Marketing executives across different industries and roles will face new challenges and priorities to consider in 2018 and the years to come. The East, specifically China, will lead the way to a change toward a digitally-centric world, spending great amounts of money on cognitive systems.
The future of Marketing is about changes on structures, connection and content approaches. Digital Marketing system, that combines data, technology, and content, outcome in better informed customer insights and opportunities. As far as you keep up-to-date with the pace of technological advancement in Marketing, great benefits will favour your company.
Trends that will impact all companies in 2018 and next decade.
Integration of Marketing activities into the customer lifecycle will be the most challenging trend in 2018, as only a low amount of enterprises think their integration process is completely optimised.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are the fastest and biggest trend to consider in the years ahead. Both will influence the customer’ lifestyles and will change content consuming and shopping behaviour of consumers. Both will contribute human expertise and talent with a scientific touch through the combining of ML and AI with humanity.
Content Marketing will remain a key priority for marketers to grasp consumer’s attention. To develop high-level significant content requires speed, agility, and risk taking; techniques like customer journey mapping for different personas are increasing in importance to help define the most relevant communications and experiences in the customer’s journey.
Content Production. Businesses are treating content as a strategic resource; the big challenge will be to sustainably produce high-quality, easy-to-understand and fun content, text, short videos and touching stories to capture users’ time. Video is just one type of content and is considered to be the technique that will give the biggest uplift in future. The dominance of videos on YouTube will be increasing in the future. Visual remind will be use in video marketing through the customer lifecycle. Augmented and Virtual Reality, closely related to video engagement, will predominate in the competition to attract customers.
Cross-sector Marketing will require more extensive networks to enable brands to achieve better results and let the people good at Cross-sector Marketing try out their ideas with greater freedom.
New Consumption. Almost all brands will focus on groups of more individually-centred young people, who has different emotional needs and values, and who want completely different upgraded products, which bring them, both monetary and reputational benefits.
Growth Hacking process will predominate as a rapid approach across marketing channels and product development, to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business.
New Retail. eCommerce will change to New Retail as a system of integration of online, offline, logistics and data across a single value chain, squeezing the middle.
Promoting. To cope with the change, CMOs will go beyond promoting products, to create a complete image of innovation, technology leadership, and social responsibility. Marketer will need to concentrate on: The youth culture niche; a more efficient integration, use of Big Data, and Brand security, to build a more honest and safe marketing environment.
Comprehensive brands, which will ensure to exhibit more human-like attributes including values, behaviours, and tastes, and which will require content to be broader and more diverse.
Data Optimisation. CMOs’ challenge will be figuring out how to efficiently integrate Data and Content, and to recognise the potential of developing Machine Learning and AI tools.
Social Messaging apps into communications, is now a trend and will be significantly increased in the near future, specially Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, both properties of Facebook, which count on millions of visitors.
Search Marketing will be dominant in Digital sales, despite of Social media popularity. However, within search marketing there is today relatively little innovation compared to the past.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Brand Purpose will be influencing the core of business, give back to society, win companies consumers’ respect, and increases trust in brands, helping organisations to identify and aspirational mission.
Emotional engagement. Marketers will create interactions with customers while thinking from the customers' viewpoint and will use creativity and technology to generate and deliver stories that create lasting connections with customers.
Big Data use will potentialised actionable insights and Analytics.
Digital Marketing Insights. Free and paid source of insights, as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn ads, Google AdWords or Rivery.io, are all good option that should do well in the future.
Contextual Marketing is the future of Marketing because it let’s know what we’re searching for, the websites we’re visiting, and even the physical location we’re in. Consumers and Media support it demand it, and has proved to be a great driver of consumer action.
Collective Engagement will be a more powerful tactic at narrative setting. driving engagement with an audience, placing participation as the key to the future of public relations.
Marketing Automation will be seen across hyper-connected networks, by implementing loT-based marketing, as Tray.io.
Chatbots (chat bots) tool is the future of marketing, as consumers see it as a positive way to better experiences with brands.
Dave Food