Consumer and digital marketing trends for 2018

Hello!! It is almost 2018 and as the new year approaches, many websites publish trends for 2018.
I have collected a couple of links to the most valuable consumer and marketing trends in 2018, so once you are done reading this blog post you are completely up to date and you can continue your party preparations for new year's eve!

The first one I would like to share is a trendwatching video from trendwatching.com.

Trendwatching describes consumer trends as "a new manifestation among people in behavior, attitude, or expectation of a fundamental human need, want or desire." meaning that this video goes beyond short term (product) trends. To work with trends it is important to uderstand what trends are and how they are created. This video explains this as well. Besides this explanation, 5 trends are described and altough the words below might seem familiar I still encourage you to watch the video as the trends themselves are explained differently then you might think, when reading these 5 trends topics below.

Watch the video below where these 5 trends are explained, I think the complete video is well worth watching.

Trend #1  A-Commerce
Trend #2  Assisted development
Trend #3  Virtual companions
Trend #4  Forgiving by design
Trend #5  Transparency





This linkedin post is also a good read in how customer trends are created. Good to read before moving on to the rest of this post.

How consumer trends are created
How consumer trends are created




















Key Digital trends for 2018

A 90 slide presentation with key digital trendsd from Ogilvy. If the slideshareview does not work, I have also uploaded the file at my dropbox (direct download here)
They actually look back to last year's predections and tell you if they were right or not. 




Email Marketing Trends 2018

Then we move on to the world of email marketing. Email marketing is still rocking, especially in the western world. The people of E-consultancy always release very well written insights and reports and this one about email marketing is no exception.
There is direct access to the report here via my dropbox account. No hassle with login's or registrations. Use this report to gather some idea's for email marketing within your business. The trends are written by 14 email marketing experts and they write about the following trends:

  • Increased regulation (GDPR, data protection, Canadian anti spam law, but also very important consumer expectations. They will expect more then the legal minimum)
  • Email rendering (about the usage of JSON, interactive emails, and emails interpretation of HTML and CSS and some best practices including screenshots)
  • Device friendly (short chapter about mobile friendly emails)
  • Intelligent personalisation (building persona's and connecting behavior triggers)
  • Sophisticated segmentation (about subscriber fatigue and the relation to an increasing spam score)
  • Subjectline effectiveness (subjectline and preheader, emoji's, conversational language, self optimizing subjectline tools, subjectline attribution etc)
  • Writing for emails (email writing is so different from website or book writing and related to the customer experience, read about the customer centric calculator and more)
  • Deliverability (already important but even more important in 2018)
  • Code like it is 2018 (stand out of the crowd with email coding and css, vs animated gif's etc.)
  • Marketing automation (predictive intelligence in relation to GDPR and marketing automation)
Email marketing trends 2018

SEO trends in 2018

As for SEO trends of course, one of the leading search engine sites, searchenginejournal has a nice blog post.
For short they see these important trends in 2018 

  • Mobile-first
  • Voice search
  • Schema
  • Featured snippets
  • Content
  • Machine learning and AI
  • Speed
  • Technical SEO
  • Links

Go click here for in depth information and more SEO trends written by various leading SEO experts. Watch this focus at UX, Voice and branding trends!
E-consultancy also has an article with SEO trends in 2018

And if you just want to click a bit around and learn about SEO trends, you can click no less then 29 times at this slideshare presentation below or direct download here.



Still not tired of clicking around? My favorite source of SEO information, MOZ, also has provided a slide deck with SEO trends in 2018, an additional 66 clicks! Downloadable version here.



Amazon/Branding

Altough it is not a specific 2018 trend video, I would like to share this video about how brand building and product selling is changing due to Google and Amazon and this will continue in 2018. It includees a section about voice search that really explains the direction.


Selling at Amazon , requires special techniques and one of them are the Amzon ranking factors. Here Amazon listing optimization techniques to use in 2018.
Talking about branding, purpose is a subject that is strongly connected to this. Marketingweek informs us about the changing purpose trend in 2018.

Chatbots

The chatbot industry will enter a new phase in 2018 and will become more mature. It's time to test with chatbots, to learn, to see what it can do for you. But think beyond just chatting, think about getting customer's insights, data, or use chatbots as a landingpage for your campaigns such as email marketing. Chatbots are for sure something to experiment with in 2018. I have become very enthousiastic about chatbots en their future after visiting some marketing workshops in 2017 like this one:
More about chatbot trends here:

Customer Experience

We all know by now the experience is the brand. A few links to websites informing you about customer experience trends 

Experience Matters writes about going beyond the NPS metrix.Reconfigure your CX measurement programs. To my opinion very important, think for example about an emotionmap per touchpoint. 
But they also write about changing customer feedback pulls and 14 other trends. Click here to go to their list.
Ameyo writes about the IoT and blockchain where of course complete books are written about. They will both impact the customer experience directly and indirectly more and more in 2018.
The Drum writes about trends in customer experience and the so called "unconsumption' strategy. Trends where the end goal still is a sale and a returning customer, but not at the same day or in the same physical space. 

Videomarketing

Besides hypertargeting relevant video's something that already takes place now, there are more trends in videomarketing for 2018. I could not really find many well written posts about it, but this one is nice to read. I would also recommend to keep on reading this website in 2018 as they have always good videomarketing insights.

Voice controlled AI and facial recognition payments in 2018 in China

The (digital) future comes from the east. Baidu, released this video a few weeks ago at their Twitter account about voice powered AI and facial recognition payments:




Make the Forbes webmarketers happy

Now let's make the forbes webmarketers happy in the last section of this post. Forbes writes a lot about consumer and retail trends and with every search I did, i found new pages about trends at the forbes.com domain. They have a lot of quick to read pages so click this link and quickly read their preview of next year's trends. I guess Forbes like to create many pages, as they also have another they have another page where they write about app trends in 2018. You might want to read this as well. So make their webmarketers extra happy by giving them aonther final click to read this article about ecommerce trends in 2018 from them as well.

For me, one final thing to say to you all:

I wish you a great , healthy and digital 2018! 

Alex his happy digital 2018 fireworks




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