The latest research in trends and innovations to shape your digital marketing plans for 2018

The Smart Insights’ team follow the latest trends closely to help show the opportunities from innovating your marketing techniques. This is our round-up of our most popular articles on marketing trends. Our most popular article is Dave Chaffey’s 10 digital marketing trends to act on for 2018 and we also recommend our free member guide on Digital Marketing Megatrends.

Digital marketing in 2018

 

What are the most popular digital marketing techniques?

If you look at the 14 themes in Dave’s article that we covered last year, none of these top-level marketing techniques are especially new, so it’s difficult to describe them as new trends or innovations. However, techniques like Big Data and analytics, Content Marketing and Email/Marketing Automation have continued to grow in importance and will be used by many businesses. We have also added machine learning marketing as a new trend.

In Dave’s look at the trends this year, he’ll be looking at integration as the theme. In our research on managing digital marketing (another free download), you can see that only 6% of companies thought their integration process was completely optimised, yet many are actively working on integration.

Our visuals have been created to help you plan, manage and optimize your digital marketing strategy across the customer lifecycle using a range of tools:

Digital-Marketing-Tools-CMYK

Digital marketing trends 2018 include:

  • Digital transformation
  • The growth in mobile and smartphone usage
  • Integrating marketing activities into the customer lifecycle
  • The importance of personalization
  • Machine learning and marketing automation
  • Integrating social messaging apps
  • Customer engagement strategy
  • Integrating different sources of data
  • SEO and content marketing integration
  • The future of AR in marketing
  • Pansexual marketing
  • Micro-moments