Ten Marketing Trends for 2017

1. Content Marketing:

Content marketing is again a top trend for 2017. It works best integrated into a marketing strategy, reinforcing your brand, tone and engaging your target audience. Integrated into your marketing strategy, it can compliment practices such as SEO, social and direct marketing. These tools work well in conjunction, driving traffic and creating leads for businesses.

Interactive content:

Building on the success of content that you can read, interactive content goes a step further and encourages interaction proving to be even more popular, and a growing trend for 2017. Interactive content can include assessments, polls, infographics & contests -  all targeted to influence your audience to fully engage. 

2. Prioritise Personalisation:

Personalisation is key and applies to all the trends for 2017 - from social media marketing to content. It is about understanding and addressing your specific target audience. What are their habits? What are their preferences?  It is about what they are looking to find and putting it in front of them. The key is to know your target audience inside out. With so much content available on the internet, it is vital that you make yours relevant to the audience you wish to attract.

3. Social Media Marketing:

Social media provides an effective platform for businesses to market themselves. This year, social networks like Facebook have increased their efforts to monetise and make changes to ensure businesses 'pay to play'. As social media users and marketing trends continue to grow, companies are forced to turn to paid social media advertising to ensure they get the reach required to have the desired impact.

If social media marketing is managed correctly, it can provide a successful platform for your business. 

4. Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality:

Virtual reality and augmented reality is not a new trend for 2017, but an insight into the way users will take to new technologies and this will only continue to grow. The overnight success of Pokemon Go provided a new way to connect with customers and suggested that consumers are open to engaging with new technologies & content. Watch this space...  

5. Live Streaming:

In 2016, we saw Snapchat take centre stage, with Instagram later adopting the idea of ‘stories’. Now, this idea of real time videos from Facebook, Periscope (Twitter) and Meerkat have become increasingly popular, so expect for live streaming to really take off in 2017…

6. Mobile Video:

In 2016, mobile video views grew six times faster than desktop views. This trend has continued to grow, and chances are that if you look through your Facebook feed the majority will be video. Mobile is huge and so is video - so the combination is unstoppable, it is time everybody got on board and took advantage! 

7. Influencer Marketing:

Consumers trust and will buy into products or services that are marketed by people they aspire to be. Social media has recently been used as a platform to market these services to specific audiences. The graph below from Google Trends (Jan 2014 - Dec 2016), demonstrates the increased number of searches for 'influencer marketing' on Google - this is only expected to continue to rise in 2017, as more businesses begin to use this as a tool to increase conversion.

8. Marketing Automation:

Marketing automation has allowed businesses to keep up to date with social media. These programmes, such as Oracle Eloqua is an example of software used to send timely, personalised messages to customers, schedule posts and send updates around the clock - even out of business hours! 

9. Chatbots:

Although chatbots are not a new thing, in 2017 they are expected to be more widely discovered. Chatbots are powered by artificial intelligence through a conversational agent. This provides users with the ability to find the answer to a number of questions - quickly.

10. Mobile first NOT Mobile Friendly:

As you can guess, the term 'mobile first' means designing a website around an online experience for mobile, rather than it be an afterthought. According to research, over 50% of all online searches are now made on mobile devices and 91% of Facebook use comes from mobile-exclusive marketing. 

Are you ready for 2017?

Talk to us to find more information about our marketing services and how we can help you secure a plan for 2017 to stay ahead of the trends!