The Future of Digital Marketing in the UK

As predicted during 2016, mobile technologies, VR advancements, and wearable gears are the definitive focus of the year, and almost every digital marketer in the UK is jumping on the train.

Businesses are starting to scope new and original ways to incorporate these kinds of technologies into their own marketing strategies. UK digital marketers should also have in mind on a couple of things that are regaining popularity during the year.

Revival of silent videos

The trend came back unexpectedly on 2017 touted because of the “swipe left” phenomenon: while 80 percent of internet users own a mobile device, average video viewing time is 1.7 seconds. It means users are consuming content so fast they are not even listening to it.

Because consumer attention is a scarce resource, marketers have had to come up with savvier solutions for their contents. For example, many have chosen to pack a punch at the beginning of the clip, an immediate hook in the first couple of seconds.

For example, the social media clip that Apple pushed to showcase the release of the iPhone 7 was a simplistic clip with frames changing every 0.5 seconds.

Task of the community managers

2016 became the year of the community managers, and 2017 is not going to be any different. Brands keep thinking social media is their one-trick pony, bur brands that succeed in the digital market are not pushing 10 tweets a day.

Consumers don’t want to see brands selling their stuff on social media. They want to see interesting stories, funny content, and other creative ways to sell an idea, rather than a specific product.

More so, social media has added humanity to online conversations as more and more people can interact with the product creators. They can give feedback in real time, lay out their opinions, criticise, share, and even create their own representations of a marketing stunt through memes, reviews, tutorials, and more.

So, the responsibilities of the community manager are not to schedule daily tweets, but to sort out creative ways to open communication lines with their consumers and make them feel a part of what they are consuming.

In other words, community managers should become the human face if the company and provide the brand of a personality and values.

Setback of live content

Streaming content is problematic because it is just not working out. Despite its immense potential to receive live comments from their consumers, most UK brands don’t seem to realise how to manage it.

Often times the production values are too low or the content is too boring. Without a real high-value exchange, live content is not going to have an impact on consumers.

More so, watching live content spends time and requires full attention, so the streaming event really has to be worth it.

Experian , for instance, is holding successful chats via Snapchat, YouTube Live, and Periscope to talk with consumers about their financial issues.

Democratisation of content

During 2017, brands will need to engage and connect with their clients better than ever before, because nowadays consumers can share and interact with almost any kind of content on the web, as well as create their own.It means companies are not competing with other brands anymore, they are not competing with the entire Internet.

For example, YouTube is still the powerhouse of the web, hoarding almost 70 percent of the entire web traffic, and the most viewed videos on the site are product reviews. It’s a rather complex idea for most companies as more than half of US and UK consumers check out a YouTube review before buying a product.

Consistent user engagement

The key is creating consistent user engagement through their digital content. Anything the brand publishes should amass retweets, favourites, shares, comments, likes, dislikes, or whatever it is on the social media of their preference.

On Facebook, the goal is to obtain shares and reactions as most people are not commenting anymore; on Instagram, the goal is to obtain comments; and on YouTube, the goal is to get subscriptions and likes.

The quality of the “amateur”

Any company wanting to inspire constant user engagement has to accept that their audience now possesses a broad range of tools (like Instagram’s Boomerang or Facebook Live) that can create better and more engaging pieces of content than the stuff brands are developing at their laboratories.

In fact, a 2016 survey found that 85 percent of the users find user-generated content (UGC) more interesting and influential than brands’ videos and photos. Another study ground shoppers who interacted with UGC beforehand are 97 percent more likely to convert to a retailer.

Digital marketing researchers have found audiences prefer “amateur” content because it looks more genuine, and such phenomenon will only keep increasing as brands fail to understand is no longer interesting to see fully-commercial ads that are only showing a product for sale.

It means there will be a surge of UKdigital marketers plunging into the UGC branch.