What are the Online Marketing Predictions for 2018?

As print marketing’s popularity drops and the regular use of blockers in online advertising rises, brands must discover alternative methods of catching the attention of an increasingly savvy potential client audience instead of relying on traditional techniques that no longer yield results.

User-Centred and User-Generated Content

User experience has become progressively more important when creating content. Where content is hosted will become more important than ever as there is now harsher punishment for content that is not optimised for smartphones. Forty percent of users click away from a webpage that takes over three seconds to load. Most online shopping is now conducted by smartphone and marketing must cater to this trend to be successful.

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Voice Search

Whilst voice search hasn’t yet peaked, error rate is steadily decreasing, and usage is rising thanks to recent innovations such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. Many experts are predicting that half of web browsing will be conducted using voice commands by 2023. How marketing adapts to this change will certainly have a big impact on results. Content may not drastically change, but how content is perceived is constantly evolving; techniques like writing text in a conversational style for voice search or using video for users who prefer visual information over text can produce optimal results.

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Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing in recent years has been growing from strength to strength as a technique for brands to show their services and products to their target audience and benefit from influencer advocacy to gain new customers. Due to a perceived sense of inauthenticity, influencer marketing could see a downturn. The audience is now wary of recommendations that are obviously paid adverts. This trend will instead evolve into instructional videos and real-world applications that showcase the product being used, which is perceived as more authentic.

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Micro influencers are likely to also take centre stage thanks to their ability to share relatable content to an engaged following, as opposed to bloggers with a large following and little interaction. The ideal influencers of an audience of 10,000 or less on social media will be particularly useful in marketing due to higher rates of engagement. This will drive brand awareness with an accurate picture of their target audience.