Another year done, another about to begin. As we look back on 2017, we can’t help but think of our achievements since last January. This year at ConceptDrop, out of our hundreds of projects, over 25% were completed rush orders. That’s no small feat! Presentations, flyers, and whitepapers were our most popular products and our client-designer match time median was 43 minutes (because we believe that you shouldn’t have to wait days to be matched with your designer). On average, our creatives were rated 4.6 out of 5 stars. You ask, we deliver.
But, inevitably, as we reflect on our accomplishments, we also want to stay on top of future marketing trends. So, we put together a list of what tendencies we predict will reign in the business/marketing world in 2018:
- Streaming Stays Supreme
As we discussed in our blog post “Closing the Books on 2017,” mobile video views by smartphone users are on the rise. Therefore, we predict that 2018 will bring even more professional mobile video streaming production from companies for promotional purposes. According to Huffington Post, “Video streaming was 75% of all internet traffic in 2017 and there are no signs showing things will slow down.” Live-streaming services dominate social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, by celebrities in particular. In the upcoming year, promotional marketing will jump at the chance to live-stream in order to publicize materials and services as much as possible.
- More Complex SEO Tactics
SEOs are obviously important for ensuring a company’s relativity, popularity, and reliability on digital medias, but as search engines constantly evolve for users, it’s important that technological advances adjust to these changes as well. Creating even more eye-catching ad campaigns and maintaining top keyword searches will continue to be experimented with in the upcoming new year. Forbes believes that adjusting SEO content to local platforms, such as naming a location or a subset of people like “students” or “young professionals,” could create more successful web traffic for companies in general.
- A Push Towards Personal Ads
Ads potentially will look less flashy and get more personal in 2018. We think of recent successful ads, such as Samsung’s “Growing Up” commercial that follows the life of a iPhone user’s frustrations for a decade (like a flipbook) to promote androids and Spotify’s “2017 wrapped” ad campaign that pointed out humorous reasons for listening to certain bands on this streaming service (i.e. one poster reads, “Someone made a ‘root canal songs’ playlist. Probably because they never had a ‘flossing songs’ playlist”). These kinds of campaigns are successful because we can laugh at them and they also reflect emotions and reactions to which most people can relate.
- Artificial Intelligence is Key
AI is not only new to businesses, but it’s becoming a crucial component for companies. We predict in 2018 that businesses will continue moving towards utilizing AI not to replace jobs with machines, but to enhance human productivity and efficiency by, for example, designating tasks to employees most qualified for a job or pair customers to their desired requests with utmost accuracy. In the same Huffington Post article above, writer Ro Parry claims, “57% of marketers using AI already say it’s absolutely or very essential in helping increase touch points with customers and prospects. Salesforce also points out that marketers anticipate AI use will grow by 53% over the next two years.”
In fact, ConceptDrop is utilizing artificial intelligence to pair our customers to their perfect freelance designers or copywriters. We also launched Nexus for companies’ use and you can read about our involvement with AI technology here.
Have a happy, healthy, safe New Years from all of us here at ConceptDrop!
