What’s Next for the Future of Digital Marketing?
Optimizing for voice search & mobile, leveraging artificial (AI) technologies, improving UX experience and content diversification will be key elements for staying competitive in the future digital marketing landscape.
We reached out to 8 digital marketing experts to get their insights on these developing technologies and share predictions on the future of online marketing.
Read on to discover insights from industry leading digital marketing companies like Backlinko, Search Engine Land and many more.
We Asked Experts in the Field to Share Their Thoughts on the Future of Digital Marketing
Brian Dean
Founder & CEO at Backlinko
1. Voice Search
It’s already HUGE. And it’s only going to get bigger.
Already huge: 40% of US adults use voice search once per day.
Going to get bigger: comScore estimates that 50% of ALL searches will be voice searches within the next 2 years.
And I’ve seen this myself. I’ve found myself talking more to my computer and phone than ever before. And as the technology improves, I’m going to type less and talk more.
2. Video
Like voice search, video is “the next big thing” that’s already here. I mean, YouTube is already the 2nd most popular website online (even more than Facebook).
But in many ways, video is just getting started. More and more people are producing videos for Instagram, Facebook and other platforms like LinkedIn. It’s also much easier to create a decent video on the cheap than in the past.
The data backs this up: Cisco reports that 81% of all traffic will be video by 2021.
3. Quality Over Quantity
Blog posts. Images. Podcasts. There’s WAY too much content online.
And people are tuning out: Email open rates are down. Blogs are losing readers. Facebook posts are getting ignored.
In short, people are focusing more on reading, watching and listening to the best stuff.
So marketers that focus on quality over quantity are going to have a big edge over the competition in 2018.
Robert Lee
Senior Vice President at Archer Education
1. Pullback on Persona Based Targeting Opportunities
It’s been a bumpy road for Facebook over the last six months. With the backlash around privacy concerns and the Russian election meddling, the platform has had to take drastic measures to ease the concerns of Facebook users by providing increased insight into how individuals can tighten up their personal information, while also introducing steps to eliminate some of the platform’s most useful targeting options.
Facebook even launched a large scale advertising campaign apologizing for their missteps and promising improvements into the future.
The most interesting aspect of all of this is the ripple affect spread across other digital environments that have mirrored Facebook in regards to their information collection processes.
Most of these platforms followed suit and many users noticed new alerts pop-up within these environments notifying them of new privacy and information collection policies.
While providing this level of insight to consumers is great, advertisers that rely on these platforms to drive targeted traffic will experience challenges. This could be the last nail in the coffin for more traditional job and skill related segmentation, and force Facebook and other platforms to advance their use of seed-list style advertising.
2. New Web Scraping and CAN-SPAM Regulation
While I can’t guarantee that the government is going to get their act together and move on something like this, having your email address and other contact information online has now become a massive nuisance.
The two elements to this equation are first the ability to crawl websites to acquire users information (which are predominantly done by automated crawls based on search parameters) and the outreach to these individuals via large scale outreach campaigns that are disguised as personal messages.
While this tactic can be very effective when it comes to distributing content and building links, many webmasters are starting to get frustrated with the bombardment as the strategy of automated scraping and outreach becomes more routine.
I personally receive at least 10+ cold outreaches a day even though I continue to opt-out of lists, and while I’m guilty of some of these tactics myself, you can tell a tipping-point is near.
3. Automation and AI Shaping Future of Digital Marketing
While the same can be said for most industries, automation and more intelligent human-informed (but machine implemented) decision making will continue to eat into the digital marketing job sector in 2018.
While a lot of the jobs that will get swallowed are more fringe digital marketing, strategies such as chat bots and bid-management will continue to advance and replace some of the less technical human-based skill-sets that currently exist.
Content and more specifically copy creation/writing are other elements that could be replaced by machines as technologies become more advanced at producing comprehensible language.
Barry Schwartz
Executive Editor at Search Engine Roundtable & News Editor at Search Engine Land
@RustyBrick
1.Voice Search
All the data shows that voice search is growing fast now. Between talking to your phone, your Alexa, Google Home, Apple’s Home Pod and even talking to your car over CarPlay or Android Auto – voice search is the future.
Expect voice search to be a huge area in the near future and with that, you need to figure out how to optimize for “position zero” and handle transactional voice search commands. Is it all very new now, so stay on top of it.
2. Mobile Search
Google launched their mobile-first index, which means Google will crawl the web from a mobile phone perspective. Make sure your mobile site is equivalent to your desktop site and that nothing important is missing.
3. Speed
While speed seems to be less and less of a ranking factor today, Google keeps pushing AMP on webmasters. AMP and PWAs might be the future or might not be, it is hard to tell. But everyone wants faster sites, so expect more of an emphasis on this.
Alexis Sanders
Technical SEO Manager at Merkle Inc., Writer for Moz
@AlexisKSanders
1. Mobile Remains Priority
Mobile conversion issues have been at the top of Google’s priorities, heightened by mobile overcoming desktop circa 2014. Google’s highly anticipated mobile-first index is scheduled to launch within 2018.
Accelerated Mobile Pages’ (AMP) have been improving dramatically and I suspect we’ll see more e-commerce case studies emerge in 2018.
Finally, Apple’s Safari will start to feel more pressure to support service workers for Progressive Web Apps (PWA). If Safari beings to support PWAs’ core functionality, it’ll drastically improve their marketability.
2. Web Performance Optimization Becomes Sexy
Websites have been growing in size creating a website obesity crisis (HTTPachive.org shows ~280% growth 2011 v 2017). Sites are going to have determine the right solution mix from their website as multiple remedies emerge (including: HTTP/2, AMP, PWA, CRP, RAILS).
3. We’re Going to Continue Hear About Machine Learning (ML) Victories
Google’s research blog has been publishing a ton about breakthroughs in ML, along with technologies that make ML more accessible to the average human being (think: Kaggle.com, TensorFlow, and Facets visualizations). ML offers the potential to better understand multimedia content better.
We’ll likely see more poignant, targeted KG responses and SERPs in these areas. Also, as the training wheel supports for Google’s algorithm, structured data is an important aspect of developing data classification. In 2017, we saw their structured data documentation morph about every quarter.
Google will likely continue to expand structured data documentation. Bing will face more pressure to support JSON-LD, as websites being leveraging the format.
4. Google’s Going to Face More Media Pressure
Google will be at the center of public debates surrounding fake news, data security (against hacking attacks), privacy concerns, and proprietary information. Following this trend, Google will likely ramp up the importance of HTTPS. About 60% of the top 100 sites are on HTTPS already.
5. Conversational Devices and Voice Search
Voice search technology is becoming closer to conversational (within a word accuracy rate that people are willing to deal with). Once the capabilities reach acceptable levels, we’ll likely see a resurgence of chat bots.
I also anticipate seeing a shift in the marketing mindset surrounding fortified content strategies, striking the balance between making content obtainable for voice search and yet not allowing Google to completely “steal your thunder.”
Daniel Kempe
Co-Founder & CEO at Quuu.co
@DanielKempe
1. Content Diversification
At Quuu, we are excited to see how content marketing is diversifying, extending beyond articles or blog posts to include video, podcasting, infographics and more.
Companies will really need to adapt to this trend to stay in the game. We’ll see larger companies hiring video producers and graphic designers to collaborate with their marketing teams.
But where it gets really exciting is if you work for a startup; let’s say you’re a one or two-person marketing department, then you’re going to have to learn those skills yourselves.
2. Up-Coming Digital Marketing Tools
Luckily, there are tonnes of cool tools out there to help you create different types of content – without having to enroll in film school! Lumen5 was a big hit with content marketers last year (use it to repurpose your blog posts into short videos for social).
In 2018 I’m looking forward to exploring Anchor. Not only does it allow you to quickly and easily record podcasts from your phone, but it’s also a growing social platform in its own right.
What I’m most excited about are our own new tools, the Quuu Scheduler and Content Recycling tools. We are pushing these out shortly and even more exciting for our users, the price will stay the same.
We just want to make our users even more successful on social media by providing a suite of tools to facilitate, alongside our hand-curated content suggestions.
Stephen Panico
Chief Growth Officer at BuzzStream
1. Google Gets Even More Intelligent
Digital marketing, particularly related to link building, is in an interesting place right now. Despite the penalties that sites have encountered by Google in the past, it seems like there is a lot of information going around right now that suggests that technical SEO and on-page optimization coupled with frankly shady tactics like link-buying are beneficial.
The reality is there is probably a grain of truth to that. Right now anyway.
Unfortunately, while there is some evidence that Google is being a little lax right now when it comes to enforcement of penalties, that can (read: eventually will) change at a moments notice.
The really messed up thing is that the opportunistic SEOs that take advantage of this fact won’t be the ones who are hurt, it will be their clients that get slammed with penalties.
So ultimately, teams that target their promotional efforts toward high authority publications with relevant content are going to outperform their peers, now and particularly as Google continues to get more intelligent (and everyone who has ever bet against that happening has lost big time).
2. Rise in Uncovering the True Value of a Link
As far as tools, there are some interesting new thoughts on authority metrics that are getting tossed around right now. Effectively, we’re seeing more tools attempt to diagnose the true value of a link, which is certainly one of the most challenging aspects of link building, particularly when dealing with clients.
For example, Ahrefs Backlink Checker attempts to do this by providing a well-rounded dashboard giving full visibility into various aspects of link value, whereas some new metrics such as Verve’s Linkscore offer a proprietary algorithm based on blended on and off site metrics to deduce value.
Devin Kostrzewski
Founder & CEO at Authority Builders
@Dmak_11
1. Future of Digital Marketing: Back to Basics
I still always come back to the phrase “back to basics.” Despite the ever-changing world of digital marketing, the same basic formula still applies. Create a well-organized website, keep it up to date, and create the best content you can. The results will follow.
There are always new methods, tricks, software and ideologies that build off those principles but without the basic principles, nothing works. Even in my world of off-page SEO and link building, if the domain I am earning links for has improper coding, tags or descriptions then all my effort is for nothing!
If you hire some fancy social media agency who is able to push interaction and traffic to your site but your e-commerce store is not set up properly you likely aren’t going to covert much, adding to your wasted costs/efforts.
2. Digital Marketing Tools Continue to Evolve
As far as tools I need software for tracking SEO metrics and evaluating the quality of links for my clients, I always rely on Moz, Majestic and SEMRush. Ahrefs gets an honorable mention. They are always evolving and provide the best insights for my line of work.
Bryan Traficante
Founder & CEO at TrafMarketing
@BTraficante
1. Social Media Improving the Impact of Smaller Brands
For social media posting and advertising, I see the biggest opportunities for smaller brands to make an impact if they focus on the user’s mindset and intent of the channel. Social media (especially Facebook and Instagram) is a form of escapism and educational discovery, keep that in mind when developing ads and engaging with your community.
2. Emotional Connections for Increased Customer Engagement
Organic posts (things you share on your wall/feed) should 100% be value first. An example of this would be post videos explaining topics you’re an expert in to educate your followers and documenting the ins and outs of your business and things you’re doing.
Organic posting (and comment responding!) is an opportunity to add human and relate-able elements to your company that people can develop an emotional connection to. Many of whom you’ll come to see as regular consumers of your content and even advocates for your company.
This organic connection then also provides your company leverage for selling in the future because that connection you’ve built produces trust and rapport.
3. Social Media: Advertising
For advertising, there are numerous strategies to deploy especially in the Facebook/Instagram/Audience Network space – which is where I see a lot of awareness and consideration marketing funnel growth for companies. I see good strategy trends moving more toward behavioral targeting.
Here’s a simplistic example: Say you’re a brewery and you have a blog post about stouts. You can target all people who have visited that blog post in the last X amount of days and deliver an ad to them on Facebook/Instagram/Audience Network. These people are obviously more aware of your company and have some form of interest in stouts.
Knowing that, you can custom tailor an ad targeting those people, ensure high relevance by recognizing that interest and then more easily suggest a business action. “Love Stouts? Same here! They’re creamy and delicious! We just tapped our new Coffee Nitro Milk Stout! Swing by our brewery and grab a pint!”
Bonus Expert Opinion:
Jimmy Rodriguez
Co-founder & COO at 3dcart
@Jimmy3dcart
1. The Future of Digital Marketing is More Personal
One trend that’s been getting better since the dawn of the internet is personalization. When the web first started, you would see things that were new to you. You had the ability to discover something outside the scope of what you’re looking for, or in most cases, you would see things completely irrelevant to you.
However, as platforms and marketing tools improved, what you saw on the internet became more of what you’ve been looking at or looking for.
The future of digital marketing will be built specifically around your tastes and preferences, down to your name to where the last few places you’ve frequented. Algorithms are only going to get better at predicting your behavior and personality. Advertisers will then be using all the data that is the internet to deliver a message to you that is perfect for you and only you.
If you have any insights on the future of digital marketing, feel free to share them in the comment section below. Also, if you’d like to join this list, email [email protected] with your submission.
