Change is coming – The 4 big digital marketing trends you need to know about now

The next 12 months will see enormous change on social platforms which are increasingly allowing users to personalise their feeds and actively tune out subjects they don’t align with – Katrina Bell presents the 4 big trends that will mature in the next year. 

1 - Feedless content 
The old distribution model on social apps is declining thanks to users increasingly using in-app search. The result for brands is that your content needs to make sense to anyone, even those who don’t know you or your products. Standalone content is not as simple as just name-dropping, but that’s the first step to beat the algorithms. Write for non-followers in other words. 

With Google in a state of disrepair, marketers are also treating the social apps as de facto search engines – your measure of success should be discoverability as well as engagement. 

Going viral is not your goal -– think of it as fast food that leaves you hungry afterwards. What you want is satisfying on-brand experiences that answer questions for followers and visitors alike. Have you ever considered creating serialised posts that invite viewers to come back for the next episode, for instance, with a design process your products or services are undertaking? 

2 - Orphan ideas are on the outs 
What a lot of us tend to do is come up with an idea, execute then move on to another concept. The apps have an aversion to this orphan approach as they know better than anyone that users may land on a post or video of yours from several routes and each post probab ly appeals to a different audience. It also doesn't show the apps that you offer long-terms value. 

Which is why the smarter marketers are already grasping something called content clustering. One topic, multiple similar posts coming at the topic from different angles. Cognitive computing trains the algorithms to better understand who you are and gets better at matching your content with more of the right viewers. That doesn't mean all the content has to be the same format or style, just the same subject. 

3 - Trust me, I’m a brand 
With the weariness and wariness surrounding AI, creating brand messages that are demonstrably from and by humans will have major success compared to generic, potentially synthetic information. Trust has always been a competitive advantage, but how you demonstrate it will increasingly be via you, your employees, experts and, yes, content creators and influencers. 

The same goes for verifiable user generated content, which includes reviews, comments and vlogs. The key thing is to communicate in an imperfect but honest way – that could include day in the life, behind the scenes footage filmed on a phone, employees doing YouTube ‘explainers’ or genuine customer posts that show how their purchase sits in their home. 

4 - Stay and shop 
The apps are racing to keep users on the platform by creating a complete sales ecosystem, such as Facebook’s Lead Forms, which allow advertisers to collect data about visitors without them ever having to leave the space. 

Social shopping/dancing about site TikTok allows users to scroll, click, buy, pay, get confirmation and organise delivery without ever once involving a separate app. It’s seamless and in terms of lead capture and conversion, the goal isn’t necessarily driving them to your website.