9 Latest Marketing Insights for 2017 [That Will Attract Your Audience]

We are already into 2017, and major changes in the marketing patterns of businesses have started taking place in the market. It seems like a natural time for marketers to review their existing marketing strategies that were coordinated well with the previous year’s flourishing trends.
 

While it is beneficial to go through your favourite blog posts and spend endless hours being absorbed by webinars and newsletters, there is not a plenty of time left for that. As we are already much into 2017, you need to finalize your plans fast and start focussing on the marketing insights that are changing the game for a lot of businesses in the market.
 

The basic idea is to carve a niche for your organization in the market and attract a lot of customers.
 

But in times like these, a lot of marketing emails from a lot of businesses is thrown at the customer. The question is why would the customer pick yours in 2017?
 

Consumers are constantly being overloaded with a never ending flood of information and resources. This is the time when companies need to look at their business critical marketing strategies and align them with the ongoing marketing trends and insights of the current year.
 

So, if you want your business to stand out in 2017 and attract customers to your products and services, you need to take a look at some prominent marketing insights of the year that will change your marketing game and provide you an edge over your competitors at the same time.
 

Market statistics suggest that 82 percent of all online engagement will be focussed on visual stimulation like images, videos, flowcharts etc by 2026.
 

One of the biggest marketing trends for this year will be to tap into the consumer’s visual spatial intelligence. The concept of visual intelligence that consists of augmented reality and visual search is bound to provide you an edge over your competitors in the market.
 

According to a research conducted by Google, 58 percent of consumers consider companies that produce video content to be more trustworthy, and 71 percent of these customers also find that videos leave a positive impression in their mind.
 

Engaging video as part of your marketing strategy improves the chances that the customer will stay on your website for a longer duration of time. This not only increases your brand’s SEO but also provides you with a much higher click through rate through the medium of these videos.
 

Try to use videos and images for your brand as marketing insights clearly demonstrate that businesses using videos are growing revenue 49 percent faster than non video users.
 

Consider the following image of Sephora’s visual artist feature as part of the augmented reality that allows you to try different makeup styles on your face.
 

Image Source: Sephora
 

Market insights suggest that most marketers need to keep their focus on mobile. According to Duane Brown, “Even though mobile makes up more than 50 percent of the web traffic, for many sites, for mobile user experience, is far inferior to the desktop user experience.”
 

According to search engine land, marketing giant Google, is also all set to launch out its mobile first indexing this summer, which will build a strong base for mobile phones in the history of Internet. If your brand does not have a mobile website or understand the benefits of mobile indexing, it is time you start thinking about it.
 

Google data suggests that mobile marketers raise 88 percent of all ‘near me’ searches in the United States and these kind of mobile searches are growing rapidly at an unprecedented rate of 146 percent every year. It has also become one of the greatest ways to attract customers towards your brand.
 

Google’s Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) framework that aims to provide a faster and more promising mobile viewing experience is gaining pace in the market this year. Also, optimizing and making the customer experience better on mobile through the medium of mobile web pages and apps increases conversions by a significant amount. Isn’t that quite significant?
 

Image Source: WiderFunnel
 

With the rise of digital marketing and other social media marketing channels such as facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, instagram etc businesses often focus on each of them independently.
 

According to Christopher Pen, “Marketers will need to invest time in true omni channel marketing.” Market analysts suggest that an integrated nurturing process of varied market channels will help you attract more customers.
 

One of the beneficial forms of channel integration can be through retargeting or remarketing in Google Adwords, where ads can be served to previous site visitor on Google’s display network.
 

Though this option has existed for many years, the trend has gained pace due to new options available on social media. Businesses have a lot to look forward to this trend as facebook and twitter have extended their retargeting options this year.
 

Image Source: Ascend2
 

According to marketing expert Kyle Lacy, “The number one thing that businesses should deal with is, how to implement artificial intelligence in their processes”.
 

Businesses across the world have always invested in tools and technology. Yet lack of resources and expertise has always been one of their major concerns. In 2017, machine learning is all set to take greater prominence in the growing market.
 

Also Artificial intelligence (AI) can alleviate day to day workload such as small design tweaks, data analysis and traffic allocation. With the help of these, businesses can easily create engaging and customer attracting online experiences through creativity, innovation and customer understanding.
 

Chatbots are a perfect example that are one of the biggest technology trends and help in assisting the needs of the customer in a better way.
 

Content has always been one of the most powerful tools to drive conversions. There is always a pressure in the market to write more stuff and make it many times better than the one already published. Market analysts suggests that, creating content will become even more intense in 2017.
 

Companies are constantly seen pushing hard to drive conversions through the medium of their posts.
 

Image Source: CMI

It was seen that many customers were unhappy with their existing companies because of compromised privacy and trust issues.
 

74 percent of the US based Internet users started putting a limit to their internet activities due to privacy concerns. This leads trust and reliability to be one of the top most marketing strategies of 2017.
 

According to Austin Knight, “At that point, we’ll need not ask the question, “what can be tracked?” but rather, “what should be tracked?” The companies that answer correctly will come out ahead.” Businesses should be public and transparent regarding their approach to user trust as it can be a key differentiating factor in marketing.

Marketing automation is emerging as the perfect technology for marketers. They can easily score and nurture their leads in an automatic way along with providing relevant content throughout the journey.
 

Sarv’s marketing automation tool can help businesses explore and use automation in their businesses and send relevant emails to the qualified prospects.
 

2017 is the year when businesses are actually focussing on slow marketing and seeking long term marketing goals. According to Ann Handley, “In 2017, marketers need to invest in themselves: They need to hone customer empathy.”
 

It is also suggested that there is a critical need for businesses to slow down in some areas as it can to achieve real results much faster.
 

According to Feras Alhlou, co-founder e-Nor “I believe the biggest challenge for marketers will continue to be figuring out their customer journey. To connect with her audience, a marketer must evolve her marketing, measurement, and optimization strategies and tactics to the level of complexity and sophistication of her customers and their journeys.”

Along with interacting with the customer, this year also focuses on measuring the customer responses and ultimately providing a unified customer experience across each platform like mobile, apps, Web etc.
 

2017 has a lot of offer in terms of marketing trends. This provides plenty of opportunities to businesses to embrace the coming trends and play along the insights of the market. While adapting to these trends, it is necessary to focus on providing the customer as it is the best way to draw more potential customers.