1) The messenger app world
Smartphone conversations have evolved well beyond regular SMS messages in the last few years, with now Facebook Messenger and especially WhatsApp becoming so popular and influential. Despite being both owned by the same company, they serve a different purpose in our daily communications in a private capacity, especially WhatsApp.
Some people can be reluctant to publicly share photos or videos, especially of family and friends, but given they want to show their closest ones what they find funny, or intimate photos of family and friends, they usually rely on WhatsApp to privately share the media.
The current ecosystem is beginning to introduce marketing within these chat apps, which users do not like and are trying to get away from. As a result, companies are trying to introduce shopping on Facebook through Messenger as to be clever about their sales online.
Marketers generally want to monitor people’s conversations to understand what users want and this new behaviour that we have does not allow these marketers to conduct their research. This also changes the way marketers conduct and view engagement, because it is less about the likes and comments and more about personalized dialogue.
2) Ad-blocking
Marketers do not seem to understand that smartphone users have no tolerance for ads when using an app or a website. It’s time to be more innovative about the whole process.
Users install ad blockers because the smartphone internet experience becomes much more of a hassle when ads pop up every time a page is turned. They just want to get on with what they’re doing, without constantly having to close ads while browsing the net. It is frustrating! Advertisers need to use the internet to their advantage, and impress users instead of distracting them.
3) Magic tech
The modern era of web technologies has allowed marketers to use now available tools that can simplify their marketing strategies and executions, as well as monitor and analyze consumer behaviour online. We are talking about ‘basic’ web applications like Google Analytics, Hootsuite, WordPress, etc.
4) Further evolution
Some recent surveys are suggesting that smartphone technology may be obsolete sooner than we think, as hard to believe as this may be. Artificial intelligence and other evolutions will allow us to experience something completely different, such as voice controls and motion sensors! How will marketers then deal with that?
5) Artificial intelligence
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, this term should no longer be ignored. We believe 2017 will see many announcements relating to AI, which can be fascinating if properly programmed. Humans are creating computers which will be able to automate many processes previously done by humans. Tech giants and even digital agencies are already advanced in this field, with new businesses which do just that making their stand.
Watch this space…