You Should Definitely Keep an Eye On

The change is in the air

A brisk sketch of today’s marketing reality: teens seem to ask Siri more often than they address their parents or friends, shoppers have switched from real to virtual fitting rooms, and a social media post can change the lives of more people than a senator’s speech. This dizzying speed of technological development opens new horizons to marketing specialists, but at the same time, it brings some confusion to those who don’t keep up the changes.

We at Globalluxsoft are excited to enter this era of new technologies and look forward to seeing what will happen around the next corner. Inspired by our expectations, we asked startup founders to share their vision of this topic with us. So, today we will speak about the latest digital marketing trends and hear the market players’ opinions regarding them.

Creating a new marketing reality

Augmented and virtual reality have long ago ceased to be the prerogative of gamers. Today, people wish to enrich their online experience with these technologies when getting acquainted with various products and services. In their turn, many businesses started satisfying this demand with the help of VR-enabled marketing tools (e.g., online fitting rooms, virtual tours around stores and exotic tourist destinations etc.) Statistics of the global spending on AR advertising demonstrates a nearly 100% leap from $6.6 billion in 2016 up to $12.8 billion in 2017.

However, many companies are still not sure whether these tools are relevant to them; moreover, many of the latest trends pose a threat to the previously established marketing approaches. For example, it may happen that in some time, interactive AR-enabled advertising will kick out traditional billboards, and chatbots will replace human assistants as far as machine learning pushes its way.

In fact, these changes can also disrupt the existence of applications we are using now because users will be getting information by other, more effective and less time-consuming, means. Anyway, many market players think that the change will not happen that fast. Kevin Macconkey, Owner of ContentCollective Digital agency, believes that there are still tons of things that can’t substitute a natural human interaction:

“The Digital Marketing landscape is constantly evolving and shifting so it’s hard to say where it’ll be next week, let alone in 3–5 years. But, I would think that while AI&VR are all the rage, at some point business brands will have to come back to the fact that we can’t automate everything and go to the pub for a cold one. People will always require that human touch when it comes to how they learn about and ultimately make a purchasing decision. I can see possibly an automation bubble — eventually the ROI of automated campaigns will lose out to people-powered marketing because I feel that the average consumer wants that interaction with someone. It’s hard to trust a computer program not to fail, or maybe be hacked in to. Especially now, with the news of Facebook’s data scandal, privacy breaches becoming more common, and slightly off-topic (but AI related) “Uber’s Self-Driving Car Killing a Tempe, AZ Pedestrian”; I have a feeling like my father, who hates telemarketers and worse yet robo-dialers, people are going to insist that there be a human connection. I can see digital marketing becoming more dynamic in terms of AI-analytics & content delivery, but I think the content creators and digital marketing specialists & strategists will still be just as-if-not-more-important.”

Ok, Google, should I optimize my voice search strategy?

Could we imagine 15 years ago that we would be speaking to a mobile device, asking for help, and it would reply to us? I’m not sure we could, but now we are definitely using this opportunity to the full. Here are some of the statistics:

• The third part (3.5 billion) of all the searches made on Google daily are voice searches;
• It is expected that the half of all global searches will be voice searches by 2020;
• In the United States, more than 50% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search on their everyday basis.

People have been increasingly using the technology because it allows making searches on the go, distracting from the screen, saving time, and just having fun. Four major companies currently offering their personal voice assistants are Google with its Google Home, Microsoft with its Cortana, Apple with its Siri, and Amazon with its Alexa. The most popular voice queries relate to finding out some general info (‘OK Google what is Surströmming?’) and getting some local recommendations (‘Siri, find the best pub near me’).

Of course, marketers can’t ignore all these innovations and should be able to optimize their SEO strategies with an eye on these changes. For many years, a long-cherished marketing goal was to hit the first page in the search results. With the intrusion of the voice searches, this goal loses its relevance (just as the keywords are losing their value) because users will hardly have a look on those top sites. Instead, featured snippets — short summaries of the answers to the queries taken from third-party sites — come to reign. And now, the fight for the first place in search results will be even more fervent, because, with a voice search, the system delivers only one answer.

This is what Zoe Warne, Co-Founder & Director, Creative Services at August says:

I believe the value of voice search will grow dramatically. Also, active participation in data management/privacy also dramatically increasing as being two major shifts and a focus in the future of digital marketing. Voice powered search technology will become more refined and mainstream, such as Alexa and other voice powered devices, and the input of data into the search engines and software developers that power them, while helping these products improve, will also face major challenges by way of legislation such as GDPR and other countries aligning on the way personal data is managed making the protection of this data extremely important.

I also believe that the term “digital marketing” will become obsolete. Digital is ubiquitous and we will just be referring to marketing activity in general.

How to get prepared for those changes and leverage your SEO strategy? To optimize it for specifics of voice-enabled requests: use natural language instead of short keyword-based queries, focus on featured snippets, provide a useful content on your website, and compose the info in the way when it answers the questions that start with what, who, how, where, etc.

Thibaut Vanderhofstadt, CEO and Co-founder of Sortlist says that the future of digital marketing will look like

“one-to-one marketing empowered by machine boost thanks to natural learning programming and spiced up by human touch & strategy.”

We agree — of course, keyword queries that we got used to will not give grounds too soon, but you have to start preparing for the changes even now and get the best out of machine-and-human-cooperation.

The true influence

These days, influencer marketing has obtained the power not seen before and keeps winning the ground. The advancement of marketing activities in social media and a vivid potency of influencer campaigns to boost sales have stimulated many B2C marketers to scale up their budgets for influencer campaigns. At the moment, we can see several trends that are here to stay.

First, we keep observing the growth of video content’s share in all social media channels. According to Influicity’s Influencer Marketing Forecast Report 2018, it is expected that by 2020, video content streaming will account for 80% of global online traffic. No marvel! We, humans, are more attracted to video content more as compared to static pics and, even more so, texts. That’s why videos will become the most powerful sales boosters.

Also, we are supposed to see a rise of ephemeral and gated content. The examples are such services as Instagram Stories and Snapchat, which are actively spread among youngsters. Driven by a restless desire to act spontaneously, they form a new generation of consumers who go through a marketing funnel fast and dictate the changes the established marketing procedures.

“I think automated ads platform will die as Z-gen block and/or ignore ads so the upcoming challenges are — I believe — a mix of content creation and organic growth,”

says Robin Allain, Co-founder of Stargazer.

“Big brands will struggle to adapt, we will see a lot of DNVBs with a stronger branding and solid skills in building communities on social media. So influencers will be the cornerstone.”

As for the gated content, the trend is conditioned by the changes in disclosure regulations. Updated 2018 FTC Endorsement Guidelines for sponsored content calls businesses for differentiating between content and advertising thus playing a fair game. We speak about the gated content when a brand asks users to provide certain information (name, email address, phone number etc.) before giving access to the content. It is a potent instrument for lead generation, but it is not always relevant, and in some cases may even impair your marketing efforts.

For example, it may be beneficial to gate research reports, downloadable instruments, webinars, white papers and product demos. On the other hand, it may be wise to keep blog posts, e-books opened in order not to scare away the customers. Hubspot created a useful flowchart with detailed recommendations on “what to show and what to conceal”. In a nutshell, your content should be valuable to users, sharable and not too self-hyping. The decision may be based on such factors as the audience volume, the stage of a user’s passing through marketing funnel, etc. but the basic question here is “Is this content worth sharing a user’s identity with you?” In other words, is it really valuable?

“People are everything. As consumers, people represent 70% of the US GDP, equaling $13 trillion. Over the next few years, the focus will shift from delivering impressions and clicks to delivering TRUE value to people. The market will evolve to a more personalized model, where people will not receive mass market, tier 1 branding messages; rather, people will declare what is valuable to them and who/what brands they will want to engage. This pull model will eclipse the traditional push model that has been the norm in media for many decades. People will disrupt this model and show their true influence on the economy and the brands that quickly adopt a people-centric model for building relationships with people will win. Those that do not, will be left behind and the traditional impression/click models will fade away in favor of people driven communication.”

said Paul Krasinski, CEO and Co-founder at Epicenter Experience.

The question above touches upon the characteristics of today’s influencer. Gone are those days when the number of likes and followers defined your status of a follower and guaranteed you the reward. It seems that now, conversions mean more than awareness and brand recognition. Youssef Ali, Founder of Syft digital agency, comments on that,

“Right now we see a lot of brand awareness campaigns from influencers and theme accounts on social media; however, the future belongs to conversion based campaigns. Brands are starting to realize that awareness doesn’t bring direct sales, but when they create campaigns with direct results and sales they actually win. Does that mean awareness campaigns are useless? No, it just means that every campaign should have and should lead a viewer/fan to get direct results. It’s more than having someone shout out your name, depending on the brand; it needs strategy, targeting, and using the content to retarget the influencers audience to convert viewers to buyers.”

People are switching their focus from the quick satisfaction of their needs to valuable high-quality solutions, meaningful and stable relations, from random affiliate links to close recommendations. Sherrard Harrington, Co-founder and CEO at Fanzee believes we will also need to rethink our established marketing practices in the nearest future and develop

“more result-oriented means of measurement for businesses and influencers. Current trends show that businesses are measuring results of successful influencer campaigns through KPIs while influencers are measuring the success of a campaign through reach/impression/likes. Possible construction of a more concise measurement tool will allow businesses to see the full impact of influencer marketing (i.e. how many sales were contributed to a single influencer…if at all, any, or it just increased brand awareness).”

Besides, he supposes that a better monetary system should be created.

“Currently most brands are paying influencers on a basis of likes: if you can generate this amount of likes, we will pay you this amount of money. I think this system is sort of asinine, because social marketing should NEVER EVER EVER be solely based on likes. Businesses sometimes do not realize that posting something for the sake of posting can hurt your brand more than help it. Better metrics should drive payment incentives.

Influencers making an impact in the blockchain space. Soon, influencers will be able to tokenize their brand assets. Instead of partnering with brands to promote their products, Influencers will create their own products and do co-partnership with Brands. Influencers will have mini ICOs to their fan base and community. In exchange for exclusive access and products. More Influencers want to become the next Kylie Jenner or Jessica Alba by creating their own company and products.”

Conclusion

Digital marketing is going through another revolutionary development stage. Global marketers should perk up their ears if they don’t want to miss a thing. Today, marketing endeavors based on trendy technologies is what can animate your business, build the sales strategy and provide a far-reaching promotion of the company. Of course, there are still tons of things we need to digest and adapt to. However, the future is already here and the question is — Are you ready for that? Share your ideas in comments below. We highly appreciate your opinion!