What Are The Hot Trends that Characterize Digital Marketing in 2018?

October 8, 2018

Everything seems to indicate that technologies will continue to revolutionize all sectors of companies. There are already emerging technological innovations that have begun to appear on the market in 2018. This is the case of artificial intelligence and chatbots or influencer marketing with the proliferation of social networks. Being updated on the latest trends in the digital marketing is mandatory for digital marketing service providers and the most essential element to grow your business and capture the attention of its consumers.

Here are the main digital innovations that are influencing the internet marketing strategies.

1. An increase of personalized Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is now a reality that can no longer be ignored. However, brands must learn to maximize the benefits offered by AI (Artificial Intelligence) – that is the ability of machines to reason like humans that we have already seen slowly entering into everyday life.

A trend that has not escaped Facebook. The social network owned by Mark Zuckerberg aims to make Messenger the preferred platform for customer care with the possibility that the same business to consumer chat can be transferred from Facebook to a brand’s website.

These chatbots allow 24-hour assistance and response facilitating both the management of certain activities by a company and the creation of a lasting relationship with consumers.

In addition to social media, personalization will touch the whole world of web marketing and will feature email as a conversion channel. Think of the welcome emails that have the highest opening rates and 320% of RoI (Return of Investment). Furthermore, improving the use of collected data to create profiled and automated emails will allow you to increase opening rates, customer engagement and also save time that you can allocate to other tasks.

2. Social Media Search

The historical search engine of Google has refined the research experience by making it increasingly local, personalized and relevant to the user. An example of this interesting evolution of Social Network research is represented by the new Hashtag follows function which allows users to follow a particular hashtag, not just one person.
Geographic tags, behavioral insights, insights on interests and passions and visual research make the platforms increasingly popular tools to meet user’s requests.

3. User-generated content

The active, participatory and creative audience acts prevalent and consequently influencing the mass media market and global audiences. By allowing people to develop this sense of belonging to their favorite brands, it is possible to form communities of co-creators.

Let’s not forget the importance of user-generated content in the process of customer loyalty. In fact, in the era of fake news the distrust of brands, media and governments have multiplied. Here the community becomes the biggest asset of the brand, helping it to draw future developments based on customer’s wishes and needs. Discussions and feedback from social media or the web, in general, can help to bring out relevant issues to be addressed before they become real problems.

4. More purchases on Mobile

According to data released recently by the report “Digital and social scenario in the world” spread by We Are Social, mobile users in Italy are 49.2 million. Of these, 30 million are active on social media from a smartphone and every three minutes spent on their mobile device, one minute is dedicated to social media.

In the wake of the good results of Facebook Marketplace that is open exclusively to individuals who can sell items and products of any kind. Soon new features will come to allow even brands and companies to sell their products in the virtual market of social channels.

With its 800 million monthly active users, Instagram has become one of the most attractive platforms for marketers in 2017. Shopping Tag – One of the most important and expected features for 2018 has been tested recently and activated in some business profiles. It has the possibility to tag products sold directly in photos shared on Instagram. Next, it will also have integration with Shopify that will allow users to make purchases directly from Instagram posts without ever leaving the social network.

To conclude, Digital Marketing has become more analytical and broader by entering new platforms, situations and means of communication. But it will continue to focus heavily on organic research on the best capabilities of Artificial Intelligence and on campaigns based on ‘influence’.

So we could say that even in Digital Marketing there is a progressive and inexorable engineering of processes that is replacing intuition, creativity, and emotions with clouds of bytes.