Top Marketing Trends of 2017

Everything you should be aware (or beware) of this year.

Zenith Optimedia, a global communication network, says that the digital ad market will grow by 4.5% and finally overcome its TV counterpart. Not only in Canada and the USA but elsewhere in the world.

What it means for you, my fellow marketer, is that it’s just about time to run ad campaigns on the Internet.

Here are some of the top marketing trends of 2017 – take notice to stay ahead of the curve with your up-to-date marketing activities.

• Images and Infographics

You shouldn’t underestimate the overall laziness of people nowadays. They never have time to read anything longer than a tweet.

Being brief and concise with your marketing message is a good way to go. “Less is more” approach is finally back!

Not only you have to be brief – you’d want to supplement your text with stunning visuals, usually an image or two. Colorful, informative images and infographics will make your product shine and attract more people.

• Mobile Marketing

According to the data provided by CitiGroup (one of the world’s leading financial conglomerates), there will be more mobile phones that there are people in the world (an increase from 83.6% to 103.8%).

Welcome to the Age of Smartphones. What, your website still doesn’t provide mobile friendly customer experience? Pack your things and move to the country then – if you want to survive in this world of competition, you’d better cater to mobile users.

• Video Content

Great images are great but, still, not enough. Interesting videos fare much better just images and photos: they have an 11.3% audience reach while the images can draw you a maximum of 10.7% from total audience. And the gap is going to get bigger in the future.

If you want to stay on top, run a YouTube channel or post videos on other resources like social networks. Choose any topic as long as it’s entertaining and worth watching and sharing.

• Interactive Approach and Gamification 

Don’t be afraid to “play” with your customers a little bit: keep them entertained and hooked to your product. Introduce gaming elements to the usually boring processes like registration and onboarding.

• Move to HTTPS

HTTPS protocol keeps your data safe and secure: starting 2017, all non-HTTPS websites will be marked as “unsafe” for your browser.

The main advantage of HTTPS is the protected traffic flow – it would be harder for scammers to fish for your cookies, business data, or personal messages.

• Page load speed optimization

Google PageSpeed Insights is a service that provides tips for developers who wants to make their website run and load faster in the browser.

The service analyzes the page you submit and points out the elements, which require improvement or even removal. It also gives you tips and recommendations on how to work those issues out.

The faster your website loads, the fewer visitors you will lose. Plus, Google search algorithm loves quickly-loading websites so you might expect a little SEO boost as well.

• LSI-Copywriting and Great Copy

Like we mentioned before, it’s “less is more” with any copy. Yet, it doesn’t mean you can throw random words there to makes sense.

If you want your copy to really work and bring customers, you need to employ LSI-copywriting approach. 

LSI stands for “latent semantic indexing." It’s a concept that suggests using the words that are most common and typical for the given topic. 

Let’s say, you have a page about Ferrari cars on your website. Naturally, you (and Google’s search crawler) expect that similar articles would inevitably use words like “luxury,” “sports car,” “speed,” “race,” “prestige,” “famous,” “power,” “Italian” etc.

So, whatever copy you’re going to write for that page, make sure it contains those words; otherwise, you risk getting ranked low.

Oh, and did we mention your copy still needs to make sense and appeal to people?

• Generation Z Comes of Age

Generation Z is the term for people who were born in the early 2000s. They are the ones who establish trends and react to advertising most.

They crave social approval (likes, ratings, reviews, thumbs up etc). People of generation Z value freedom of choice, comfort, design, and style.

• Analytics and Statistics

Numbers drive progress. How well do you analyze your audience and their behavior?

Every piece of data is crucial to the success of small businesses nowadays because if you know and understand something, you can control it.

The Future of E-Commerce

There are a few more rules and tricks you want to be aware of to be successful in 2017.

• Keep your customers loyal to your brand, express genuine interest in what they do and how they feel while maintaining firm marketing grip. The latest Nike Twitter-friendly campaign called #betterforit, which show unrestrained desire to take it to the top.

• Show people how real you really are – shoot a video about yourself, your team at work. Relate to people.
• Show your creative side as well – in the ocean of mediocre content, it’s very hard to stay afloat. Here’s a fun example from the food delivery company. 

• Being endorsed by a celebrity is a great way promoting your brand. Check this out: it only took one Kim Kardashian’s Instagram post to boost the popularity of EOS lip balm.

• Pay attention to who recommends and talks favorably about your brand on social media. Read customer reviews and feedback, especially if you’re a b2b (business to business) company. Your reputation depends on this.

The technology is always moving forward. To stay relevant, you need to make sure you provide quality products/services and useful content; otherwise, you’ll go down on Google search results page. Mix various tactics and experiment with approaches.

Many trends of 2016 have successfully continued into 2017, like smart email marketing.

If you’re still having doubts about your way of making it on the Internet, do contact us for a professional consult and friendly advice.

Write your comments or questions below – let’s talk about it!