Integrated marketing communications is a popular area in digital marketing and, although earlier many trends did emerge, it would be interesting to see new trends emerging in 2018.
Digital marketing trends in 2018 are manifold and it would be interesting to analyze and follow up on them:
Trend 1. Integrating Marketing Activities into the Customer Lifecycle
As the complexities of digital marketing are on the increase, there has been a need for techniques that involve customer journey mapping for various individuals.Also, much focus is on the increasing importance to be able to define the appropriate communications as well as experiences for various touchpoints in one’s customer journey.
Ways and methods need to be evolved to improve the effectiveness of the digital marketing by viewing it from the point of view of the customer. Efforts must be made to make digital marketing available via customer lifecycle for various types of business.
What is Lifecycle marketing?
It involves the creation of managed communications or even contact strategy in order to prioritize as well as integrate the full range of marketing communications channels and also experiences in order to support prospects cum customers on their path-to-purchase making use of techniques such as persuasive personalized messaging as well as re-targeting.
This mind-tool has been designed to enable members to think through all the required potential touchpoints across the paid, owned and earned media. Then one perform a ‘gap analysis’ of the use and effectiveness of the lifecycle comms that one is making use of against those one could be also be making use of to enhance the relevance and response of communications.
Trend 2. Integration personalization into the user journey cum customer experience
In order to increase the relevance and response of comms, the website personalization has been widely been made use of within the transactional ecommerce sectors such as retail, travel as well as financial services for a considerable period of time. Off late lower cost options have become more available with different types of solutions. One comes across several forms of web personalization which vary from those that have been integrated into content or commerce management systems; also with those that are integrated into analytics solutions or standalone Software as a Service (SaaS) personalization options that do integrate with your CMS as well as analytics.
Trend 3. Integrating machine learning into marketing automation
It can be taken note of here that personalization is also applicable across the lifecycle in the email comms. Yet, research on email marketing indicates that despite the widespread usage of the email and marketing automation systems, many companies do not manage to put in place a full lifecycle contact system like that is shown in the lifecycle visual above.
Assessment has been done with the segmentation and targeting of the respective emails that are based upon the number of criteria that are made use of from none at all up to the dynamic content.
Trend 4. Integrating social messaging apps into communications
There is much increase in the usage of messaging apps which is a remarkable trend in itself. Based on information of the Ofcom Communications Market research there are more than half of the total mobile audience used Facebook Messenger (61%) and half used WhatsApp (50%). Both the properties are owned by Facebook. The Snapchat mobile app had, in fact, a reach of 28%, with 10.1 million unique visitors.
Trend 5. Integrating video into the customer journey
The video is also increasing in popularity that is fuelled by social. This breakdown of the Google popularity does show the dominance of YouTube. One would normal acknowledge that the YouTube is the second biggest search engine, but the present data indicates shows that it is now more popular than Google Search based on the number of users in a particular month.
It is but obvious there are interesting trends to adhere to in the coming year and one can start focusing upon digital marketing trends of 2018 now itself in order to ensure maximum benefit from them. One must realize that new emerging digital marketing trends are always welcomed to enhance business and 2018 is no exception to this.
4 Comments
Nice & informative blog! Keep up the good work.
A dedication of appreciation is altogether to share such a dumbfounding information.
Now a day’s digital marketing is booming as it follows new trends day by day and gaining its position to top level by maintaining daily lifecycle marketing, by sharing customer’s experience and making video of customer’s journey.
Digital marking is an ongoing journey and you have to keep updated with this integrated marketing activities and you have to share the customer feedback and bring changes according to that and offering them discount’s and sends thank you messages as to get more targeted audiences.