Here we review some Digital Media trends.  We believe, based on our consultancy and training experience, are relevant for marketers across organisations regardless of their size.

12 Digital Media trends

1. Customer Lifecycle

Lifecycle marketing is described as producing a managed communications plan to rank. It assimilates the full array of marketing communications conduits and experiences to sustain prospects. Digital media supports consumers on the road to purchase using methods such as ‘persuasive personalised messaging’ and ‘re-targeting.

Techniques such as ‘customer journey mapping’ are growing in importance. This is due to how the intricacy of marketing and digital media has intensified. They will help delineate the most pertinent communications experiences for different touchpoints in the client journey.

To buttress this, think about how to develop the effectiveness of digital media. Learn to think from the consumers’ perspective and how communication is available through the customer lifecycle for different types of business.

2. Personalising the User Journey

To increase pertinence and rapid response of communications, website personalisation has been used widely in transactional e-commerce sectors such as travel, financial services and retail for quite a long time, lately, however, cheaper options have become available with a range of solutions.

There are many forms of web personalisation:

  • integrated content or commerce management systems
  • analytics solutions
  • or separate Software as a Service (SaaS) personalisation, assimilated within your CMS and analytics.

A valuable method with which you can review your use of personalisation is an ‘experience personalisation pyramid’.

3.  One-to-one personalisation

Using AI (Artificial Intelligence) to deliver an individualised experience to each customer, one-to-one uses some of the same principles as optimisation and segmentation, however, by presenting a solution to the two supreme limitations, delayed results and inability to scale, it signifies an essentially different approach.

4. Segmentation

Targets site visitor groupings, each with specialised content to increase relevance and conversion.

5. Optimisation

Structured experiments. AKA AB Testing or Multivariate testing such as Google Optimize

Each segment requires separate manual rules to be set up. So returns for this tactic eventually lessen after the maximum sustainable number of audience segments has been touched.

The main development within personalisation is improved use of AI rather than manual rules. Plus, we can also expect to see site personalisation services being embraced across more areas than the transactional sectors it is already popular with.

6. Machine Learning and Marketing Automation

Personalisation can also be employed across the lifecycle in e-mail communications.  Yet, e-mail marketing research reveals that despite widespread use of e-mail and marketing automation systems, many businesses don’t manage to put in place a full lifecycle contact system.

In many State of E-mail marketing reports the results are alarming: Only 50 percent use any targeting whatever, less than 30 percent use only basic target segmentation and fewer than 15 percent use segmentation and personalisation mandates to reach out to those audiences within their databank. Meaning that they are almost certainly missing out on openings for automated e-mails with dynamic content for the reception and cultivation of prospects and clients.

7. Social Messaging Apps

The use of messaging apps will make more of a trending impact this year. According to the latest Ofcom research, more than 50% of the mobile-using audience managed their social media on Facebook Messenger and the other 50% used WhatsApp, also owned by Facebook.

Pizza Hut and IKEA are initial implementers of Messenger either for booking tables or conducting market research.

8. Video and the Customer Journey

The use of video in social media is still increasing shown mostly by the dominance of YouTube. It used to be said that YouTube was the biggest search engine after Google, but new data from comScore’s Ofcom panel confirms that it is now even more popular.

9. Customer Engagement Strategy using Content Marketing

Although important, a video is only one type of content. Content marketing is set to become more popular, the trend is that companies are getting serious about the content being treated as a strategic resource. That means customer engagement strategy at a practical level, developing content for a variety of audiences using systems such as Personas and Content Mapping. Research shows that customer-centric investigation systems will grow in reputation.

10. Search Marketing

Search marketing is prevailing if we examine the top digital sales channels. Social media is much further behind in almost all other areas, its enduring popularity with consumers notwithstanding. We know now that in many areas, social media is a good tool for connecting consumers with a brand, successful enhancing favourability and cognisance but it normally doesn’t energise lead volume or sales.

With organic search, the changing face of the SERPs as shown by Mozcast, is a movement marketers need to be aware of. SERPs features update, which shows the types of links within a bundle of top 10k keywords they monitor. This demonstrates the significance of knowledge panels which are important for both brands and SMEs.

11. Marketing Tech

The development here is that there will be no respite in innovative approaches used to analyse or automate. Technology-enabled targeted marketing powered by important customer interactions, propelled by the use of consumer data, will be the latest trend in moving the performance needle on growth and martech is lighting the way.

12. Data Sources

This test here is about tools for assimilating perceptions from dissimilar paid media ad serving tools and which give the best effects. Launched recently rivery.io, ‘an intuitive SaaS integration tool to consolidate all your data from both internal and external sources into a single data platform in the cloud’, should do well. The tendency here is for novel integrated media tools that are not Google or Adobe, that aid comparison performance for different media.

These are additional analysis tools services and are startlingly expensive since they are not marketing technology that will increase directly leads or sales to your business.

If you would like to know more about incorporating digital media into your marketing strategy, then contact a member of our team. Remember to follow us on social media to stay up-to-date with the latest marketing information.