Top 3 Digital Marketing Trends Regional Companies Should Look for in the Next Year

Mid-market companies need to stay ahead of the digital curve if they want to continue to increase their return on their media investments.

There’s no question that digital marketing is here to stay, and it continues to grow and change at an alarmingly fast pace. With new technologies showing up every day, and digital advertising strategies morphing in real time, the effort to simply keep up the pace is no longer enough. Regional companies must stay ahead of the curve and then make the moves that will get their business where it needs to be.

Staying ahead and remaining there will be crucial to digital plans in the coming year. Below are three important developments that will surely impact the world of digital marketing. We’ll likely see more brands taking steps to ensure they’re adding increased value to their consumer’s experiences.

1). Video Views Lead Internet Traffic Video views still lead all digital advertising traffic on the web and are on track to continue this run way into the future. Most people would much rather watch a short video than read a blog post. So as consumer’s attention spans get shorter, so must video ad messages.

Brands are utilizing shorter digital video ads in their campaigns, but video marketing only succeeds if it delivers what consumers want, when and how they crave it. Delivering engaging content in such a short window of opportunity is difficult, but consumer behavior requires it. Shorter, attention grabbing video messages are taking the lead and when done properly, can produce great results, boosting click-through rates as well as conversion and engagement rates.

2). The Onset of Native Advertising Is Causing the Need for More Creativity Today’s consumers are extremely resistant to advertising, and the increased use of ad blockers has made it increasingly difficult for marketers to get messages to their consumers. If regional companies want to reach new consumers, they’ll need to work on making their ad messages blend seamlessly into the content consumers are engaging with. The popular answer seems to lie in native advertising.

Native ads provide a welcome change from the annoying banner ads that barrage consumers every minute. As brands work to become less annoying, they are successfully obscuring the lines between native and traditional ads. It’s becoming more difficult to know if the article you are reading is a real article or a sponsored native one.

In the future, platforms may need to clearly differentiate their various types of content. This will force brands to be even more creative with their marketing, less disruptive, and a bigger part of the conversation.

Despite smarter consumers, native ads have become an important component of the marketing mix for major brands. In the coming years, businesses will be able to leverage native ad strategies through social media, displaying engaging content that users will hardly even recognize as ads.

3). Programmatic Advertising Is Becoming the Norm The past few years have seen a huge upswing in programmatic advertising. This advertising technology was once reserved for media-buying only but is now on fire and predicted to account for nearly two-thirds of the world’s digital display ads by next year. Buyers and sellers are investing heavily in automated ad buying and showing no signs of slowing down.

While digital display is well on its way to becoming fully programmatic, what is most interesting is the effect on traditional media (TV, radio and OOH). It’s beginning to follow the same programmatic trend. You can expect to see a shift to traditional programmatic media taking shape in the coming year.

As businesses become more familiar with AI and new digital capabilities, they will be able to deliver better, more sophisticated and more personalized experiences to their consumers. Regional companies need to stay ahead of the curve and by accessing more technological advances, data and better interpretation of that data, thus retrieving better insights, no smart regional business will be left behind.