What can you expect to see in Digital Advertising trends that will affect your marketing strategies in 2018? KEO Marketing presents The State of Digital Advertising: Trends to Watch in 2018, where we detail the top 4 digital advertising predictions for the upcoming year.
- Sales Still Close the Buyer’s Journey
Your sales force will continue to close sales in 2018. While your prospects and customers do most of their research online, they still like to talk to a human being for the final mile, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Before meeting with your sales team, they prefer your digital content in the form of vlogs, blogs, reviews, comparison sites, white papers, case studies, and more.
Analytics will still be highly important in helping to bring your customers from the digital realm into a personal relationship that leads to a sale. Use the data at your fingertips, both on- and offline, to help you determine what digital advertising strategies will help move them through your funnel until that fateful meeting with your salesperson.
- Digital Remains Important Post-sale
One advertising trend you will see in 2018 is how important digital advertising remains post-sale. Once your buyer has completed his or her customer journey, continuing digital advertising strategies keep your customers feeling pampered and important—and keep your business top of mind.
As most successful marketers know, it is easier and cheaper to sell to a current customer than to onboard a new one. Use digital marketing techniques like learning algorithms to help guide your customers for months, even years, after your initial sale. Instead of coming across as intrusive, if done well, it will feel personally empowering.
- Separate Customer Data Onboarding from Customer Onboarding
Your customer onboarding process comprises the strategies and steps undertaken as part of the buyer’s journey. On-boarding customer data is an emerging trend we see in 2018 to first capture the customer data to improve their journey.
Consider how the average customer connects to multiple devices every day. Those multiple connections generate data you need to capture and on-board. According to Winterberry Group, by 2020, you could face on-boarding up to $1 billion online attributes a day.
Marketers will need to further refine digital advertising strategies around specialist areas for a clearer understanding of the role and benefit of each.
- More Digital Advertising
The more informed customers and prospects are, the more willing they are to engage with brands that produce useful, relevant, timely, and personalized knowledge. This holds true even with a wider array of online and offline competition between brands. Marketers need to step up their digital advertising efforts to be heard above all the other voices out there.
The greater your brand engagement with your target audience, the more harmonized your process becomes. And a harmonized process allows you to deliver an authentic, personal buyer’s journal from beginning to end.
Conclusion
The above digital advertising trends will affect, in some way or another, every marketer in 2018. The result will be a digital transformation that savvy brands realize must happen, if they are not already in the process of transformation. For more information on what you can expect headed into the New Year, download KEO Marketing’s latest guide, “Digital Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2018.”
