Digital Marketing Trends for Q2 2017

It is a given that marketing will always be in a state of flux. Consumer behavior changes and technology develops over the course of time. Even more so for online marketing, as the Internet community is known for its volatility.

For marketers who have gone digital, they need to keep themselves constantly updated on the current trends for the season. Should they not, they will soon find themselves trailing behind their competitors.

Columnists from technology and marketing sites have taken notice of these prevalent trends for the second quarter of the year:

Email campaigning still remains to be the king of digital marketing. It continues to be one of the most cost-efficient ways of advertising businesses online. 

Using emails is an oft underrated and underused technique by many marketers. Despite this, emails have the highest return on investment out of all digital marketing methods. It reportedly has an ROI rate of 4300 percent.

Along with email campaigning, many also underestimate the effectiveness of using content for marketing. For instance, businesses who use written content have found significant increase in their ROI rate by thirteen times. 

The notion that written content is always more effective at short lengths was discovered to be not necessarily true. Research has shown that the most shared content on social media often reach word counts past 1000. 

Video, on the other hand, is still the leading method of content marketing. More than half  of professional marketers say that it has the best ROI out of all types of content.

The population of online mobile users have long outnumbered the population of desktop computer users. An algorithm designed for mobiles has been announced by Google and is expected to launch by 2018.  The need to optimize content for mobile consumption continues to grow. 

The number of active mobile users that have messaging applications now number at four billion. Apps such as FB Messenger and LINE are also being seen as potential platforms for marketers to make use of.   

Digital marketing and other outsourcing services are now being overwhelmed by customer and technological demands. With the help of artificial intelligence, marketers will not only be able to collect user behavior data. They will also find it easier to understand consumers and how to attract them better.  It can assist in content optimization, marketing tactics, and other activities such as email campaigns.

Accenture stated that by 2035, AI will double the economic growth rate.

Many digital marketers still doubt the implementation of artificial intelligence into their work for this year. But there are also others that say automation provides perks such as:

It was noted that using AI for digital marketing does not mean using it for all operations. Tasks that do not necessarily need the human touch can be delegated to automation. Despite the fear that humans may lose their jobs to automation, marketers can take comfort in knowing that AI cannot replicate human creativity—at least for now. 

As we speak, consumer behavior continues to shift. New technological advances are being made. What is popular now may not be in a few months’ time. Some things may remain the same for several years. The attention spans of humans continue to shorten—something that marketers need to adapt to. Digital marketing solutions need evolve as well, if they aim to continue at the pace that it is at right now.