20 digital trends for 2017 that will change the marketing landscape
7 likes2,004 views
This document outlines key digital marketing trends for 2017, predicting the rise of AI social chatbots, the merging of Google and Twitter, and the transformation of workplace communication through Facebook's offerings. Additionally, it highlights the growing importance of mobile optimization, the impact of virtual reality, and the inevitability of increased online advertising and marketing strategies. Marketers are urged to adapt quickly to these evolving trends to maintain relevance and effectiveness in their campaigns.
20 digital trends for 2017 that will change the marketing landscape
- 2. Trend 1 Why we predict these trends We are a digital marketing and technology agency operating across 35 international territories. It’s our job to keep looking ahead for the benefit of our clients, then applying this to their marketing strategies accordingly. This document encompasses just 10% of the full story (there’s simply not enough room), so call us, book an appointment and let us come and share the full story, it could really help your brand to grow – we’ll even bring cakes! Welcome to our inaugural digital marketing predictions for 2017
- 3. Expect social chat bots to look and feel human, constantly reflecting the brand’s image of course! Trend 1 Rapid developments in A.I. tech will see bots become central to the marketing mix, providing a huge value add and competitive advantage. Forward thinking brands will wake up to integrating a Social Chat Bot for the benefit of 24- hour real time engagement with consumers, especially in relation to customer services and product sales funnels. Consumer reliance on bots expands to; ordering shopping, send breaking news, train our brains and get on a level with brands! Expect other major social platforms to follow suit. Social Chat Bots will be embraced by brands and online retailers Trend 1 “ ” “ ” “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 4. Trend 3Trend 2 Twitter continues to struggle with maintaining its relevance as a platform, user drop off, impatient shareholders and big losses, leaving Google to pick up a bargain and firmly break into the live data social market. On completion of the purchase, expect Tweets to take more prominence on Google search results! Trend 2 Twitter has made recent strides into the live video market, which when combined with Google’s YouTube, would provide a healthy competitor to Facebook. Google will beat the rest And buy twitter Trend 2 “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 5. Workplace By Facebook, with its premium ‘per seat’ pricing model, will alter how colleagues communicate with each other and integrate with other online management apps such as Asana and Slack. Trend 3 Facebook will ultimately dominate this space because of its familiarity to brands and users – no need to keep logging in to other platforms! Advertising across Workplace By Facebook will open a whole new opportunity for brands to directly target professionals, potentially creating a worthy rival to the largely unchallenged LinkedIn. "It's an app, but I think about it more as a way of running a company.” Mark Zuckerberg Workplace By Facebook will revolutionise the workplace “ ” Trend 3 “ ” “ ”
- 6. Trend 2Trend 4 Ad blocking software has lead to a total loss of global revenue as high as $21 billion, meaning a scramble to resolve the issue. This could lead to marketers offering incentives to finish watching ads to encourage completion rates. This means some users may need to endure up to 3 minutes of ads before they get to content! Google will start the rout by penalising ad blockers, disabling the ‘skip option’ on YouTube ads when ad-block is detected. Ad Blockers will become redundant Trend 4 “ ” “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 7. Trend 5 Object Based Targeting will present itself as a genius way of targeting adverts at consumers, based on what objects the user’s camera has in front of them. Object based targeting Trend 5 Snapchat has filed for the patent to the technology, which will see their platform become a whole lot more relevant to marketers in 2017 and beyond – imagine taking a picture of a car you like and Snapchat serving you an ad for ‘Cheapest Car Insurance’! “ ” “ ”
- 8. Social media fully embraces Virtual Reality Watch Twitter enter the market with 360 Tweets. Trend 6Social media fully embraces Virtual reality Trend 6 The combo of more affordable technology and marketers’ desires to create better consumer experience have caused immersive 360 videos’ popularity to rocket. “ ” Next level VR content won’t come soon enough. Content to date is extremely limited, but new use-cases will start to appear, particularly in healthcare and education that will have us hooked for sure! Expect to see Facebook’s Oculus Rift integrate with the platform for a truly immersive experience, creating a unique opportunity for early adopting brands to differentiate. Facebook integrates Facebook Live to Facebook 360 and Instagram Stories. “ ” “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 9. Trend 7 Smartphones are ruling our lives, so brands now need to be addressing their vertical video strategies, even if that means reshooting their best performing content to date. Vertical video numbers will explode Trend 7 Snapchat dominated the vertical video market up until 2016, but it’s a mystery why when you think of how we’ve all been consuming videos on our phones for so long… “ ” Instagram has quickly followed suit and allowed its users to post portrait and landscape movies - expect Facebook to follow in 2017! “ ” “ ”
- 10. Expect new and improved search tools which will utilise advanced machine learning to index more image and video content. This will only improve their ad serving technology, being able to improve personalisation and offer you what you want, exactly when you want it! Trend 8FACEBOOK SEARCH TO RIVAL GOOGLE, BING AND YAHOO Trend 8 As of June 2016 Facebook was facilitating more than 2 billion searches every single day, increasing 33% in just 9 months. Expect more emphasis on user reliance from Facebook, who arguably have the advantage of faster news aggregation, over Google. “ ” “ ”
- 11. We, as consumers, will rely more on the clever integration of crowd sourced social advocacy (reviews) and make faster buying decisions through their favourite social media channels. The Social MARKETPLACE BOOMS Trend 9 Social platforms make it a priority to integrate and improve smart social commerce functionality for the benefit of drawing in more users, and therefore advertisers. Many of the larger social channels already have integrated their ‘buy’ buttons. “ ” Pinterest trials its augmented reality shopping where users can place virtual objects from Pins in their homes. Instagram trials its ‘shopping tags’ service where content managers can tag items so that when tapped / clicked they can be immediately purchased. “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 12. Trend 10 The world’s first VR social network gets early traction with die-hard trendsetters and will be eyed by PlayStation and Facebook for a potential acquisition. vTime impresses early on, bidding war could occur Trend 10 “ ” The world’s first VR social network gets early traction with die-hard trendsetters and will be eyed by PlayStation and Facebook for a potential acquisition. Graphics will improve by the end of the year, allowing for greater personalisation and humanisation of avatars. Thought leading brands will explore product placement within virtual environments. E.g. Virtually ordering a Domino’s pizza. PlayStation will integrate vTime for the benefit of their PSVR users as a value add away from Xbox and Facebook. “ ” “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 13. Expect social advertising costs to increase due to the demand. This means even less reach for more cash! Digital Ads will usurp TV ad dominance in 2017 Trend 11 Increasing numbers of viewers spending considerably more time watching online videos over TV, means there’s no surprise that the digital ad space will top its TV rival in 2017. “ ” Brands will start shifting more of their advertising budgets to social media channels, which will continue to prove their worth in terms of reach over TV. The TV ad industry will have to start looking at new and inventive ways of offering greater value than their social media and digital rivals. “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 14. Once we’re all hooked on watching Live exclusives on Facebook, expect the network to be eying up the opportunity to get on your Smart TV! Facebook has already filed a patent for their own dongle that would act as a duct between your phone and the TV set. Trend 12Facebook gives more focus to live streaming Trend 12 In 2016 Facebook started to put promotional budget behind getting us all to start live streaming and reaping the rewards for it too, notably greater reach and engagement. “ ” Expect Facebook to launch more live streaming partnerships with big broadcasters, adopting the Netflix model of streaming exclusive content. This will lead the TV ad revolution, bringing even greater profits to the social giant. Expect brands to start broadcasting uses of their products! “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 15. From Facebook’s perspective, expect organic reach to be a big fat ZERO for the offending publishers. What’s more, Facebook won’t display ads in apps or sites containing content that is fake news. More tools will also surface that will allow us to report fake and hoax content across its network. No more fake news… well, mostly! Trend 13 In 2016, Facebook in particular came under fire for how they handled the US presidential campaign’s mass of Fake News, which was said to influence voters. Well, Facebook and Google have joined forces and are restricting exposure to certain sites known for publishing fake news. “ ” From Google’s perspective, penalized sites won’t be able to run ads from AdSense, which will hit publishers hard, and where it hurts. “ ” “ ”
- 16. Expect a new advertising product to spawn across Instagram Stories in 2017. Instagram Stories spawns opportunity for brands Trend 14 It’s no secret that Instagram stole a page from Snapchat’s book when they added their Story feature, which lets the user see what their favorite Instagrammers are doing for 24 hours. “ ” This is creating a big opportunity for businesses to showcase their brands in a prime location on the app. Large brands like Starbucks, Taco Bell, and JCrew have already been taking advantage, as well as smaller brands like Justin’s PB and HubSpot. “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 17. Trend 15 This in turn will force marketers who embrace Pinterest to up their game and focus more so on pinning videos over static photos. Pinterest introduces video ads Trend 15 Due to the fact we’re all accessing more video these days Pinterest will see an increase in the amount of videos pinned across the network from sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion and Vimeo. “ ” This will lead to the introduction of Pinterest video ads, which will be a big earner for the network. “ ” “ ”
- 18. Tagging of friends on Facebook with facial recognition. Deep learning technology that is woven into Facebook’s suggestions, Newsfeed algorithms and trending topics. Artificial Intelligence – essential to operation of social networks Trend 16 In 2017, A.I. is BIG business and is needed to control and manage the increasing amount of content we all create across social media. Expect social networks to focus their A.I. technologies around some of the following below. “ ” Provide better job matching between business and candidate. Pinterest uses the intelligence of the robots to boost image recognition and search. “ ” “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 19. Long tail blog articles continue to align with Google’s search algorithms, therefore accounting for a higher percentage of organic traffic each month. Many of us are feeling ‘blogged out’, there is so much long and epic content out there covering every topic physically conceivable that as marketers we’ll ignore lengthy pieces and simply try to provide as much information as possible in the smallest possible space—dense content—to appeal to readers. Blogs remain as marketers weapon of choice Trend 17 Surveys suggest that in 2016 38% of marketers agreed that blogging is their most important form of content for business, followed closely by visual marketing at 37% and videos at 21%. “ ” Guest blogging is still very cool and straight out of the ‘Good Digital Marketer’s Handbook. It’s especially efficient for reaching new audiences and increasing exposure. “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 20. Marketers will need to move quickly and drastically to prepare their tactics for this brave new world. This means addressing more terms like ‘who, what, where, how’ etc. Google will be relying more upon their Knowledge Graph as a way to both answer and enable better results for voice search, meaning that marketers really need to be focussing on simplifying their site and making it easier to understand for the search engine. Trend 18Get ready for voice search Trend 18 Personal Digital Assistants on our mobile devices and desktops will become more sophisticated, gain our trust and therefore alter the way many of us carry out searches in 2017. “ ” Especially start thinking about the content and context of your site as well as the change in voice search behaviour. “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 21. Trend 19 What’s more, Google announced they will no longer be providing insight into the algorithm updates and changes, leaving us to figure out the changes ourselves. This news will leave SEO marketers with little more to go on in 2017 than continue to focus on best practice: ensuring websites are responsive, fast, mobile compatible and ensure they contain great content. Google algorithms go incognito Trend 19 September and October 2016 saw some of the most fluctuating changes to Google’s search results ever. “ ” Will this potentially increase spending fees on SEO to allow more time to ensure best practice? “ ” “ ” “ ”
- 22. Yet, a staggering 91% of businesses still don’t have a mobile responsive website. So expect to see this figure come down to 80% in 2017, which is still high, but leaves those businesses willing to invest in a responsive site with a huge opportunity to increase site rankings. MOBILE IS STILL KING Trend 20 It’ not surprising that over 60% of Google searches are now taking place on mobile over desktops and 40% of us will choose another result if the first one they land on is not mobile friendly. Tech Savvy marketers will therefore continue to focus on ‘mobile first’ in relation to SEO. “ ” It’s clear that marketers will need to focus on ‘the mobile experience’, encompassing mobile keyword optimisation and mobile responsiveness. “ ” “ ”
- 23. GET IN TOUCH Contact Hayden Allen-Vercoe Director Our web address orbitalmedia.com Our number +44 0203 411 9111 (ext. 901) Get in touch!