As the year comes to a close, and people’s thoughts start thinking about surviving December, marketers look at building new plans for next year.  What new and innovative things will they be able to leverage to generate more leads, and get more clicks?  How do they not get left behind in the race for the top of the Google search, and how do they increase their brand awareness with Millennials?

Marketing has always been an evolution in tactics and mediums, but with all of our current technological advances, this evolution has never been more exciting.  The thing that marketers want to look at are the top trends that they might capitalize on for success in 2018.  Here are my top picks for digital marketing trends to watch in 2018.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)- The need to optimize web content on all levels is critical for success in 2018.  Companies that understand how to optimize their content so that they index well in Google searches spend less in Pay Per Click (PPC) and Google AdWords.  People often ask me if SEO optimization works and I tell them – YES! We tried an experiment for the last six months with Q Academy and Q College.  We spent no money on PPC or Google AdWords, but we spent time optimizing every page and blog post that we produced.  We did nothing but PPC for Q College and what we found was that we got three times as many leads per week from Q Academy than we did from the College.  What we found was that our courses were indexing higher than our competitors who were paying for top spots.  They were dolling out cash, and we were achieving the top ranking organically.  Google loves organic rankings, and we take great pride in seeing the fruits of our labour. You will not go wrong investing in SEO in 2018. As more and more companies are on the web, you need to make sure that yours stands above the crowd.
   

2. Content Marketing- If your website has a blog that is continually populated with good content and SEO, your page ranking will soar!  Content has been king for a few years now, and Google is continually refining its algorithms to search for unique content.  It is not enough anymore to simply have a website.  Customers want more.  They want to get to know the faces of the business.  They want to identify with it and see the human side of the business.  They want interaction, and reviews, and blog posts.  Essentially, they want interactivity.  Content Marketing provides that for end-users as part of the user experience.   Investing in a 500 word, well SEO’d, an article about a topic relevant to your business will do more for you than spending the same amount of money in AdWords.
   

3. Data Analysis- Call it “Big Data” if you want, data is data.  It does one thing- it tells you what you are doing right or wrong.  One of my marketing mentors always used to tell me that if you ”Could not measure it, why are you doing it.”  In 2018 marketers need to be able to justify every dollar that they spend, and to do that they need data.  Who visited the site, when, what time, and what did they look at?  All great questions that will tell marketers not only what message to send, but when to send it.
   

4. Leverage data and personalize your message- Making messages personalized provides an audience with the presumption of “human” contact.  By personalizing messages, readers are naturally drawn to read at least the first sentence before deleting them mainly because they see their name.  It is a simple, yet effective, technique to draw someone’s attention to an email message as the brain registers reading your name and says “Hey read this, it is about you.” The key to success with this style of marketing is to combine large amounts of data that you get from data collection tools and pair that with extremely creative content. All of this provides marketers with the ability to create personas of their customers and extremely targeted campaigns with a higher success rate that run-of-the-mill shotgun campaigns.
   

5. [an error occurred while processing this directive]Get Visual! – A recent study indicates that more than half of Generation Z (born 1995-2009) can’t live without YouTube and Instagram.  Content marketing trends for 2018 will be targeting younger consumers as they are now the influencers in buying decisions.  Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook Live are quickly replacing more traditional methods of marketing.  Why? Mainly because they are easily searchable, and end-users do not have to read-they can watch. The video is one of the up and coming means of content marketing.  We have found that we have more and more calls about how to produce effective internet videos, and edit them.  It is a marketing trend that is not going away anytime soon.  While an article is great for SEO, and a picture is worth 1000 words, video content on your website is worth its weight in gold.
   

Well, there they are. My top picks for digital marketing trends to watch in 2018.  The stage is set for 2018 to be an amazing year! I am always excited about what I can do in the form of organic marketing that exceeds paid marketing.  I have had bad experiences with agencies who over promise with paid marketing and under deliver.  I would rather teach marketers how to leverage organic marketing to save money while still proving a return on investment for the time invested.

Best of luck in 2018, and I look forward to another year with Automatedbuildings.com

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