What Changed In Marketing In 2017?

Marketing always needs to develop along with two things: customer expectations and technology. The first one sets up goals that marketers need to achieve. The second one determines how to achieve them. What trends managed to emerge in 2017 that we are now aware of?

Predictive analytics

By gathering large amounts of data about particular users and their preferences, actions and behavior, we are capable of predicting their needs and wants and establishing marketing campaigns based on them. Moreover, this process can easily be automated in order to account for any particular details, providing great results.

UX

UX, or user experience, is becoming more and more relevant. Doesn't matter whether it's setting up your website, designing your product or planning your customer support - customer expectations keep rising, to the extent where the level of provided assistance can be as valuable (or even more so) than product itself. How easy is it to convey information to the users of your service? Are the features your provide them with useful and thought out? Without taking the customers' perspective into consideration we are dooming yourself to low brand loyalty and overall lack of satisfaction.

Permission-based marketing

The golden rule of marketing in the 21st century is simple: market to the people, who want you to market to themselves. Aggressive, quantity-over-quality email spam is not the way to go if you want to encourage your audience. This includes two things: delivering customized content that is applicable to your target audience, as well as making sure that the aforementioned audience can relate to your product or service. Proper lead segmenting is crucial for this purpose.

Interactive approach

Your approach to your audience will determine whether they are hearing you, or actually listening to you. Captivating content that allows people to interact with you has multiple advantages over static content. First of all, it grabs their attention much more easily. It also reinforces your message, since interacting with an app, questionnaire or a quiz is more engaging and less forgetable than simply viewing an email or a picture. These forms are also increasingly likely to bring repeat visitors, who will generate more traffic and improve your chance of making a sale.

AI and automation

Machines have been making our lives easier for hundreds of years. Now, thanks to our advancements in computing, they are becoming smarter and smarter. Marketers can use their processing power in order to properly select and sort lists of people in order to create databases that can be used by businesses to increase their lead count and provide more accurate ways of marketing to their audiences.

Video content

Videos are becoming more and more prevalent as a key form of marketing. They are capable of quickly and aesthetically transferring large amounts of information within minutes or even seconds. If a picture is worth more than a thousand words, how much is a moving one worth? Well, according to 83% of businesses, it's enough to give them a good ROI.

When it comes to marketing, it is always important to remain in touch with the latest trends and technologies that are helping us get our messages through to proper audience and keep it interested with what we have to say. It's rarely simple, but without a doubt it pays off - especially since customers are becoming more and more distanced from conventional methods that we've been using for so long already.