Digital Marketing Strategy 2018: Top 8 Strategies To Elevate Your Business

digital marketing strategy 2018

Today is January 18th, 2018 and by now, you should have a digital marketing strategy for 2018 in place.

If you have not, don’t worry. In this article, you will discover the top digital marketing strategy for 2018.

1. Which Device Is The Most Popular?

The first digital trend is to understand the popular devices which are used by your customers.

For most websites and online stores, the usage of mobile devices had surged over the last three years — and the figures show that there is no stopping anytime soon.

popular devices for 2018

As you can see, the usage of mobile devices had increased dramatically.

Here are two important takeaways:

  • The usage of mobile devices is evergrowing
  • Laptop and desktop usage are dropping gradually

Note: While it is important to focus your marketing on mobile devices, you should still focus some efforts on laptop and desktop as they are still holding a large market share.

2. Social messaging apps will take over communication

According to the latest Ofcom Communications Market Research more than half of the total mobile audience used Facebook Messenger (61%) and half used WhatsApp (50%).

social media messaging

What does this means to you?

People are finding easier means to reach out to one another — and if you want your business to strive in 2018, then make sure you are available on these platforms.

The ultimate goal is simple: It has to be easy for your customers to reach out to you.

If you are not convinced, take a look at Pizza Hut using Messenger to communicate with its customers and IKEA uses social media messaging apps to conduct surveys.

3. Make video marketing your baby in 2018

You shouldn’t be shy in front of the camera, and even if you are.

In 2017, we have seen video marketing went to new heights. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter had given more priority on video when compared to any other media forms.

Thanks to YouTube, video marketing has taken toll not only on YouTube itself, it has moved over to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

See the image below that explains the number of unique audience (in millions) on various platforms.

how important is video marketing in 2018

MUST READ: Instagram For Business (The Secrets Of Marketing On Instagram)

4. Search engine marketing will be more important than ever

With the number of advertisers advertising on a daily basis, stay ahead of the competition will result in more money spend on ads.

search engine marketing

Therefore, a good alternative to paid ads is search engine. Make no mistake — search engine marketing will be more important than ever. Search engine marketing is dominant.

There are two ways you can choose to start doing search engine marketing:

  • Doing it yourself (takes a little bit of time but extremely cost saving)
  • Hiring a search engine agency/consultant to do the job for you

Either way, search engine marketing is definitely one of the most important digital marketing strategies in 2018.

If you are planning to do search engine marketing yourself, you need to have these two tools: SEMrush and KWFinder.

NOTE: SEMrush helps you to monitor the keywords and your competitors and KWFinder allows you to find the most profitable keywords to rank on Google search.

5. Content marketing will be one of the most talked digital marketing strategy (after SEO)

We all know the importance of having good content and in 2018, good content marketing strategy is going to skyrocket your business to new heights.

For me, content marketing is always considered as the ‘engagement’ fuel that powers all digital communications from search to social to email marketing to creating website experiences which convert.

content marketing strategy 2018

Content marketing is definitely the top digital marketing strategy for 2018 because you need to have content in any forms of marketing.

Important discovery: The trend I’m seeing here is that businesses are getting serious about treating content as a strategic resource, that means developing a customer engagement strategy using different media as shown in the lifecycle diagrams above, and at a practical level, developing content for different audiences using techniques like Personas and Content mapping.

6. Bots will be apart of digital marketing

Article intelligence or bots will make a huge change in digital marketing strategy 2018. Take a look at Facebook bots. They have flooded the market and influencers (and business owners) are going crazy over them!

bots

As technology advances, we longer need to wake up in the middle of the night to answer questions on social media — our bot (when setup correctly) will do it for us efficiently.

7. Analytics and reports are not going anywhere

When it comes to digital marketing strategy, analytical skills and having the right reports are going to make differences in your business.

Through my consultancy business, I’ve seen business owners being more focused on reports they receive and they are getting even more demanding on those.

analyzing digital marketing strategy 2018

I totally understand this — we should take our business seriously and the best way is to achieve greatness is through proper information. In this case, reporting and analytics will play huge roles in digital marketing 2018.

What steps should you be taking?

  • Request for better and more detailed reports
  • Do weekly analytics instead of monthly
  • Compare analytical reports (week over week, month or month) to find for trends
  • check-circleAim to spot small changes that leads to huge jump in revenue, sales etc.

8. Digital marketing automation will be mission-critical

If you are not using automation for digital marketing, you need to start doing right now!

automation process

With automation, you can save more time on digital marketing and focus on things that matter most to your business.

Digital marketing automation allows busy influencers and business owners to run tasks without any worries of mistakes or totally forgetting the tasks.

What are the examples of digital marketing automation?

  • Automatic publishing to social media (for new blog posts)
  • Automatic and recurring automation on social media posting (try this tool)
  • Automation through triggers (imagine IFTTT)
  • arrow-circle-rightSet and forget welcome email (ConvertKit offers one of the easiest welcome email setup)
  • arrow-circle-rightAutomatic email delivery to subscribers when they abandon card (see Drip in action)

You might be interested with this: MailChimp vs ConvertKit vs Drip – Comparing The Best Email Marketing Automation Software

Digital Marketing Strategies for 2018

Are you ready to make 2018 a great year? I hope you find the top 8 digital marketing strategies for 2018 useful.

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