5 Emerging Marketing Trends For 2017
It’s never too early to start looking ahead to the upcoming year. When it comes to marketing trends, they’re always changing. A good marketer needs to absorb what’s changing around them and prepare to act on what’s important to the business or risk being left behind by competitors.
As you push to end 2016 on a strong note now is not the time to relax: 2017 will be here before you want it to and a lot is happening in the marketing world. To help marketers stay current and keep track of emerging technologies we’ve put together a list of 5 emerging marketing trends for 2017. Check it out.
Data Will Drive Design
People often think of design as an arbitrary thing based on your personal preference. Great design feels magical; you can’t always explain it, and it’s often difficult to replicate. While some parts of design are dependent on the artist, taking a design and making it work on the internet is not. That’s where having the ability to track what users are doing becomes invaluable.
The design industry is in the middle of a shake-up, and 2017 will bring it to a head. Data will finally begin to dominate the online design industry. We’ve been using heatmaps, visitor recordings, A/B testing, and user segmentation to increase our conversion rates across all our marketing touch points. We use the results gained from these tools to drive our design decisions and relay our findings back to the client and the sales team. This data becomes a critical part of a growth driven design campaign and ensures we’re making sound decisions based on what we observe, not what we “think” is right.
If you’re only focused on data you can extract from Google Analytics, 2017 is the perfect time to take advantage of more advanced analytics software you have at your disposal.
Live Social Media Streaming
Video continues to dominate the internet. One trend worth watching this year is live video streaming. With live streaming marketers can speak directly to their audience. Chances are, if you’ve been on Facebook in the past six months, you’ve seen Facebook Live in action.
The move to live video streaming makes sense — social media works best when we’re in the moment. Think how quickly you refresh your Twitter feeds, consume disappearing Snapchat snaps, and look at trending topics. We want to know what’s happening right now.
Nothing is more right now than Live Video.
Oh, and did we mention the potential live video has for Facebook engagement? Initial data from Facebook revealed that people comment 10X more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos.
Live social media streaming is going to be huge in 2017. You need to develop a strategy for working live broadcasts into your marketing channels.
The Platform-Agnostic Experience
We saw a significant push by the big players (Facebook, Google, Apple) in 2016 to keep users in their ecosystems. We continue to see these brands take steps to reduce the friction between mobile apps, websites, mobile devices and computers. The goal is to provide users with an increasingly seamless experience across platforms and keep users from leaving.
How can you compete against these goliaths of the industry? The key is to continue to create content your users crave. We already know content is so important to an effective inbound campaign. But do you have a solid understanding of your audience? That’s how you can differentiate yourself from the big players. Only you know your audience, and it’s your job to know them better than anyone else.
2017 is the perfect time for a deep dive to understand your customers. Then use that data to develop customized content that for your audience, specifically which part of the buyer’s journey they are on.
Big Push For Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO is the process of increasing the number of visitors to your site to customers. There are a variety of ways to increase conversions including, A/B testing, heat mapping, visitor recordings and more. I came across a pretty amazing stat this week. For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them. (Econsultancy, 2016) (Source: HubSpot)
For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them.
One of the problems we consistently see is a client launching a campaign, spending a ton of money on the launch, with little thought on how to improve the campaign after it goes live. Luckily there is a better way. One of the biggest benefits of Growth Driven Design is the ability to build dynamic campaigns that are flexible enough to adapt to the demands of the users. Growth Driven Design allows the campaign to maximize ROI through the life of the campaign.
Establish a Growth Driven Design plan for 2017 that can react to the needs of your visitors. Let them tell you what they want, not the other way around.
Video Will Eat The Internet
As the cost of entry to create compelling video continues to slide, and the video viewerships continue to rise, 2017 will be the year video consumes most of the internet. We’ve already talked about the increased value in Facebook’s push to live streaming. Even Mark Zuckerberg is convinced videos is the future:
“We’re particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services,” Zuckerberg said in a statement on Wednesday night, as the company reported better-than-expected earnings.
There is little doubt that video can be a powerful marketing tool. We’ve used video in our campaigns time and time again. But it needs to be more than just a beautiful picture. Using a video hosting service like Wistia gives you a slough of marketing tools that can help you increase your conversions over services like Vimeo or YouTube.
In 2017 take advantage of the technology out there and identify services that make converting customers a priority and start using them consistently.
Hopefully, these 5 emerging marketing trends for 2017 will help you prepare for 2017.
If you’d like to learn how Sage Lion Media can help you get started with an effective inbound marketing strategy, contact us today.
