Marketing trends come and go and are continuously evolving. Making a big announcement or coming up with attention-grabbing content isn’t enough anymore. In this environment, brands would be prudent to take advantage of cutting-edge marketing trends that claim to provide them an advantage over the competition in order to reach consumers. In this Ad Brief, we hear from eight industry experts on what major development they believe will affect marketing the most over the next two years.
Laura D’Onofrio from Sermo has noticed hyper-niche targeting as opposed to more generalized audience targeting tactics. “So with that smaller audience, it’s important to understand what they want,” explains D’Onofrio, “So that we’re building resident messages to this group.” The next two years will involve quantitative and qualitative research to back your marketing messages. This can be done through surveys, analyzing data, and building programs and personalized campaigns to better understand your niche.
Supporting this belief is David Wilson from Zozimus. He has seen the importance of data collection grow significantly over the last ten years. He sees analytics and statistics as something that has grown and will continue to grow in importance in the future.
Meanwhile, Matthew Coffey from Cloud Campaign emphasizes the power of organic social across marketing channels. This will be even more important in the next two years with the changes to tracking, GDPR regulations, and Apple and Facebook’s privacy updates.” We are only seeing the beginning of this trend that will grow as more platforms come out under these new regulations.
Rob Howe from Simply Automate draws attention to a specific yet influential part of marketing strategies moving forward: Robotic Process Automation (or RPA). Not strictly just RPA, but anything focused around intelligent automation will be important to stay competitive in the marketplace. “Right now, it’s impacting more businesses across more industries than any other software in the entire technology industry,” states Howe, “The interesting thing about it is less than 2% of small and medium-sized business owners even know this thing exists.” If you wish to succeed in the coming years, get ahead on the RPA trend now instead of following the crowd later.
Perhaps taking an opposing approach, Richard Bukowski from Digital Wheel of Fortune believes in the power of Digital Out-of-Home (or DOOH) marketing. He sees opportunities with existing technology to allow interactions with signs, billboards, and the rest of the world outside of the screen, so long as health and safety allows for us to do so.
Moving back to the digital realm, Christian Knightly from Treefrog Cinegraphix has been looking into the rise of artificial intelligence creative uses. Whether copywriting, imagery, or video, AI has the capabilities to handle these tasks at increasingly-complex levels. In the future, AI may be able to generate content directly based on a specific user’s profile. It may even be able to use the images you’ve uploaded to social media and use them to create ads for you featuring you in them. While the ethics of such a decision are up to your company to decide, the technology isn’t far off from this being a real possibility.
Continuing off of AI, Audra Carpenter from ZEN, Inc. acknowledges that AI will be an incredibly useful tool for either copywriting, creative, or managing campaigns on the backend. “As business evolves online,” explains Carpenter, “We need to get better and better at presenting our product and giving consistent results or a consistent presence to our audience.” Omnichannel marketing and AI together will help create a better unified brand and product delivery in the next two years.
Alice Fairfax from Alice Fairfax Creative brings the future back to the people who are making it. As video begins to feel more and more corporate, audiences are responding more to content that feels personal and real. Your messages should try to be genuinely about sharing the message to the audience and leaving more manipulative practices behind. As the technology can become more and more overwhelming, the future relies in sharing your story authentically.
