Digital marketing trends that will die in 2018

The fast pace at which technology progresses means that the digital world can be a fickle place, with trends quickly being replaced by new innovations. Luckily, the pace of digital marketing has slowed down to a certain degree, but, as you can expect, there will still be some changes in 2018.

Looking to the year ahead, these are the digital marketing trends that Business2Community predicts will fade into the background:

e-Books

Social media has led to an age of instant gratification and this means brands need to look at other ways of building expertise and authority.

Going are the days that they are expected to produce long ‘expert’ e-Books and white papers, as consumers often now don’t have the attention span to read such long forms of content.

While these might not die out completely, the online world has provided marketers with new tools and platforms to develop and share information in shorter and more engaging ways. Did someone say video?

Facebook’s organic reach

It’s no secret that Facebook’s organic reach has been declining in recent years. In fact, the Guardian reported that it has reduced from 100% in 2012 to an average of 1-6%. 2018 may, therefore, mark the beginning of the end for the social media platform’s organic reach for good.

Site text optimisation

Written content is no longer the only type of content being shared by brands. If you’re only optimising the text on your website, you’ll not only kill your SEO rankings, you could soon become irrelevant. This year, you need to extend these practices to videos and imagery, too.

With video and graphic content, and the emergence of voice and camera search, there’s a whole new world of search opening up. You’ll end up falling behind your competitors if you stick to a text-based SEO strategy in 2018. It’s time to start priming your audio, video and visual content to help people find all types of content quicker.

Relying on marketing automation

While marketing automation technology has freed up marketers’ time, when used too much, it can make brands feel cold and inhuman. If you simply rely on convenience this year instead of delivering a personal touch, you’ll lose out.

The turbulent political times we’re living in have resulted in consumers striving for a more human touch, Campaign recently revealed.

To make waves in 2018, reduce your reliance on marketing automation and start to embrace a more customised approach.

Generic blog posts

We’re not saying that content is no longer king, it clearly still is, but in the saturated world of digital content marketing, there’s no longer a place for posting hundreds of generic blogs.

Consumers are clocking on to clickbait articles that are there purely to get traffic, and they’re now demanding hyper-specific blog posts. This means that you need to be producing quality content that addresses their pain points to ensure they stick around to read and engage with it.

You can now prove your expertise by posting fewer but higher quality blog posts, as it will show you only want to write and share informative content, and aren’t happy just churning out articles for the sake of it.

If you’re faced with a marketing challenge as you begin the new year, speak to Fireworx today to start off on the right foot.