Trending in 2017: Digital marketing

This year will see greater focus on mobile user experience and regional content

With 90 per cent of mobile usage on Facebook and more than half the searches happening via mobile, mobile user experience is already a focus area. We are going to see brands invest a lot more in it, especially when it comes to speed. Google has launched Accelerated Mobile Pages and Facebook is expanding its Instant Articles feature, both of which are going to expand their reach in 2017. Even social media engagement via mobile is going to change with brands adapting to how they can get more engagement on devices.

Brands often believed more content is better, but with millions of content pieces and social media posts going out every day, the opposite is true. 2017 is going to see a sharp trend of brands focussing on high-value content, which is engaging and far more personalised. With voice search growing in scale (currently at 20 per cent of mobile searches in the US) many of our digital activities are going to be conversation.

With automation and machine learning playing a large role in advertising, this year will see even smaller brands adopting programmatic advertising. With platforms like Double Click for Google and Power Editor for Facebook, a lot of elements will get automated. Google has also launched responsive display advertising allowing for brands to run ads of multiple sizes without having a design team. YouTube is soon launching a feature to allow for automated product showcase below videos, wherein machine learning would determine which product it is, rather than the brand manually having to tag which videos showcase their products.

Google has reported Hindi content was growing faster than English content and this is likely to grow further in 2017. With Netflix, Amazon Prime and others spearheading the video content in multiple languages, we are also going to see written and visual content growing in regional languages. Facebook has also launched an auto-translate feature for all the Brand Pages — though nascent it is bound to improve this year.

Building the brand is key, and what better way than videos? It’s never been easier to create videos with the help of free and low-cost tools. As per statistics by Facebook, users watch an average of 100 million hours of video every day, most of which are on their mobile devices. Facebook has made it even easier with its Facebook Live feature, which is a very engaging tool, especially for entertainment, fashion and hospitality industries.

Attribution, especially for online/offline, will continue to be a grey area. While there have been many initiatives and many are in the pipeline, most restaurants, retailers and offline stores find it difficult to attribute walk-ins and business results to the digital medium. Facebook and Google Maps have been improving their proximity data to understand if users are at a specific location and encourage them to review the location. Google is also in an early stage testing of beacons to allow for better attribution but it’s still 1.5 to two years away from mass adoption.

Brands have always found it difficult to be active on multiple social media networks and we do expect some consolidation. Twitter has been in talks of selling out and even growth of Snapchat hasn’t increased. We will see brands also focussing on select platforms — usually a maximum of two or three — that make sense.

There has been a lot of talk around virtual reality devices. While the experience they provide is phenomenal, it is not going to be mainstream yet. While the cost of devices is dipping, the adoption of these rather bulky devices is still limited to a few tech-savvy individuals, at least in India.

The author is the co-founder of Social Beat