What comes next in digital marketing?

Executing those retargeting campaigns feels like your company is up to date in digital marketing? At a glance, yes. But the race for attention continues and it is hardening. See what is next.

We are living in the attention economy and no one can’t reverse this. It is getting harder from day to day to get awareness and get known or noticed by customers. Even if you are in B2B or B2C, or B2B2C, it is not easy. But marketers are trying to ride the newest innovations, technology advancements and marketing approaches to defeat the competition. Here is an incomplete list to lead the change in 2018.

Every marketer knows their job starts with data. Good, fresh, accurate, actionable data. And this is intensifying. Advanced digital marketing offers data consolidation. To blow up the silos. The unification of every kind of data to get a 360 degrees view of a customer. Creating the connection between online and offline data to gain efficiency in campaigns and in loyalty programs. How this will be achieved? With Data Management Platforms. DMP-s are the next level of digital advertising spending. To break the duopoly of Facebook and Google and make omni-channel advertising consistent.

Regarding current marketing approaches outbound (marketing automation, account-based marketing and social selling) and inbound (content, but not just content marketing) tactics are on the block, and of course many others. What we see is that B2B marketing strategies are infiltrating B2C areas these years. Automating marketing processes like lead generation, scoring and nurturing are not exclusive to B2B anymore. Technology made it available on a large scale for companies with millions of customers.

What became very clear is that the ability to execute omni-channel marketing communication is a must for advanced marketing. Managing the full customer lifecycle from awareness to retention is inevitable. With cross-channel customer journeys considering all the possible customer touchpoints and with intelligent (for example artificial intelligence based) decisions the field of marketing automation is booming.

In B2C marketing automation a major goal is to personalize all the communications on a large scale to achieve the sense of 1:1 relation. Personalize not just the content, but the timing, the channels and the whole way a company interacts with its clients. And it is already possible. Large scale consumer profiling, artificial intelligence and recommendation engines are here to enable this. And not just for Amazon. It is easier than ever to run programmatic ads, retargeting and lookalike campaigns with dynamic content. Now it is possible for every marketer to deliver fully personalized digital experience to its customers on every channel with personal offers.

“Large scale consumer profiling, artificial intelligence and recommendation engines are here to enable this.”

The analytical side of digital marketing is still on the rise. B2B and B2C marketing analytics are reaching true accountability with valid KPIs, not just measuring traffic and impressions. The consolidation of marketing data (website, ad spend, tracking, events, etc.) and sales data (e-commerce, POS and all revenue sources) makes it possible to generate real ad to revenue reporting. It is possible to show the influencing capabilities of all the marketing activities.

And one more thought.

The good old email marketing is happier and more alive than ever. Although responsive design is still a challenge for many players, emailing is arriving to a new stage. With the proliferation of interactive eDMs starting out with Apple OS inbox, the engagement opportunities are drastically grown for emails. We expect to see minimized web shops coming directly to the inbox.