Digital Marketing Trends for 2018

Thanks to advances in technology in digital marketing over the past few years, small businesses are having an easier time reaching a wider audience and increasing traffic to their websites, which can result in more sales. If you’re a business owner and aren’t already using digital marketing as part of your sales strategies, make 2018 the year that your business gets on the map with these tips. Understanding the digital marketing trends for 2018 will help all businesses advance to the next level.

Invest in Video

Video has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to engage people with your brand. There’s something about
watching video that creates a bond between your audience and your company that can’t be accomplished as quickly or effectively through written content. Work with someone to create video that tells a story about your brand and explains to your audience how you can help them solve a problem when they use your product or service. Once you have a series of videos created, launch them into a digital campaign on your website and social media sites to bring people closer to your brand and want to get to know more. Now with the technology of smart phones, creating video content has become easier for everyone. If you can click a button on your smart phone, you can become a movie producer and jump on this trend!

Create a Personalized Experience

People love feeling a connection to a brand, and one way you can accomplish that is through creating a personalized experience that they can relate to. You can use metrics that will give you insight into their patterns and habits to help you deliver the most relevant content to them. If, for example, someone is visiting your site for the first time, you can use a gamification approach to gather information about them, then use that information to direct them to the most relevant products for their needs. People don’t mind sharing information with brands they know and trust. Create a survey and start building data which will allow you to send targeted email campaigns. Email marketing is a powerful trend year after year.

Use Quality Content

With so much information coming at a person when they’re on the internet, it can be overwhelming. How do you stand out among the noise of information so that a person chooses to visit your site out of the millions of others available on the internet? One way to make yourself stand out is by creating quality content that people will want to read. That means creating content that’s easy to read and has no spelling or grammatical errors in it, which can take away from your brand’s reliability. Most small business websites also put out content and forget to keep it fresh. Updating yours periodically keeps readers interested and coming back for more.

Targeted Ads

Thanks to digital marketing, gone are the days of paying for ads in your local paper that may or may not reach the right audience for what your business offers. Now, thanks to targeted marketing, you can create ads that will reach the exact demographic you want to sell to. You can input a variety of metrics, including age, sex, income, geographic location, and even interest to push out ads to people who are most likely to buy your product.

Voice Marketing

With the number of people who use assistive devices such as Alexa, Siri, and Google around the home and office, we will likely see a rise in the number of ads that are targeted through these devices. For example, if someone asks their assistive device where to go for a great cup of coffee and you run a cafe, you can pay for your company to pop up in the results as one of the first recommendations.

Use Algorithms

Predictive algorithms are letting businesses of all sizes to only let people see what’s relevant to them when they need to see it. If you don’t have a large marketing budget to work with, this can be a huge lifesaver and let your money go further since you’ll only be charged when people actually see and engage with your content.
If you’re ready for your business to break into digital advertising, 2018 is the year to get started. With so many exciting technological advances available and more on the horizon, your business can reach the right audience and help drive engagement and sales.

The 2018 trends are very comparable to the 2017 trends I mentioned in a previous article. “Digital Trends 2017” which was a presentation a gave at our local college.  The bottom line is to educate yourself to help advance your business on these trends.