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The top digital marketing trends for 2018?

Author's avatar By Dave Chaffey 05 Mar, 2018
Essential Essential topic

Chart of the Day: Which online marketing techniques are marketers most excited by this year?

In my article covering digital marketing trends for 2018 we asked readers of our blog to give their views on the digital marketing techniques which they felt would give them the biggest uplift in incremental revenue in 2018. So, I was interested to see this new Econsultancy-Adobe research which asks a similar question. These are the research results:

The common features of the responses to the two questions are the value of data-driven marketing. This also featured second in our poll. Content marketing is a popular technique in both, but this was a clear winner in our survey rather than customer experience in this research. This could be explained by a difference in respondents with more marketing communications focused respondents in the case of Smart Insights and more CX focused respondents in the case of Econsultancy and Adobe. We covered CX specifically by asking about conversion rate optimization. It was rated sixth with 5% selecting it, but the customer experience is much broader, so you can see why this would rate more highly.

Other responses are at a similar level, with techniques like IoT, augmented reality and connected devices all rating low compared to the fundamentals of content, CX and applying analytics. We did find in our survey there was more interest in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning which was rated third.

Research source

Author's avatar

By Dave Chaffey

Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.

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