Don’t get me wrong such elements are important but they are not going to build your emotional bond or a meaningful relationship with the customers. Numerous market studies have shown that customers choose brands that denote trust, quality and performance.

Branding expert Melanie Spring in an interview with Entrepreneur says the concept of branding has changed over the last two decades.

She informs, “It used to be more identity focused. It was about building a logo and all the pieces around it. It didn’t really talk about values or how the company worked. Now we talk about branding in terms of how it makes you feel. It isn’t always something tangible.”

It doesn’t matter whether you are a startup, an established business or a non-profit how your brand is perceived will affect the success of your business.

But like advertising, publishing and marketing, branding is also evolving at a rattling speed and it is extremely hard to catch up. What was a valid branding technique last year may not make an impact this year. You have to grow with the changing trends to keep your brand relevant.

Here are the branding trends that need to implement in your marketing strategy.

Experiential Branding

Not a new concept, experiential branding has been a very powerful tool in the marketing arsenal of global brands for many years.

When customers experience or observe your brand then it provides you with the opportunity to involve with them. The whole concept of this branding form is to move beyond the convention customer engagement and add a touch-and-feel experience option for the customers.

The result-driven storytelling has worked wonders for global brands and it is a trend that you need to implement.

If you wondering how experiential branding works, then here are some cool examples.

Illustrations

Let’s face it, your customers are already struggling with the information overload, interestingly most of it just cursory without offering any value. Your brand voice has to cut through all that noise and give a relief to already inundated customers. One way to build a trusting relationship with the customers is to offer useful content.

But you cannot expect your quality content to stand out if there is no nuanced advantage to it. This is why custom branded illustrations are such a huge game-changer. Such content shows customers that you are committed and gives you a competitive edge.

According to Canadian e-commerce powerhouse Shopify-

“Illustration is a communication tool with three superpowers. It can add clarity to a complex idea. It can link concepts to the words we’ve assigned them within our respective products (aka on-boarding). And, it can capture the values and traits of a brand in a single voice, shift the tone depending on the situation, and speak directly to the user.”

If you use custom illustrations, you have much higher potential to get your idea delivered to the target audience.

Mobile First

Google made its stance on mobile-friendly sites clear. On its official webmaster blog, Google announced this March that it will be releasing the mobile-first indexing for all sites. Responsive and interactive experience is a must for every web asset related to your brand. With the boom in the use of handheld devices, it is important to give preference to mobile web design.

According to SEOEaze.com, the focus of mobile first designing is to reduce the visual hierarchy and reduce the unnecessary content to a bare minimum. This will heighten the functionality of your mobile site.

If most of your visitors are mobile-based it’s important that you make ideally adopt mobile-first designing so that the creativity quotient of your website is augmented without compromised functionality.

Content Modularity

Modularity has opened a whole new dimension to content designing improving the user interface designs multifold. Splitting your content into modules allows you to easier add extra functionality like the seamless integration of images and videos.

With modular and intuitive design process you can convert your content into a visual powerhouse that not only improves the legibility of the content but also facilitates the process of conversion from digital to print and vice-versa.

A modular approach to content design helps you create a wonderful browsing experience for your readers both on mobile and desktop.

Aesthetic functionality

According to legendary typographer Stefan Sagmeister, most branding campaigns can promote themselves entirely based on their look and feel.

For some of you, this approach might feel like in total contradiction of the principles of design. How can beauty take preference over an idea? Well, Stefan makes a strong argument to give equal if not more important to the aesthetic appeal of your campaigns.

Being daringly creative can help your business to make its presence felt in a market of an ever-growing crowd. Such an aesthetic approach clearly tells your audience that you have the courage to go an extra mile to demonstrate your creative prowess.

VR Content

Virtual reality is fast becoming a go-to option for delivering lasting impression by brands across the globe. VR and 3D are technologies still in their development phase, but businesses are now eager than ever before to be early adopters to reap the financial success.

To measure the scope of VR you can refer to Goldman Sachs’ expectation that VR is going to touch a massive $182 billion mark in the coming years. Among all VR technologies, 3D, in particular, is offering a novel way of offering authentic experience by presenting stories in an entirely different way.

These trends will let you keep your branding efforts on track but remember that these are just trends, not the success drivers. Your branding success lies in offering tangible value to your audience that makes them put their loyalty in you.

The post Branding Trends Businesses Need To Follow appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

With that being said, here we will again compile our predictions for the marketing trends. As we have always said, knowing the latest trends and working marketing strategies are very important aspects of staying ahead of the competition.

Without further ado, let us begin with our first prediction.

1. Voice will be a more significant search medium

Voice search has risen in the past few years thanks to the popularity Siri and Google Assistant on our phones, as well as smart speakers and home assistant hubs like Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and so on.

Many studies have predicted that voice search will continue to rise, such as this study by Gartner, predicting that this will be done via voice, not only our search activities.

While voice recognition technology is now quite advanced and reliable, we can also expect it to get better in the years to come. We are expecting truly intelligent voice assistants in the really near future and its impact on both businesses and our personal lives.

The thing is, SEO for voice search is vastly different when compared to textual search. Specifically, we use different languages when speaking compared to typing. So, you might want to focus on more conversational keywords and develop content pieces with more conversational approaches.

Nowadays, we mainly use voice search when our hands are full or when we are simply too lazy to type. Yet, as voice recognition and word accuracy get even better in the years to come, voice search will become a necessity.

2. Video will be the king of traffic

It is obviously no secret that video is the primary content on the internet in the past half decade or so. Netflix alone accounts for 30% of the total internet traffic in recent years, and obviously we can’t neglect YouTube. Yet, what we have today will be insignificant in what’s coming the next few years.

According to Cisco, IP video traffic is predicted to reach 82 % of the global internet traffic. Even nowadays, most people prefer watching a video rather than reading a blog post, except for in-depth content, and this trend will continue, if not rise, in 2024 and onwards.

When done well, video can be a very effective marketing tool with a high conversion rate. According to Forbes, adding video to your email newsletter can boost CTR by up to 300%.

Video as a medium will continue to be more popular, as well as live streaming video content. Also, we can expect the shift into more interactive video content, which can be very effective in achieving more conversions.

3. Chatbots

During 2018 and even 2017, we have seen how A.I.-driven chatbots have taken over customer service for many big companies. It is predicted that by 2026, 85% of customer engagements will be dealt by chatbots.

There are obviously two main advantages of using chatbots over human customer support: first, one single chatbot can engage with a lot of customers at one time, saving your human resources costs. Second, it saves time, and you can have a 24/7 customer service without spending too much money.

Similar to voice search, the technology behind chatbots is continuously improving. But even today, the technology is pretty decent, where even the customer survey conducted by Digital Pulse in 2016 found that 85% of surveyed customers are satisfied with chatbot.

One common application for chatbots today is to let the chatbot engage with a new prospect, asking the preliminary questions like the prospect’s email address, their available budget, and so on.

When the prospect passed the preliminary questions, the chatbot can pass the conversation to a human salesperson. This way, we can automatically qualify prospects, and your salespeople’s valuable time and resources can be utilized on the prospects with the highest chance of conversion.

Also, consider the fact that implementing chatbots are now more affordable than ever. If you haven’t used a chatbot in 2018, you definitely should. Check out this guide by Sprout Social to help you further in implementing and utilizing a chatbot.

4. Content clustering for SEO

SEO has evolved just as search engines have changed their algorithms. Now, SEO is not solely about keywords, but will prefer clusters of content around a particular topic, this way, search engines can determine your credibility for that topic. Local SEO will also become vital to the success of small and medium-sized companies and business owners need to make sure their websites are optimized for local prospects.

So we should base our SEO approach on this concept: one ‘pillar’ content as a broad outline for this topic, and clusters of content to cover long-tail keywords related to this topic.

Let’s use an example to properly illustrate this: let’s say you are a SaaS business selling a cloud computing software. So, you want your site to rank for the ‘cloud computing’ topic. Besides running SEO for your SaaS business you need to work on pillar content.

Your pillar content, in this case, can be something like “The Definitive Guide To Cloud Computing”. Then, you can add cluster content pieces like “How To Choose A Cloud Computing Software”, “How To Maximize Productivity With Cloud Computing”, and so on.

The idea is, topic clusters establish your position as an expert of this niche, giving the search engines a strong ranking signal.

5. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is certainly not a new marketing trend, having been one of the most important marketing tactics in the past few years. Yet, influencer marketing will be even more important than before.

We can’t deny the digital marketing landscape is even more saturated than before, and it’s really hard to get our voice heard amidst all the noises. This is where having an influencer to promote your product and/or brand can be very beneficial.

Although influencer marketing has been there for quite some time, we can also expect some changes especially thanks to the rising demands for influencers: many influencers, especially major ones and celebrities are now very expensive, and they are now pickier when choosing the brands they would want to promote.

This is where we can utilize micro-influencers, those with followers between 10,000 and 500,000. Micro-influencers are not only more accessible (and affordable) compared to the celebrities, but they also offer the benefit of authenticity: customers are getting smarter, and they know when celebrities and mega-influencers are promoting or endorsing a product. With micro-influencers, you can provide a more authentic voice resulting in less resistance from your prospects.

6. Transparency

For a long time, marketers were often viewed negatively by customers, thanks to a long history of hard-selling, exaggerations, unethical advertising/sales practices, and even, blatant lies.

Because of this fact, many customers and prospects are now very resistant to promotional messages and marketing efforts, and in general are becoming harder to impress. Also, in this era of social media and maturity of the internet, it’s very easy to find any information about your product, service, or brand. In short: no matter what, you will need to be honest and transparent.

This need of transparency will be even more prevalent than before: we’ll need to address negative complaints quickly and honestly, we will need to admit our faults, and we should never exaggerate our value propositions. In essence, we should only offer promises we can deliver upon.

In the next years to come, two-way communication between brands and customers will also become more common, being an essential aspect of building relationships and trusts.

7. People trust peer reviews and content, not advertising

Above, we have mentioned several times how people are now very resistant to promotional messages, especially advertisements. This is even more true for millennials, as many studies have suggested in recent years. This is, however, not saying that advertising is no longer effective, as when done right especially through newer forms like remarketing, it can still be effective. It’s just that advertising is no longer as effective as back then in the 90s, and should be used in combination with other marketing tactics to stay relevant.

This phenomenon has been around for quite some time now. In fact, a Nielsen study back in 2015 has stated that the top for most-trusted sources driving purchase decisions are: recommendations from people we know and trust, branded sites, editorial sites, and reviews. In fact, in that study, advertisements are placed near the bottom.

In the years to come, we can expect this trend to continue growing, and so we should focus on building social proofs and consistently publishing valuable content pieces to establish credibility, a concept we know as inbound marketing. Also, due to this trend, influencer marketing, which we have discussed above, will also be even more important in 2025 and onwards.

End Words

These seven marketing trends we have discussed are the ones to look for (and focus on) as we are entering the last quarter of this year and prepare for the next.

Obviously, these won’t be the only changes we’ll see in the marketing landscape, and there is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach in developing a marketing strategy. Yet, these seven we have discussed above can definitely help you achieve your marketing goals. You can also work with a digital marketing expert and consultant to ensure you stay on top of the marketing game.

The post 7 Marketing Trends To Expect for Business Growth appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The rise and expansion of the internet has been the catalyst behind a plethora of innovations in many different industries. Nowadays, there are new ways of doing things intended to maximize resources, and unsurprisingly, many of these innovations involve the use of the internet. In today’s climate, a business or an organization owning a website is considered a no-brainer. In other words, it is virtually impossible to imagine a company or an organization without a corresponding online presence. This is because your website serves as the initial face of your business; it is often the first element of your company your audience sees when establishing a relationship with it. It is therefore essential that your website is well designed in order to increase customer engagement with your site, drive conversions and consequently grow your business.

Another benefit of following web design trends in 2018 is being able to reach new customers and build brand awareness. Whenever people see your website, the impressions they get from it tend to inform their judgements about your business as a whole. Therefore, no matter how great the product or services you offer are, if your website does not do its job and keep your audience engaged enough to take favorable actions, then you won’t have the opportunity to showcase those same products and services. A well-designed website also helps fast-track communication with your customers. This improves the relationship you keep with your users and enables you to achieve better customer satisfaction.

Have a look at the infographic from DesignAdvisor below and check out the web design trends of 2018 you can implement today to see your business grow.

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