Keys to Succeed in Your Digital Marketing Strategy in 2018

Although it’s something that we have been seeing for the last years, in 2018 there will be even more focus on personalization. “Users no longer want impersonal brands that speak to everyone equally and make the user feel like one of the masses. The digital environment has allowed brands to communicate with their audience in a more personalized way”, explains Patricia Peñalver, Project Manager at We Are Marketing.

Innovative design and content

Content marketing will focus its strategies this year on offering customised and value-added content for the user, in order to capture their interest and make your messages stand out amongst the mass media.

Just as you have to make your content interesting for users, how you present your content is also important. Here we have the infinite possibilities of design. “It’s increasingly necessary to customise forms, messages, images... so that we can transmit our message more effectively. Nowadays there are many tools that allow us these personalizations, but to be able to do it in a more impactful way we need to work with a multicultural and multidisciplinary team, with the aim of gathering different points of view that contribute significant ideas in each project”, explains Ricardo Vilardi, Creative Manager at We Are Marketing.

After the evolution of Sketch or InVision tools and plugins, 2018 is the year where designers will begin to rethink their strategy in a broader way, taking into account the innumerable points of contact that a brand can have.

One of the trends this year is the involvement of the design in the different stages of each process, whether it’s a buyer journey, a campaign, a website or a product. This is where interactive content comes into play: SMART content, surveys and games are an important bet for this year. “Static websites are no longer so attractive and adding sections with some type of interaction with the user is a formula that is gaining ground”, says Ricardo Vilardi.
 

SEO

The time and effort made by your company to create personalised and value-added content with an innovative and impactful design is useless if you do not position your messages on the Internet correctly. Users need to find you so that they can learn how your products and services offer greater value than the competition.

A good SEO strategy is essential to stand out and position yourself among the millions of searches and results that Google moves daily. “This year, voice searches are experiencing exponential growth, due, in large part, to the growing number of mobile terminals”, explains Antoni Saurina, SEO/SEM Manager at We Are Marketing.
 

In addition, it is necessary to 'get under the skin' of the user and think about how they will carry out their searches. “This is what is called machine learning applied to SEO. Google uses it to know the user's intention to search”, says Saurina.

Keeping up with the updates that Google makes in its algorithm is key to strengthening your SEO strategy. One of the trends in this area are featured snippets, also called quick responses. These are fragments with prominent information that appear on the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). “There is a growing competition for brands to appear in the search engines’ zero position and requires very specific pre-optimization work. Appearing as a prominent fragment or as an answer to a question has opened the doors to an almost unknown type of SEO. It is above what it means to be the first in the results of the SERP”, says Antoni Saurina.
 

Given this new scenario, one of the keys to positioning yourself successfully and standing out from the competition is a 100% mobile website that gives a good user experience, provides concise, quality answers to user questions, improve the loading speed, and generates quality visual content. Since Google bought YouTube, videos provide more and more relevance in search results and improve the reputation of your brand.

Social media

Another key to succeeding in your digital marketing strategy this year is knowing how to get the most out of social media to boost your brand and increase sales. The so-called i-commerce (instant commerce) - using social networks as a direct sales channel - is a key trend for 2018. “Consumer behavior changes constantly, and if social media were already important for brands, now they will be even more so with the possibility they give users to make a purchase directly through these channels”, says Patricia Peñalver.

Social media is also fundamental to improve your engagement with users. “From the Marketing departments we must focus on strategies that allow us to create lasting relationships with our buyer person. We will focus more on discovering and analysing behaviors and taking actions that allow us to know more about them. Measuring engagement, therefore, must be an obsession”, says Peñalver.
 

Data

The potential of social networks is infinite, but you have to measure each strategy well. Companies know how their communities grow in social networks, or what content is more interesting to users, but now the challenge is to measure customer emotions and study the content of these interactions. For example, we must know how to analyze satirical, ironic, positive and negative comments. Thankfully there are already tools in the market that allow us to monitor all this automatically.

In line with this, this year will also be important for predictive analysis tools: “These tools, based on Artificial Intelligence, allow us to perform real-time analysis and make marketing decisions based on facts contrasted by these predictive patterns, and not assumptions”, affirms Patricia Peñalver.

Finally, remember that the customer journey has become more omnichannel than ever. Most consumers continue to combine online shopping with visits to the brand’s physical store. As a result, companies must create strategies that combine different channels so that the brand is present at all times in the life of the buyer. “Analysing these channels as a whole is crucial for the marketing strategy to be successful”, concludes Patricia Peñalver.

 

In this post we only discussed a few of the trends in digital marketing for this year. If you want to learn about all of them, do not hesitate to attend The Inbounder Global Conference 2018, the most popular digital marketing event in Europe, taking place on April 25 and 26 at the Municipal Conference Center of Madrid.

The conference will have the best marketing experts in fundamental areas of the industry, such as SEO, social media, content marketing, and CRO. Keynotes speakers include Rand Fiskin, Aleyda Solis, Mike King, Talia Wolf, Purna Virji and Melanie Deziel, among many others, who will provide you with the latest in digital marketing and give you tips on how to grow your business.