Live and ephemeral video, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Influence Marketing and Micro-Influencers, Marketing Automation and Community Management, Artificial Intelligence and Chabot’s are the 5 trends identified.
Trends in Digital Marketing and Social Media
Live and ephemeral video
The choice of formats will be essential and the video must. By relying on live and ephemeral video with Stories, brands will boost their social media communication. Animated content such as gifs, or very lively content, combining photos and videos, such as Cinemographs, will also be highly appreciated by social partners. More generally, all visual content will occupy an important place on social networks, video being the flagship format this year. Brands will have to ask the right questions about the creation of their different content and their use on social networks. To stand out and catch the attention of users, especially with Stories on Instagram, it will be innovative. The challenge will be to imagine ever more creative content by focusing on three essential values: proximity, spontaneity and authenticity. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Brands will still use Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), we will talk more and more about Mixed Reality. A world recreated numerically from 3D or real elements that will become an essential marketing channel in many areas. The global VR + AR market will be growing and the big brands will still experiment with these technologies to improve the customer experience. The latter already favor self-service to interact with brands by visiting digital or social platforms. Brands will always use social networks like Facebook to offer VR experiences and social apps like Snapchat to launch their own AR filters. They will seek to create new experiences as part of their communication campaign. The challenge will be to live experiences without common measure, mixing several technologies.
Influence marketing and micro-influencers
Influence marketing will continue to grow and become a credible alternative to traditional digital levers. Professionals, responsible for brand communication, are already considering increasing the budget of their campaigns alongside influencers on social networks. Consumers will increasingly follow influencers on social media and give more and more credit to their posts, Facebook post, Instagram, tweet or blog post, for example before making their purchases. The prescribing power of influencers will be even greater and the impact on consumers will become indisputable. The challenge for brands will be to succeed in building long-term relationships with good influencers, by favoring micro-influencers, with more advantageous characteristics, i.e. experts in a particular field or very active members. of a community.
Marketing automation and community management
Marketing automation will also be needed to communicate more effectively, by diversifying messages, targets and speaking places. Automation can be done at many levels, including all marketing techniques such as emailing and of course social networks, with the scheduling of posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Brands will have an interest in taking into account consumer habits of using a large number of social networks, and moving more and more to mobile applications. They should not simply duplicate their messages, especially not, they will aim to adapt their speech to the specificities of each platform. The challenge will be to integrate the automation of Community Management into the Social Media strategy, to optimize its presence and be more efficient.
Artificial intelligence and chatbots
In 2018, Artificial Intelligence will explode and chatbots will continue to grow, whether on Facebook Messenger or other messaging platforms. They will grow in quantity, let us be sure and, hopefully, also in quality. These will help optimize the customer relationship and allow users to interact effectively with a brand if they offer a non-deceptive experience. To do so, it will be crucial to think and ask the right questions before launching your conversational tool. Brands will be able to launch powerful chatbots without Artificial Intelligence, offering a convincing experience. In addition, it will be necessary to combine them with private couriers powered by humans to continue to converse, better understand the demands of Internet users and respond intelligently. The challenge will be to facilitate the connection with the brands and to personalize the relationship as much as possible.