How your consumers interact with each other and your business, what they want and what they think is all undergoing through thorough changes since the beginning of the century, and changing fast and continuously. Since the advent of the digital age, we have seen the annual rise and fall of different social media marketing platforms, geofencing marketing, memes, and lighting in a bottle trends and consumer tastes and preferences that are undergoing overarching changes that force the 21st century business owner or manager to evolve and adapt for them to survive and thrive. The advancements of technology and the birth of the world wide web just over a decade ago has given rise to a very dynamic digital marketing industry with trends developing and evolving at a pace that most businesses have not been able to cope with.
The new trends and tech have forced the entrepreneur to stay on toes or otherwise risk struggling or being kicked out of business. Both the small business enterprises and the big corporations are utilizing digital marketing trends to gain a competitive advantage, venture into new markets, expand on their consumer base, increase their volume of sales and widen their profit margins. However, it is sometimes difficult for business owners and managers to keep up with trends that pop up almost on a daily basis and even harder to predict the ones that will lead to a successful digital marketing campaign. In this article, we are going to highlight the trends in digital marketing that every business should embrace in 2018 to have the edge over their competitors.
Behavioral Marketing and artificial intelligence
The different platforms of digital marketing collected and stored different types of data in 2017 such as content preferences, search history, browsing patterns and site usage. This information was used to create the different marketing strategies based on the behavior of the customer and consumer profiles that are critical for marketers when cresting custom-made messages to address these different prospects. However, the most exciting part is the next step. According to Adobe, machines will begin to make marketing decisions that are very strategic. In such a scenario, the program will do data analysis to build segments, create custom copies, start and stop marketing campaigns in the different channels which will be essential in the targeting of different personalities. It has been discovered that consumers become more loyal to a brand that conducts their marketing with them in mind. As a result, these developments in behavioral marketing and artificial intelligence will enable the marketer to engage their campaigns and prospects more efficiently hence achieving customer satisfaction and an improved consumer brand experience.
Big data
For many years now, big data has been a big trend in the world of digital marketing. However, many entrepreneurs have had the opinion that big companies and corporations should only use it in their business operations. With the prevalence of data analytics and big data technology, this incentive will be more available to small business enterprises and startups. As of today, there are over six million technicians and system developers who are working on projects that involve big data. Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning, big data has become more available to the small-scale entrepreneur now more than ever before. With more methods in marketing outreach and platforms ion advertising and product promotion that are incorporating big data technology and data analytics to their infrastructure, it is going to be difficult for any business to have a competitive advantage without embracing this trend.
The capitalization of applications
Today, there is an application to solve almost all problems that confront human beings. In the past decade, there has been the diversification of both mobile and computer applications which have been made available to the business owner and manager. Due to this trend, consumers rely on specific applications such as review apps, transportation, and navigation applications as part of their day-to-day life. Consumers have embraced Google like their most important search engine to get whatever they want on the internet. In 2018, we are set to see increased use of applications by consumers to shop online and order the different products and services.
