2017 is coming to a close and a new year will begin and offer tons of new possibilities. There could be a huge changes in the marketing world and maybe new processes that everyone’s bound to comply with or work with. Here are some trends that you should look out for as 2018 comes rolling in. Mind you, these aren’t exactly new, but, they made quite an impact this year that it’s worth utilizing and starting your 2018 with it. There’s so much room for progress and changes and it’s best to look into these ten trends!

TREND 1: Understanding Customer Journey

When creating your own product you plan ways to get your potential customers from point A to point B. In point A, they’re not your customers just yet, but when they get to point B they turn into your customers or your buyers. Marketers should be looking at HOW their customers get themselves from point A to point B, utilize the data and use it to map out the how’s and why’s and from there easily formulate a better strategy. Design your marketing, appeal to them and reach out to them as they create or make their journey with you.

The point of understanding your customer’s journey is to create an understanding regarding your customer’s or potential customer’s behavior. With that understanding, it will be easy to map out changes and create strategies that will appeal to them and make them your regulars. Creating a connection with your target market or your customers can be a great leverage when it comes to competition.

TREND 2: Video Marketing

There’s been a huge impact with videos nowadays, attention spans have grown shorter and reaching your demographic with something that offers more at a shorter time frame is a definite essential.

As seen through research, YouTube has been in the lead as a search engine, making it a great opportunity with increasing your rankings at the same time, grow awareness about your product. It’s definitely something you should consider doing, but of course, you have to do it right for it to succeed. There’s a lot of different videos that you can think of, like doing professional live videos on Facebook Live or even Instagram, or you can go for Augmented Virtual Reality as the whole VR tech is booming and constantly improving.

TREND 3: Social Media and Social Messaging Apps in Communication

Social Media has been a front running with regards to bringing awareness for your product. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your site or your product and get it known. With it’s evolving features, there’s so much you can do now! It’s now a staple to create a Facebook page for your company or a Twitter profile and usually this is where you can fully connect with your audience and customers.

Text messages and phone calls have been slowly transitioning to the messaging features that social media has created and most companies have been incorporating Facebook Messenger or Twitter’s Direct Message as their main point of contact for support. Let’s not forget how majority now use their mobile phones and have internet access all the time.

TREND 4: Automation and Predictive Algorithm

Internet Marketing has been evolving as much as technology has. It’s a bubbling new experience that marketers have been utilizing, marketing automation. With marketing automation, you’re now able to cut down tasks on your list and let an AI handle the job. It’s a simple set up of settings and letting the machine do the work. Of course, since it’s still new and still requires a whole lot of improvements, it’s not something that can easily replace yourself actually doing the tasks. It’s not a solution to reaching your goals, but it’s a really helpful tool when it comes to getting work done.

Partnering with automation we have predictive algorithm. With this steadily improving over the course of 2017, marketers are now able to gather enough data that can mimic possible outcomes to a certain strategy. Now with data, small and big businesses can easily predict their marketing spend and optimize everything accordingly to its overall budget.

TREND 5: Personalization Across Your Entire Funnel and Customer Journey

Generic and impersonalized ads or funnels have gone out the window with regards to appeal. Now, you have to make sure you make personalized emails, funnels and make sure you connect all your campaigns to your personalized funnels and grab the attention of your customers instantly. Attention is currency. Appeal to your customers and establish a connection through personalized interactions and make sure that you leave an impact. With this in mind, you’re sure to garner enough attention.

Loyal customers are essential to business and the best way for you convert customers to loyal customers is to create that connection through personalized interaction. There’s been a widespread of ads that are relatable this year, ads that leave a lasting impression and a certain kind or appeal of emotion. It’s personal, it’s effective and it connects with your customers.

TREND 6: Native Advertising

A great way to create better traction with your sales or advertising is to use your target audience’s native language. Bridging the language gap between you and your customers would create a more welcoming appeal and could just give you better results rather than just sticking to one language or having your campaigns global but half the people viewing your ad doesn’t understand it. It’s a little bit more effort but it’s well worth it. Native advertising can help immensely for marketing in 2018.

TREND 7: Test, Test, Test!

With a lot of metrics to take into consideration and a lot of tools at your disposal, it’s best to focus on doing tons of tests, or as they say, “Cost per Experiment”. You take in consideration all those other metrics (CPP, CPL, CPM, CPC) and test everything to get closer to your desired ROI. It’s a huge effort and if you’re smart about it, you’ll establish the perfect strategy that will prove the most effective for your marketing.

TREND 8: Voice Marketing

There’s content creation which branches out into multiple kinds like blogs, articles, videos, animations, drawings, design, and here’s an entirely new contender, voice marketing. With new devices and options such as Google Assistant, Bixby, Alexa and Siri, studies show that 20% of mobile searches are voice searches. It’s a growing trend that shows much promise. It’s 2018 and it’s best to be prepared. How exactly are markets going to cater to such searches? It’s a whole new world for discovery.

TREND 9: Online and Offline Integration

A lot of advertising today has began to utilize this kind of integration, sports most often than not. Marketers take sports fans through online marketing and advertising of promotions or online activities, hyping them prior to the main event and thanks to that digital/online advertising, you get an even huge response and a continued and fulfilling experience at the main event which is now offline advertising. It holds a lot of promise for marketing and worth looking into for 2018.

TREND 10: Conversational User Interfaces

With the latests gadgets and features on mobile, new ideas for UI will be utilized. AI are no longer just robots, instead they are now programed with a little human touch. This creates a more natural exchange between your interface and your customer. With conversation at its center, a natural connection is established between your UI and your customer and that in itself can provide a huge amount of advantages may it be in sales, customer support, information, or even just for entertainment.

What do you think about these trends that’s possibly going to improve or change things in 2018? Do you think these are feasible things to spend time on and actually follow? What do you think are the other things that can be considered “trends”? Do you already implement this in your strategies and have invested in this to be ready for next amazing year?