We have a couple of weeks before 2018 ends, so now we stop for a moment to look back at one of the most shaky years for digital marketing. A year full of tops and turns on every little piece of this industry.
Focus has changed
From the beginning of the year until now, the focus of many brands has changed.
First, according to a study done by Social Media Today, spending on advertising has changed to leave Facebook and Instagram on the highest spots with 91.69% and 20.39% respectively.
This would leave Snapchat on the last place, after all, we remember how Kylie Jenner marked them for life on Twitter, a strike that the platform has yet to shake off.
Also, we can see that budgeting has changed its focus too, instead of throwing ads after ads at the users, now more money is destined for content creation, a trend that will surely keep its course through 2019
This year has seen great influence from TV practices to social media, giving more importance to context than to impacts.
Machines became our best friends
During the year, we witnessed great growth on the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning, even making them household words.
Marketers have seen great benefits from the compilation of data by IoT (Big Data) and the support of Machine Learning, which even though it’s still young, it is grown rapidly.
Cambridge Analytica and microtargeting
We all heard of it, Cambridge Analytica used a personality app on Facebook to get data from thousands of users, data they later used to create advertising scenarios.
Cambridge Analytica was then instrumental for Donald Trump’s digital campaign and this year the next step of digital marketing was created: microtargeting.
2018 gave way to 1 on 1 user experiences, same that opened the door for new marketing tools like Google’s segmentation API and Instagram’s virtual stores.
Influencers opened up transparency opportunities
Digital marketing on 2018 wouldn’t be complete without mentioning influencers, not by name, since many will be forgotten in time, but by the behavior shown by users and platforms surrounding them.
Thanks to the existence of influencers, which rose to popularity thanks to the great success of YouTube and Instagram this year, we realized of something important: fake profiles.
Fake profiles became a strong subject for platforms, since after paying for a post from someone with 200K followers, you’d then realize they only had 500 real followers.
Platforms then decided to create new rules and tools to fight them.
Instagram, then, created transparency labels for paid content and opened the backstage doors for us to see how many times an account has changed its name, to know if it was stolen.
Likewise, Facebook introduced labels for political content, showing who paid for which post to know its real intent.
2019 is charged with more turns.
Next year is just around the corner and we already have many things to think about. Now the real important influencers have less followers, the users are looking for experiences on site that make them feel satisfied while browsing.
Machines can give us the hard numbers we need, so now we have to think on how to use this data to, as we said before, satisfy the client.
Finally, and even right now, platforms are still changing, Facebook is betting on Watch, Instagram is pushing for IGTV and Google wants us to read more reviews.
So then, what do you think is coming for digital marketing in 2019?
Sources:
www.socialmediatoday.com
www.emarketer.com
www.statista.com
www.marketingweek.com