in order to attempt to rescue its reach but even with this in mind, the use of Facebook or LinkedIn are in your business's favor as these will give you a higher chance at reaching the relevant audience. However, this can change overnight so it's worth keeping an eye on the changing trends regardless of your budget!

There are countless key benefits of social media for business, including:

Increased Brand Awareness. Ultimately, social media will help expose your brand and its offerings to new eyes. With just one click, your message is shown to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people. Moreover, the use of social media can also help you seek customers that are already talking about your business which can be supported to reach even more people.An example of this in practice is through the growing popularity of Daily Fantasy Sports. This online phenomenon sees 32 million Americans spend $15 billion annually, and a huge factor in this has been a result of social media and the groups that have catapulted from this. Brand awareness through social media platforms, and other marketing avenues, has led the industry to grow 10-12% annually!

Learn About Your Target Audience.  By using social media for business, you will gain insight into you audiences' interests. Understanding your audience is paramount when it comes to discovering new ways to reach them via online advertising, and thus by using social media, you will be able to identify what content engages them the most and use that to your advantage.

Customer Service. As you become more informed about your target audience, you will discover that a customer won't always reach out to you if they have a problem, and will instead post an uncompromising complaint online. However, due to numerous consumers using social media as a point of contact with a brand, by utilizing social media for business, you can resolve these complaints with ease and receive good feedback thanks to your swift response – which leads me on to my next point.

Feedback. As well as the opportunity to provide excellent customer service, the use of social media for business enables you to attain instant feedback from your consumers, regardless of whether it is positive or negative, enabling you to act fast and build favored relationships with customers.

Competitive Analysis. Above all, the use of social media for business can help you monitor your competition. Ultimately, you can utilize social media platforms, such as Facebook, to target your competition's audience and find out what they are offering that you are currently lacking.

Video Marketing Trends
As well as being a convenient and efficient form of obtaining information for the consumer, video marketing provides professional marketers with an incredibly shareable medium to reach their audience as well as new audiences. However, several brands are unaware that video marketing doesn't only have to involve creating forced video content, recording customer testimonials and live event videos are just as effective, and thus fail to integrate video marketing into their digital marketing strategy.

Luckily for you, using video in your marketing is easy, regardless of whether you are a beginner or have a considerable amount of experience in the world of video marketing and creating video content. Beginners can integrate video marketing into their digital marketing strategy by creating short 15-second testimonials from real customers, for example. Other video marketing ideas to try include:

Animated GIFs
Extended customer testimonials
Full product demonstrations
Interviews with key employees
Live presentations
Further to this, video customer testimonials in particular are becoming increasing popular. Today, customers are relying less and less on the reviews they read online, and are instead turning to video content. Studies suggest that this may be because individuals are more likely to buy a product featured in a video created by the customer as opposed to one that is set up professionally – so why not jump on board this coming digital marketing trend for 2018?

The Bottom Line
There are numerous digital opportunities for 2018 patiently waiting to be revealed, but for now, utilizing social media platforms, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and using available resources is a great place to start. Ultimately, in order to take any digital marketing opportunity by the horns, it is paramount that you understand your audience and their needs and interests. Even through the strategies behind digital marketing are constantly changing, 2018 will prevent even more opportunities than ever for brands and business that take advantage of new trends and behaviors.

Source: 60 Second Marketer