2018 for brand and marketing predictions

2018 for brand and marketing

As my agency starts out 2018, I thought it would be great to make a few predictions for our sector in the year ahead, as we continue to adapt in this ever changing, exciting landscape!

The year of clarity

As we continue to see more traffic gravitating towards our social media streams, brands now more than ever need to grab attention quickly and lock it in! The best way to do that? Clear communication!

Brands are continuing to understand that most of us don’t buy the best product out there, but the one that we understand the quickest. Do you ever make that squinty confused face when you’re trying to figure out what a product does? Chances are they’ve already lost you by that point! Confuse and you lose!

Typical squinty confused face :)

Continued shifts to ‘nontraditional marketing’

Consumer attention is continuing to shift, with social media platforms such as Facebook seeing phenomenal growth with over 2 million registered advertisers and 500 million daily active users. Google continues to see growth processing an average of 3.5 billion searches a day. With this in mind, we’ll see an increase amount of companies choosing to allocate marketing budgets to non-traditional forms of marketing such as social media, paid search away from the traditional forms such as TV, Radio etc.

Although this will be a move many of the bigger brands start to make, I believe we’ll see the greatest impact in the small-medium sized business sector. These companies with comparably smaller budgets to the multi-nationals, will be looking to utilise localised/interest based targeting across platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram rather than stretching the budget for a TV advert or local radio station.

The year of voice

We’ll start to see more brands experiment with voice based apps and ensure certain products are optimised for voice purchase on platforms such as Alexa and Google home as consumers increasingly invest in this tech.

Over the next few years expect to see companies competing for the first 4 minutes of your day, scrambling to grab your attention first thing in the morning. What do you think you’ll be asking your device?

‘Alexa, what’s the BBC saying this morning’
‘Google, is it going to rain today?’
‘ Siri, buy my morning train ticket from train line’

The first 4 minutes of every day, that’s 28 minutes per week, 121 minutes a month, 1456 minutes a year! Now that’s brand loyalty for you and that’s why they’ll be competing for it!

Consumers will have had enough of being stereotyped as: Baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Millenials…

This isn’t based on anything factual, but I bet you agree with me right? ;)