The biggest 2018 digital marketing trends

The countdown to Christmas has begun. And that means that the new year is on the horizon with all its evolution, innovation and change. In the world of digital marketing, 2018 is going to be a bumper year and these six trends could change the way we do it for good.

Content is still king(/queen)

Successful digital marketing is still going to be content driven but the focus is now much more on consumer-centric content. Now, content needs to have genuine learning value, be positively disruptive or breaking new ground. Digital content strategies in 2018 will be reliant on regular publication and topic choices will be more crucial than ever before.

Marketing across devices

We’ve made the transition to mobile marketing and now strategies need to be diversified to incorporate a multi-channel approach. Real time analysis of customer behavioural data can be used to optimise the customer experience depending on what device is being used, at what time of day and in which location. It’s no longer enough to simply have mobile in mind when you’re creating digital marketing strategy, for 2018 the big trend will be drilling down into the details of devices and using data to give customers what they want.

Social selling

This is already a burgeoning trend but in 2018 social selling is going to take off like a rocket. 75% of B2B customers are already using social networks to help them to make purchasing decisions. Successful social selling requires the ability to tap into the data that social networks provide and target efforts via social listening and various other analytics and monitoring methods.

Personalisation

Personalisation appeared on many digital marketing trends lists for 2017 and it has proven to be one of the big themes of the year. In 2018 it’s getting an upgrade: mass personalisation. Thanks to the sheer volume of information that can now be accessed via big data – and the drive in automation and AI algorithms – personalisation can be created on a mass scale. The point is to be able to collect as much information as possible to feed into creating customised marketing strategies that are more effective at reaching their audience.

Chatbots

The challenges of customer service have been given a huge boost by artificial intelligence. Chatbots can deliver information in real time, expanding the number of customers a business can reach and interact with and speeding up information dissemination. The idea is not to be able to replace the human customer service agent but to supplement them. Chatbots can use artificial intelligence to deliver on the more mundane and simple answers and tasks while human beings focus on those more complex jobs that add more value.

Customer experience

If there is one trend that every digital marketer needs to know for 2018 it’s the intense focus on customer experience. This ties in everything, from the switch to inbound marketing, to the need for more personalisation. It’s not about simply delivering your messages anymore but reworking customer experience so that it is easier to digest, more focused, personalised and more engaging.