Marketing is the soul of every business. Even the best of companies that offer highest quality products, require marketing campaigns that help make their products become more popular. The trend of marketing as well as selling products for almost all types of businesses has evolved greatly. The new trend requires selling and marketing strategies that boost the products or services over the internet as well. This is largely due to the hyper boost in mobile platforms usage and searches on digital media including mobile devices or traditional laptops or desktops as well.

In today’s digital world, many businesses are operating only on the internet side of things, but for businesses that sell their products or services through traditional ways of selling also require marketing on the internet to compete with the competition as this has now become a need rather than an add-on. There are plenty of ways of doing online marketing, however Search Engine Optimization (SEO) presents a unique cost effective solution for all types of businesses. A quality SEO Company should be able to not only optimize the business website for search engines but also guide the business towards effective marketing strategies in the coming year because they are well-known to stay up-to-date with all the current trends in the industry. The present and the coming year are set out to be the most competitive yet and here are a few outstanding marketing trends that will rock in 2018:

1: Live Streaming

Predictably, video continues to dominate social media at all platforms. This shift in the paradigm will continue to favor video in the coming year as well. For 2017 so far, video streaming totaled to about 75% of all internet traffic and no apparent slowdowns are expected soon as well. According to authentic studies, people tend to watch live streams up to three times longer than prerecorded video content. Live videos on popular platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter or Instagram when done in high quality and with special interactive features have the ability to engage people all that more into marketing campaigns. This is predicted to be one of the most effective marketing trends that will rock in 2018:

2: Mobile Video

Experts predict that mobile vide ad budget will rise 49% in 2018 to about $18 billion where non-mobile video ad budget will fall 1.5% to about 15 billion. Searches on mobile devices has already overtaken searches on desktops and video consumption on mobile devices is expected to overtake that on laptops or PCs for the first time as well during the next year. Predictions have it growing a staggering 25% with the average person watching 36 minutes of online video per day on their mobile devices whereas it’s expected to drop down to only about 19 minutes on traditional computers. The indications are all there in favor of mobile vide and the potential for marketing strategies based on that.

3: Growth Hacking

Also formally known as growth driven tactics, these include marketing strategies especially aimed to boost growth in revenue for a business on all platforms. Still to this day, SEO is one of the better growth hacking strategies as it targets people or businesses looking for similar products and tends to propose good solutions for searching people. A good SEO agent will guide businesses towards optimizing for additional search options and strategy adjustment in order to meet the looking audience right where they are looking at. Pulling business leads through outstanding content and exciting features like giveaways or challenges can surely convert a high number of these leads to potential business opportunities. For 2018, SEO along with other growth hacking tactics, will continue to peruse many business leads and turn them into direct business opportunities as well. When comparing these with other marketing strategies, growth hacking strategies surely offer marketing trends that will rock in 2018.

4: Explainer Videos

Explainer videos only showed up recently and have progressed rather quickly to become one of the hot trends of the present and the next year as well. These are short videos explaining the products or services that specific businesses offer and also help in bringing in new business to the website and ultimately the business as well. These indeed pack a punch when it comes to familiarizing the public with what the business offers and boost sales in the process as well. People are 4 times more likely to see the explainer videos first on websites for businesses with them on the homepages and then go into further details of the written text or any other forms of communications. Healthcare or construction industries are the best examples of types of businesses taking explainer videos head on. High quality animated videos work perfectly to communicate complex ideas and explain the purpose of various procedures including products or services in advance or people doing anything else while they are on the website.

5: Chat Bots

Automated chat bots will continue to rise even further as valuable communication assets for numerous businesses and their websites and will also help improve customer support immensely. All that works in favor of the marketing strategies. Predictions show that a whole of 85% first interactions between possible customers and the business will be done through chat bots in 2020. Chat bots are predefined workflow algorithms that work through artificial intelligence (AI) and aim to answer potential client or actual customer’s questions without there being a need of them interacting with a live human being. These facilitate faster and more consistent conversations between the business and the potential or actual clients and aim to solve problems quickly and efficiently.

6: Viral Content

Different people from different walks of life have different reactions to the word viral, a regular person who surfs the internet quite a bit understands this to be a video of a cute pet cuddling a cute baby, a doctor will think of it as probably a disease, a software programmer always dreads viral attacks from hackers, however a marketer dreams about his/her content going viral in a different way so that it becomes an internet sensation with hopes of pulling much more business and revenue in the process as well. However, this is easier said than done. Creating viral marketing content demands much research and delegation and then interpretation of that research into actionable ideas on which the content can be based on. The content also needs to be authentic, original, funny, witty and reliable if it is to engage massive number of audiences and appeal to them so that they share it on their own social media platforms.